I have been typing in Dvorak for about 2 years now. Before I managed to fully make the plunge, I made 2 attempts that I chickened out from after a few days.
It was a difficult transition, but made easier by doing it during summer break from school. It was about 2 weeks before I could type comfortably, and probably 2 months before my speed was up to my previous QWERTY speed.
Here are the good things about switching. It forced me to learn touch typing, which has lead to an increase in typing speed and ease, simply because I never look at the keyboard anymore. Your fingers don't have to move as far from their baseline position as much, and you tend to alternate between right and left hand much more, which is much more comfortable on the fingers. Having the _- key so close at hand has been very handy.
Here are the bad things about the switch. I technically could have learned touch typing on QWERTY and achieved a similar speed increase. The windows computers in the computer lab I frequent have the settings locked down so I cannot change the keyboard layout, though I solve this by using the linux computers at almost all times. The 'c' and 'v' are less conveniently placed for coping and pasting. Typing on other peoples computers, which I must do on occasion results in a few minutes of awkwardness while I readjust. It is harder to type one-handed since I use a mapped keyboard layout, and must therefore remember the key locations rather than just looking.
Ultimately I am glad that I made the switch. There are some benefits to my typing abilities, and the inconveniences are not too great. I also take a certain amount of pride in it, like being an early adopter of metric units in a time when everyone is still using imperial.
1&1 Internet caught me this way. They gave me 3 years of free web hosting. This january it expired, and by that time it was really not worth it to me to move the 3 websites I'm hosting to a new web host.
I'm honestly not sure if you're trying to be funny or are just clueless.
There are certainly a lot of places with well-constructed and well-insulated buildings. They are in the vast minority once you visit the average American home or apartment. Double paned windows are quite rare in all of the locations I have lived in or visited in California and a lot of the Western states. Sure, a certain small percentage of new buildings have the double panes, but not many. The use of a more insulating gas in between the panes such as argon is remarkably rare.
Fiberglass insulation is a bit more common, but older houses and apartments are still in the majority in America, and few have been refitted with better insulation. Furthermore, not all new buildings are built to these specification, especially in lower priced areas.
From the article: "They would replace the huge transistors currently in use that are at least four feet tall and wide."
If we instead assume that common transistors are, on the order of 1 micrometer in size (1000 nanometers), then this simply means they are off by a factor of a mere 1.2 million. So if we correct their units and divide a 3 inch device by this, then it would clearly qualify as nanotechnology!
This article claims that there is no programming language in which kids can easily write these programs like they could in BASIC. This is completely wrong.
A child can easily start programming using Visual Basic, C/C++, or even Matlab to program the simple math algorithms that math books have in BASIC. The syntax can be virtually identical for simple programs. These newer programming languages only add functionality, they take nothing away.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with programming BASIC on a C64, but make no mistake there are a wealth of easier to obtain options.
Re:Please put on your RDFEG for testing purposes.
on
The Science of eBay
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· Score: 1
All you've done is confirm the high cost of living. $95k gross a year is a pretty good living even in very expensive areas like Santa Barabara (where I live). From my experience in engineering, an electrical engineer fresh with a PhD can generally make $100,000 gross, capping out at around $175k as they get more experienced unless they invent something, move into higher management, or go somewhere highly specialized. To be an EE prof at a university, you would need the same PhD. The salary would probably start around $80k and cap around $120k unless the prof gets a big breakthrough in his research, or moves up higher in the ladder to department head (or something like that).
Is there a difference? Yes, but both are very comfortable salary ranges, and for many professors, academia is where they want to be, which makes up for the fact that they're making less money than they would in the traditional job market.
You also make the point that a lot of professors don't make $95k a year. This is true, but there is a very big difference between a professor at a nice university, and a professor at a community college or small state university. One of the primary differences is that at community colleges and smaller schools the professors are much less likely to do research. This isn't necesarily a bad thing, but why would you pay a professor who isn't actively doing research the same amount that you would to one who is merely a lecturer?
This reminds me of my adventures with liquid nitrogen.
It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time to freeze a lime and shatter it on the kitchen floor, with tiny shards going all over. But it very quickly deteriorated into a pile of sticky lime fragments scattered all over the kitchen.
That's not entirely true, because people may still want to make long distance trips which take that long, and few people want to spend 6-8 hours sitting at the charging station.
Unfortunately I have no mod points right now...
People make politically uncorrect jokes about all kinds of things. So now that there is one (a funny one at that!) about homosexuality it gets modded as troll??
As already mentioned by others, GNUTella networks are fairly easy to monitor, and bittorrent sites usually post statistics, and could easily be monitored with a modified client.
Also, IRC, where a lot of files start their meandering paths across the internet, can also be monitored. The technology behind IRC search sites like PacketNews could be used to monitor how many people in how many channels are sharing your file, and in some cases, when files are requested with triggers in the main channel, you can find out about how wide your file is spreading.
It may also be a good idea to read this article on file sharing, which covers the process many files follow to make their way from release groups to the general public. In the article you will see read about someone who is an insider in many file sharing rings who consults with media companies on how their files are spreadin
There are, naturally, file sharing vectors that they have no capacity to monitor, but they can get a very good picture with a bit of easily obtained data and a bit statistics. It's hard to say *exactly* how accurate it is, but it can certainly be used as a reliable relative indicator on which files are downloaded more than others.
>>When the Chinese government eventually DOES shut them down, I hope they don't expect much coverage in the Western media.
Boy, did you ever miss the point of this blogger made.
He highlighted one of the major problems in Western media: sensationalism. It's a very popular story to tell the world about how the Chinese government restricts free speech, and running such a story simultaneously praises Western governments for not having such restrictions. But in these lands with few restrictions on speech, the media tends towards writing the most popular story, even if the facts aren't strictly true.
It's practically malicious that you seem to hope that Western journalists will now pass over this kind of injustice in China in retaliation for a clever critique of Western media.
Anyone who uses the phrase "jillions of volts of capacitance" obviously doesn't understand what's inside an LCD monitor, nor how dangerous it is.
There is really nothing dangerous in them, LCD's cathodes don't use more than 1kv, and unlike CRT's, there is no significant capacitor that will remain charged when the monitor is turned off. Obviously there would be some risk if you actually worked on the inverter while it was on, which isn't even dangerous if you are careful.
And if you're that worried about the safety of cutting into a cold cathode, you could always use a shop vac to improvise a fume extraction system, in case you screw it up. Or you could order a harder to find cold cathode that does not have the covering mentioned, or salvage one from a scanner.
If you take a few minor precautions this operation is not really dangerous at all. Don't complain about how stupid this author is when you don't understand how LCD backlights work or basic safety proceedings.
I suspect the trend for governments, including our own MA, to move to open document formats had a great deal to do with this move.
They would have lost a great deal of business if they had not made this move.
Open Source is good in and of itself, and because people are starting to realize its potential, other businesses have to adapt to market pressures and imrove themselves. Open Source will have to find new ways to distinguish itself from MS. Competition only improves products.
"But the HFI system uses electricity from an engine's alternator to power the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen as needed from small amounts of distilled water.
"That's a big advantage and a bit of a novelty," said Venki Raman, an expert on hydrogen-energy applications who started Protium Energy Technologies."
TFA claims (though it could be wrong) that the innovation is creating hydrogen from elecrolysis. Frankly, it's a fairly obvious idea to generate hydrogen with elecrolysis. There is a short list of practical well-known methods for getting hydrogen out of other compounds, and elecrolysis of right near the top. The metal-oxide coil in water car posted on slashy a while back was a more innovative, though not necesarily practical way to get at hydrogen.
It also says that the idea of using hydrogen to boost efficiency has been published since the 70's.
I don't see an innovation here, I just see common knowledge finally brought to the market in a product. My hat's off to them, but though IANAL I think a patent needs a more original idea, unless they patent some highly specific process used to electrolyse water or inject the hydrogen.
It sounds great, just like Wikipedia
on
Google Base Launches
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Like Wikipedia, this idea has great potential.
Like Wikipedia, this will have many problems.
What's to stop this from suffering under a heavy load of spam, honest mistakes, and deliberate mischeif?
You seem to have missed the true insights of this power distribution method.
You mention that even with a central DC power supply, it will be converted back into AC again by the internal power supplies, and back to DC. This is sort of true, but you miss the point that now internal power supplies do not need to rectify and filter incoming AC, which is the entire point of a central DC supply.
All of the power rectification, inrush limiting, power factor correction that must happen at the central DC supply already had to be done inefficiently at each internal power supply, so those are not truly a disadvantage of a central DC supply. They can be much more robust and higher quality with a central supply.
Even though computers do require multiple voltages, the central power supply would supply one DC voltage, within a certain voltage range, which would then be efficiently converted to the proper range of voltages at the server. Because of the small amount of space alotted to most rackmount power supplies, they can now be better built because there is no longer need to fit in large filter caps, power factor correction, and rectification.
You mention the difficulties of maintaining battery charge currents, but you forget that it's even harder to do with AC. Further, the batteries can be connected directly to the supply lines when power goes out, no need for an intermediate inverter which must be very beefy, and will probably put out a fairly square wave unless it's a very expensive model.
No matter how healthy cigarettes become, you're still inhaling disgusting smoke. I'm still going to cough if everyone is lighting up, and leave restaurants that allow smoking. I'll still support laws banning smoking in public areas.
> The US, and the massive US military-industrial complex many despise, was essentially solely responsible for creating the internet (note: I am talking about the *internet*, not the world wide web, which itself would not have existed were it not for the internet)?
> Aside from the politics and issues surrounding.xxx, that the US has proven itself to be a capable caretaker of the internet and the root servers (several of which are outside of the US, albeit under ultimate control of the US)?
So in other words, because the US started the internet, and the biggest problem is that there's only a moral censorship on that TLD nobody else should have top level control?
That we started the internet is admirable, but if we want other countries connecting to "our" internet (and we certainly do) then we need to make concessions.
If ICANN follows the lead of the Dept. of Commerce, which follows the lead of the conservative religious right, then how can an intelligent freedom-loving US citizen trust the control of the root zone file in the hands of just one government? Blocking the.xxx TLD serves no useful purpose to the public. Since porn is the biggest industry on the internet, it really ought to have it's own domain, to reduce crowding in other domain spaces, and simplify differentiation of pornographic and non-pornographic sites.
>yes Al takes a lot of energy to make. we would call this a "high energy density" material.
True, but you've missed the point. It takes a lot of energy and manpower to mine the aluminum oxide, then extract the Al itself. On the plus side, it seems the same process for extracting Al from ore would restore the waste Al from the car.
The main problem with this idea is the same with all hydrogen cars, the energy to produce Hydrogen (electrolysis, chemical methods, or this metal method) all require ENERGY. And where is the energy coming from? From the power plants that burn coal, oil, and occasionally an environmentally friendly power plant. Add the massive infrastructure changes and it might only provide a slight gain over fossil fuels in terms of emissions.
>um, the trucks can be wire-powered too, y'know. It'd be kinda silly for them NOT to be wire powered.
Well yes, they could be. It still takes a ton of energy (and thus emissions from the power plant that electrolyzed the Al from the ore) to transport metal by truck and train, more so than a pipeline over the course of the lifetime of the pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been typing in Dvorak for about 2 years now. Before I managed to fully make the plunge, I made 2 attempts that I chickened out from after a few days.
It was a difficult transition, but made easier by doing it during summer break from school. It was about 2 weeks before I could type comfortably, and probably 2 months before my speed was up to my previous QWERTY speed.
Here are the good things about switching. It forced me to learn touch typing, which has lead to an increase in typing speed and ease, simply because I never look at the keyboard anymore. Your fingers don't have to move as far from their baseline position as much, and you tend to alternate between right and left hand much more, which is much more comfortable on the fingers. Having the _- key so close at hand has been very handy.
Here are the bad things about the switch. I technically could have learned touch typing on QWERTY and achieved a similar speed increase. The windows computers in the computer lab I frequent have the settings locked down so I cannot change the keyboard layout, though I solve this by using the linux computers at almost all times. The 'c' and 'v' are less conveniently placed for coping and pasting. Typing on other peoples computers, which I must do on occasion results in a few minutes of awkwardness while I readjust. It is harder to type one-handed since I use a mapped keyboard layout, and must therefore remember the key locations rather than just looking.
Ultimately I am glad that I made the switch. There are some benefits to my typing abilities, and the inconveniences are not too great. I also take a certain amount of pride in it, like being an early adopter of metric units in a time when everyone is still using imperial.
1&1 Internet caught me this way. They gave me 3 years of free web hosting. This january it expired, and by that time it was really not worth it to me to move the 3 websites I'm hosting to a new web host.
I'm honestly not sure if you're trying to be funny or are just clueless.
There are certainly a lot of places with well-constructed and well-insulated buildings. They are in the vast minority once you visit the average American home or apartment. Double paned windows are quite rare in all of the locations I have lived in or visited in California and a lot of the Western states. Sure, a certain small percentage of new buildings have the double panes, but not many. The use of a more insulating gas in between the panes such as argon is remarkably rare.
Fiberglass insulation is a bit more common, but older houses and apartments are still in the majority in America, and few have been refitted with better insulation. Furthermore, not all new buildings are built to these specification, especially in lower priced areas.
From the article: "They would replace the huge transistors currently in use that are at least four feet tall and wide."
If we instead assume that common transistors are, on the order of 1 micrometer in size (1000 nanometers), then this simply means they are off by a factor of a mere 1.2 million. So if we correct their units and divide a 3 inch device by this, then it would clearly qualify as nanotechnology!
This article claims that there is no programming language in which kids can easily write these programs like they could in BASIC. This is completely wrong.
A child can easily start programming using Visual Basic, C/C++, or even Matlab to program the simple math algorithms that math books have in BASIC. The syntax can be virtually identical for simple programs. These newer programming languages only add functionality, they take nothing away.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with programming BASIC on a C64, but make no mistake there are a wealth of easier to obtain options.
All you've done is confirm the high cost of living. $95k gross a year is a pretty good living even in very expensive areas like Santa Barabara (where I live). From my experience in engineering, an electrical engineer fresh with a PhD can generally make $100,000 gross, capping out at around $175k as they get more experienced unless they invent something, move into higher management, or go somewhere highly specialized. To be an EE prof at a university, you would need the same PhD. The salary would probably start around $80k and cap around $120k unless the prof gets a big breakthrough in his research, or moves up higher in the ladder to department head (or something like that). Is there a difference? Yes, but both are very comfortable salary ranges, and for many professors, academia is where they want to be, which makes up for the fact that they're making less money than they would in the traditional job market. You also make the point that a lot of professors don't make $95k a year. This is true, but there is a very big difference between a professor at a nice university, and a professor at a community college or small state university. One of the primary differences is that at community colleges and smaller schools the professors are much less likely to do research. This isn't necesarily a bad thing, but why would you pay a professor who isn't actively doing research the same amount that you would to one who is merely a lecturer?
This reminds me of my adventures with liquid nitrogen. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time to freeze a lime and shatter it on the kitchen floor, with tiny shards going all over. But it very quickly deteriorated into a pile of sticky lime fragments scattered all over the kitchen.
That's not entirely true, because people may still want to make long distance trips which take that long, and few people want to spend 6-8 hours sitting at the charging station.
Unfortunately I have no mod points right now... People make politically uncorrect jokes about all kinds of things. So now that there is one (a funny one at that!) about homosexuality it gets modded as troll??
If you send out a few million emails asking people to kill a witness, one of them will take you up on it.
As already mentioned by others, GNUTella networks are fairly easy to monitor, and bittorrent sites usually post statistics, and could easily be monitored with a modified client.
Also, IRC, where a lot of files start their meandering paths across the internet, can also be monitored. The technology behind IRC search sites like PacketNews could be used to monitor how many people in how many channels are sharing your file, and in some cases, when files are requested with triggers in the main channel, you can find out about how wide your file is spreading.
It may also be a good idea to read this article on file sharing, which covers the process many files follow to make their way from release groups to the general public. In the article you will see read about someone who is an insider in many file sharing rings who consults with media companies on how their files are spreadin
There are, naturally, file sharing vectors that they have no capacity to monitor, but they can get a very good picture with a bit of easily obtained data and a bit statistics. It's hard to say *exactly* how accurate it is, but it can certainly be used as a reliable relative indicator on which files are downloaded more than others.
>>When the Chinese government eventually DOES shut them down, I hope they don't expect much coverage in the Western media.
Boy, did you ever miss the point of this blogger made.
He highlighted one of the major problems in Western media: sensationalism. It's a very popular story to tell the world about how the Chinese government restricts free speech, and running such a story simultaneously praises Western governments for not having such restrictions. But in these lands with few restrictions on speech, the media tends towards writing the most popular story, even if the facts aren't strictly true.
It's practically malicious that you seem to hope that Western journalists will now pass over this kind of injustice in China in retaliation for a clever critique of Western media.
From http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_comeagain.shtml
Anyone who uses the phrase "jillions of volts of capacitance" obviously doesn't understand what's inside an LCD monitor, nor how dangerous it is.
There is really nothing dangerous in them, LCD's cathodes don't use more than 1kv, and unlike CRT's, there is no significant capacitor that will remain charged when the monitor is turned off. Obviously there would be some risk if you actually worked on the inverter while it was on, which isn't even dangerous if you are careful.
And if you're that worried about the safety of cutting into a cold cathode, you could always use a shop vac to improvise a fume extraction system, in case you screw it up. Or you could order a harder to find cold cathode that does not have the covering mentioned, or salvage one from a scanner.
If you take a few minor precautions this operation is not really dangerous at all. Don't complain about how stupid this author is when you don't understand how LCD backlights work or basic safety proceedings.
I suspect the trend for governments, including our own MA, to move to open document formats had a great deal to do with this move. They would have lost a great deal of business if they had not made this move. Open Source is good in and of itself, and because people are starting to realize its potential, other businesses have to adapt to market pressures and imrove themselves. Open Source will have to find new ways to distinguish itself from MS. Competition only improves products.
"But the HFI system uses electricity from an engine's alternator to power the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen as needed from small amounts of distilled water. "That's a big advantage and a bit of a novelty," said Venki Raman, an expert on hydrogen-energy applications who started Protium Energy Technologies." TFA claims (though it could be wrong) that the innovation is creating hydrogen from elecrolysis. Frankly, it's a fairly obvious idea to generate hydrogen with elecrolysis. There is a short list of practical well-known methods for getting hydrogen out of other compounds, and elecrolysis of right near the top. The metal-oxide coil in water car posted on slashy a while back was a more innovative, though not necesarily practical way to get at hydrogen. It also says that the idea of using hydrogen to boost efficiency has been published since the 70's. I don't see an innovation here, I just see common knowledge finally brought to the market in a product. My hat's off to them, but though IANAL I think a patent needs a more original idea, unless they patent some highly specific process used to electrolyse water or inject the hydrogen.
Like Wikipedia, this idea has great potential. Like Wikipedia, this will have many problems. What's to stop this from suffering under a heavy load of spam, honest mistakes, and deliberate mischeif?
You seem to have missed the true insights of this power distribution method. You mention that even with a central DC power supply, it will be converted back into AC again by the internal power supplies, and back to DC. This is sort of true, but you miss the point that now internal power supplies do not need to rectify and filter incoming AC, which is the entire point of a central DC supply. All of the power rectification, inrush limiting, power factor correction that must happen at the central DC supply already had to be done inefficiently at each internal power supply, so those are not truly a disadvantage of a central DC supply. They can be much more robust and higher quality with a central supply. Even though computers do require multiple voltages, the central power supply would supply one DC voltage, within a certain voltage range, which would then be efficiently converted to the proper range of voltages at the server. Because of the small amount of space alotted to most rackmount power supplies, they can now be better built because there is no longer need to fit in large filter caps, power factor correction, and rectification. You mention the difficulties of maintaining battery charge currents, but you forget that it's even harder to do with AC. Further, the batteries can be connected directly to the supply lines when power goes out, no need for an intermediate inverter which must be very beefy, and will probably put out a fairly square wave unless it's a very expensive model.
No matter how healthy cigarettes become, you're still inhaling disgusting smoke. I'm still going to cough if everyone is lighting up, and leave restaurants that allow smoking. I'll still support laws banning smoking in public areas.
> The US, and the massive US military-industrial complex many despise, was essentially solely responsible for creating the internet (note: I am talking about the *internet*, not the world wide web, which itself would not have existed were it not for the internet)?
.xxx, that the US has proven itself to be a capable caretaker of the internet and the root servers (several of which are outside of the US, albeit under ultimate control of the US)?
.xxx TLD serves no useful purpose to the public. Since porn is the biggest industry on the internet, it really ought to have it's own domain, to reduce crowding in other domain spaces, and simplify differentiation of pornographic and non-pornographic sites.
> Aside from the politics and issues surrounding
So in other words, because the US started the internet, and the biggest problem is that there's only a moral censorship on that TLD nobody else should have top level control?
That we started the internet is admirable, but if we want other countries connecting to "our" internet (and we certainly do) then we need to make concessions.
If ICANN follows the lead of the Dept. of Commerce, which follows the lead of the conservative religious right, then how can an intelligent freedom-loving US citizen trust the control of the root zone file in the hands of just one government? Blocking the
>yes Al takes a lot of energy to make. we would call this a "high energy density" material.
True, but you've missed the point. It takes a lot of energy and manpower to mine the aluminum oxide, then extract the Al itself. On the plus side, it seems the same process for extracting Al from ore would restore the waste Al from the car.
The main problem with this idea is the same with all hydrogen cars, the energy to produce Hydrogen (electrolysis, chemical methods, or this metal method) all require ENERGY. And where is the energy coming from? From the power plants that burn coal, oil, and occasionally an environmentally friendly power plant. Add the massive infrastructure changes and it might only provide a slight gain over fossil fuels in terms of emissions.
>um, the trucks can be wire-powered too, y'know. It'd be kinda silly for them NOT to be wire powered.
Well yes, they could be. It still takes a ton of energy (and thus emissions from the power plant that electrolyzed the Al from the ore) to transport metal by truck and train, more so than a pipeline over the course of the lifetime of the pipe.