When I decided to learn touch-typing, Dvorak seemed the natural choice, not due to speed but effort. I also played guitar, and the idea of my fingers moving 1 mile a day with Dvorak, versus the average 16 that a Qwerty typist churns through, seemed a no-brainer.
A hundred-some dollars later, I had a Northgate Omni Key Ultra with dip switches so it toggle to Dvorak mode, and had also sprung for the caps where keys had changed rows. Mavis Beacon and a month's time helped me learn the layout.
Don't have that keyboard anymore, but having known how to touch for nearly 30 years it's irrelevant, as all modern operating systems now support Dvorak as a "language". I do still have my clunky DAS Keyboard though, from back in the PC days, with no stencils on the keys. Between blank caps and the Dvorak layout, it was great security through obscurity.
Having switched to Apple in '09 with an MBP, I've gotten used to the tactile feel of that keyboard, and use a wireless Matias on my desktop rig when not on the laptop.
Apple has given up on being "cool" in favor of being "rich".
Had been very happy with them, since getting an MBP back in '09 and cutting the WinDoze cord.
Unfortunately, it's getting to be a little long in the tooth. Have already lost one USB port, getting spontaneous re-boots and logouts. It's annoying, and as old as the machine is, no sense throwing money at replacement parts from eBay.
Still need a good rig, though, and am not interested in something glued and soldered that I can never work on.
So, recently, spent around the same amount as that '09 MBP and built a Hackintosh.
It's not a laptop anymore, but gosh, does it run!
Intel Z370 (using onboard graphics), i7 8700, 32GB DDR4, M.2 drive, 28" 4K screen, Matias keyboard (over the last nine years, my fingers have gotten really used to the touch on that MBP)
Everything works, running High Sierra. Did have to spring for a Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth card, but fortunately Intel lets you remove the one they included.
Still want a portable box for when I'm away from the desk, so am going to reload the MBP and see if that breathes some life into it. If not, will just find a middle-of-the-read laptop and build another Hackintosh. (It's just for on the road, so no need for super-cow powers.)
This is really too bad for Apple, because if they had just continued to make excellent hardware that folks could actually work on, I would have spent the money on them instead.
I almost always answer the phone, but do appreciate T-Mobile's spam filter which shows the name ID of suspect calls as "Scam Likely". Those tend to get ignored.
'doze? Wine. Much better than past days, but still not quite there.
OSX? Already Linux-adjacent, being based on BSD.
Given the vastly greater ability to modify 'nix to suit ones personal tastes (keyboard shortcuts, etc.), one could *mostly* make it work just like 'doze, but why?
Certain things would have to be relearned, such as paths that do not have colons in them with delimiters going the other way.
If one can handle such cosmetic changes, it doesn't really matter. 'doze, 'nix, Mac... it's all just pushing buttons.
Over the past dozen+ years (going back to FF 1.something, when still on WinDoze), I have installed many add-ons. These days, around 30 survive, and while I'm sure some can be removed (for example, don't really *use* ColorZilla anymore), with nearly 90,000 users, my favorite by far, and the one most indispensable to daily use, is Tab Groups.
As a "Legacy" add-on, it will, due to Mozilla's mandate, not survive the upgrade to v57.
It's more than just a bookmark or history manager, and there is nothing like the functionality it provides in the new FF. Containers don't cut it; don't want a huge vertical "Tree" view. Want that familiar icon that helps me organize my tabs into logical collections, letting me switch to a different group, or being able to right-click on a tab and move it to another group.
Some months ago its author announced he would not be converting it to WebExtensions, and has released its source code to the wilds of GitHub. I, alas, do not have the free time required to dig in and figure out how to perform the conversion.
I currently have 35 groups, one just for/. That group has about a dozen things in it, related to exploration of various stories I've read on the site. It's very handy being able to organize my surfing in that manner. The groups do get pruned from time to time, if after a bit I fail to follow up on some page that's been saved to a particular group, or when cleaning out base search queries.
(There are "Containers" in the modern FF world, and one very nice thing about them is keeping cookies, etc. separate. That's a *good* idea. Tab Groups does not do that, but I hope its successor does. Unfortunately, any WebExtensions add-on I've seen which employ them falls far short in doing what Tab Groups can.)
Am in general pretty loyal to my technology, so while they're on the machine, don't use Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. Am on Mac these days, so M$ browsers are out (even in the WinDoze days, they sucked. Anyone remember IE's skinned cousin Maxthon, which sucked ever-so-slightly less?)
Thus, FF it is, and until something so radically better comes along that I needs must re-evaluate my choice of browser (as did it, rising from the ashes of Netscape, which I had used since v2 back in the 90's), FF it shall continue to be.
I totally understand the developer's recalcitrance to re-write his entire app. I also totally understand Mozilla wanting to push their browser into the future, but feel they are falling into the all-to familiar trap of not only desiring that I use their code, but deciding for me how I should use it, as well.
There is no technical reason why Mozilla could not allow the performance hit of having legacy extensions remain functional. Sure, it will add bloat to the program (think multiple sets of libraries being needed to accommodate XUL or XPCOM as well as WebExtensions), but Mozilla should give developers more time than they have, to catch up with the new way of doing things, or let new faces take up the old code and convert it, rather than simply throwing years of good work down the drain.
The whole idea of an add-on is that a third parties may add functionality to a program which the original authors have not coded in to the core. (Just imagine how painful using *nix would be, without bash scripts.) While WebExtensions is much more secure (it limits what the add-on can "do" in modifying the core code's behavior), many, many popular extensions have already been written - and vetted - by Mozilla, using the older XUL technology.
While I agree that moving forward, new extensions should be forced to use this more secure way of doing things, Mozilla should also recognize the contribution of earlier add-on authors and allow older extensions to run if the end user desires it.
Thus, until something comes along which can provide the functionality of Tab Groups, and is written using WebExtensions, I have sadly been forced to turn off FF upgrade notifications.
Typed in my first text editor from a printout - an issue of Dr. Dobbs, I think, don't recall exactly - for the venerable C64, which had no numeric keypad, making data entry of the 6 or 7 K worth of hex assembler code fairly tedious. Otherwise, loved that keyboard.
On the PC side, still miss my Northgate OmniKey Ultra - they offered a bag of keytops for Dvorak which I used before learning to touch on that layout. (Thank you, Mavis Beacon!) DIP switches on the bottom of the keyboard let you switch layouts.
Also on PC, miss using (but still have) a DAS Keyboard - flat black, clicky keys like an IBM, no stencils on the buttons. (Between that and having the Dvorak layout enabled via software, it was difficult for anyone but me to sit down and use the machine. Security through obscurity, anyone?)
But it's OK, I really don't mind not using those anymore, because the keyboard on my '09 MBP is still chunking along quite nicely. Took a little time getting used to it, but now anytime I sit at another machine (even the little bluetooth thing attached to my Samsung tablet) it feels weird.
Between the NSA, FaceBook, and Cortana, there will be no need for keyboards.
By combining predictive text technologies with routine snooping on every detail of our private lives, not only typing, but actual, human-to-human conversation will be rendered obsolete.
This will turn out to be a good thing; not having to bother with the tedious task of composition, everyone will have more time to stare at their Wall.
I miss the days when the only other person that truly knew what was inside my head was Santa Claus.
I tried to read the article, but it was too hard to think about.
Actually, it does raise some good issues, but one corollary of its central point - that as systems grow more complex, the potential for error increases - is that as time goes on, our understanding of how to solve a particular problem will change.
Putting Lovelace aside, we've only been working with software for less than a century. Many of humanity's technologies are quite a bit more mature, stable, and less prone to such error, as we've had time to work out the kinks.
Were this article to be re-visited in 2117, many of the "problems" it raised would no longer exist (though certainly other, newer ones that had yet to be "debugged" would).
Why don't we just have the current US CEO declare hurricanes (especially those with foreign sounding names) to be illegal immigrants, and thus not allowed to enter the country?
I for one would love to see our Border Patrol agents try to stop one; not to mention what kind of wall it would take, or how we'd get the storms to pay for it...
What I'll be doing less than a year from now is not updating FF.
Of the couple of dozen or so add-ons installed over the years, I only use a handful on a regular basis, and one of those (probably in the minority here) is Tab Groups. The author has already stated he's not converting it to the new system, and has released the source, but the voluminous free time it would take for me to do the port is not alas in my current repertoire.
If Mozilla wants even a chance at staying relevant, they should let the program run both WebExtension or XUML as needed.
No sense completely alienating your customer base; especially when you're no longer #1.
Seems the obvious choice would be the Libre Foundation, but my snarky humorous side would love to see Google take over and somehow use the stewardship in their never-ending fight with Ellison et all...
I'd always thought sleep was for helping to retain memories, not erase them.
During sleep, we are not recording nearly as much data as when awake, giving the brain the opportunity to prioritize which earlier experiences need to be retained in long-term storage.
Many theorize that during REM sleep, while dreaming, we are actually re-living various experiences gathered throughout the day. By re-examining these experiences, they have a better chance of being retained long-term.
Remembering a pretty sunset years down the road may be pleasurable, but will not help you stay alive in the physical sense.
On the other hand, remembering to immediately jump into the tree when catching scent of a predator you haven't run across in quite some time, just might save your life.
It's this latter form of experience, getting put into long-term storage partially by initial experience, partially be repetition via dreams, that helps us to enjoy more sunsets.
The former will fade, leaving just a shell of its presence, if any.
This is a hideously bad idea. Every time someone clones a repo, they effectively have a made a full backup of the source. As we just saw with GitLab, one cannot ever have too many backups.
My '09 MPB is still going... after replacing the superdrive and logic board, and upgrading to a SSD drive and the max of 8GB memory.
Apple seems to forget that their premier laptop, while a portable, is also a pretty powerful computer used by loads of people worldwide.
While it's nice to have portability as an option, in practice mine is usually plugged in, with an external monitor.
Probably the real reason they won't go beyond 16GB isn't energy as they say, rather nobody's going to shell out for their hideously overpriced, soldered-to-the-board memory.
I'm never buying another Apple product I can't work on, and upgrade myself. Unfortunately, Adobe still has no path to running on Linux, so it would have to be a VM of either M$ or Apple's own OS. Either way they're not getting any new hardware sales from me until they realize that while the walled garden might be fine for tech-clueless cell phone users, folks that know what they're doing don't like being held prisoner to their machines.
This is precisely why I'm still running on a seven year old MBP.
Though with only a core-2 duo CPU it's quite a bit slower than current models, you can actually upgrade memory and repair it all by yourself!
Hopefully Fake Tim Jobs will wake up one day and realize that by making the hardware impossible to work on, Apple is alienating the very tech savy people who came to love said machines in the first place.
Am never buying another Mac until they dump the glue and soldered memory.
Changed it up a little so I could pass a number (otherwise it defaults to 63 chars), removed the limitation of zero vs upper-O, number one vs lower-L, etc. (didn't make sense as I'd just be pasting anyway), and put an alias in my bash init so I could call it without typing.php every time.
Decided never, ever to use a password on more than one site.
Of course, if I lose the password file, I'm screwed..;)
Use a variation of it to generate alpha-numeric folder names (say, for a Laravel code folder, or many other uses).
Slashdot Mirror
As if the Kernel and git weren't enough, Linus now invents the "Unsend" button.
When I decided to learn touch-typing, Dvorak seemed the natural choice, not due to speed but effort. I also played guitar, and the idea of my fingers moving 1 mile a day with Dvorak, versus the average 16 that a Qwerty typist churns through, seemed a no-brainer.
A hundred-some dollars later, I had a Northgate Omni Key Ultra with dip switches so it toggle to Dvorak mode, and had also sprung for the caps where keys had changed rows. Mavis Beacon and a month's time helped me learn the layout.
Don't have that keyboard anymore, but having known how to touch for nearly 30 years it's irrelevant, as all modern operating systems now support Dvorak as a "language". I do still have my clunky DAS Keyboard though, from back in the PC days, with no stencils on the keys. Between blank caps and the Dvorak layout, it was great security through obscurity.
Having switched to Apple in '09 with an MBP, I've gotten used to the tactile feel of that keyboard, and use a wireless Matias on my desktop rig when not on the laptop.
As soon as they also start playing the sports.
Apple has given up on being "cool" in favor of being "rich".
Had been very happy with them, since getting an MBP back in '09 and cutting the WinDoze cord.
Unfortunately, it's getting to be a little long in the tooth. Have already lost one USB port, getting spontaneous re-boots and logouts. It's annoying, and as old as the machine is, no sense throwing money at replacement parts from eBay.
Still need a good rig, though, and am not interested in something glued and soldered that I can never work on.
So, recently, spent around the same amount as that '09 MBP and built a Hackintosh.
It's not a laptop anymore, but gosh, does it run!
Intel Z370 (using onboard graphics), i7 8700, 32GB DDR4, M.2 drive, 28" 4K screen, Matias keyboard (over the last nine years, my fingers have gotten really used to the touch on that MBP)
Everything works, running High Sierra. Did have to spring for a Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth card, but fortunately Intel lets you remove the one they included.
Still want a portable box for when I'm away from the desk, so am going to reload the MBP and see if that breathes some life into it. If not, will just find a middle-of-the-read laptop and build another Hackintosh. (It's just for on the road, so no need for super-cow powers.)
This is really too bad for Apple, because if they had just continued to make excellent hardware that folks could actually work on, I would have spent the money on them instead.
I almost always answer the phone, but do appreciate T-Mobile's spam filter which shows the name ID of suspect calls as "Scam Likely". Those tend to get ignored.
'doze? Wine. Much better than past days, but still not quite there.
... it's all just pushing buttons.
OSX? Already Linux-adjacent, being based on BSD.
Given the vastly greater ability to modify 'nix to suit ones personal tastes (keyboard shortcuts, etc.), one could *mostly* make it work just like 'doze, but why?
Certain things would have to be relearned, such as paths that do not have colons in them with delimiters going the other way.
If one can handle such cosmetic changes, it doesn't really matter. 'doze, 'nix, Mac
Over the past dozen+ years (going back to FF 1.something, when still on WinDoze), I have installed many add-ons. These days, around 30 survive, and while I'm sure some can be removed (for example, don't really *use* ColorZilla anymore), with nearly 90,000 users, my favorite by far, and the one most indispensable to daily use, is Tab Groups.
/. That group has about a dozen things in it, related to exploration of various stories I've read on the site. It's very handy being able to organize my surfing in that manner. The groups do get pruned from time to time, if after a bit I fail to follow up on some page that's been saved to a particular group, or when cleaning out base search queries.
As a "Legacy" add-on, it will, due to Mozilla's mandate, not survive the upgrade to v57.
It's more than just a bookmark or history manager, and there is nothing like the functionality it provides in the new FF. Containers don't cut it; don't want a huge vertical "Tree" view. Want that familiar icon that helps me organize my tabs into logical collections, letting me switch to a different group, or being able to right-click on a tab and move it to another group.
Some months ago its author announced he would not be converting it to WebExtensions, and has released its source code to the wilds of GitHub. I, alas, do not have the free time required to dig in and figure out how to perform the conversion.
I currently have 35 groups, one just for
(There are "Containers" in the modern FF world, and one very nice thing about them is keeping cookies, etc. separate. That's a *good* idea. Tab Groups does not do that, but I hope its successor does. Unfortunately, any WebExtensions add-on I've seen which employ them falls far short in doing what Tab Groups can.)
Am in general pretty loyal to my technology, so while they're on the machine, don't use Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. Am on Mac these days, so M$ browsers are out (even in the WinDoze days, they sucked. Anyone remember IE's skinned cousin Maxthon, which sucked ever-so-slightly less?)
Thus, FF it is, and until something so radically better comes along that I needs must re-evaluate my choice of browser (as did it, rising from the ashes of Netscape, which I had used since v2 back in the 90's), FF it shall continue to be.
I totally understand the developer's recalcitrance to re-write his entire app. I also totally understand Mozilla wanting to push their browser into the future, but feel they are falling into the all-to familiar trap of not only desiring that I use their code, but deciding for me how I should use it, as well.
There is no technical reason why Mozilla could not allow the performance hit of having legacy extensions remain functional. Sure, it will add bloat to the program (think multiple sets of libraries being needed to accommodate XUL or XPCOM as well as WebExtensions), but Mozilla should give developers more time than they have, to catch up with the new way of doing things, or let new faces take up the old code and convert it, rather than simply throwing years of good work down the drain.
The whole idea of an add-on is that a third parties may add functionality to a program which the original authors have not coded in to the core. (Just imagine how painful using *nix would be, without bash scripts.) While WebExtensions is much more secure (it limits what the add-on can "do" in modifying the core code's behavior), many, many popular extensions have already been written - and vetted - by Mozilla, using the older XUL technology.
While I agree that moving forward, new extensions should be forced to use this more secure way of doing things, Mozilla should also recognize the contribution of earlier add-on authors and allow older extensions to run if the end user desires it .
Thus, until something comes along which can provide the functionality of Tab Groups, and is written using WebExtensions, I have sadly been forced to turn off FF upgrade notifications.
Typed in my first text editor from a printout - an issue of Dr. Dobbs, I think, don't recall exactly - for the venerable C64, which had no numeric keypad, making data entry of the 6 or 7 K worth of hex assembler code fairly tedious. Otherwise, loved that keyboard.
On the PC side, still miss my Northgate OmniKey Ultra - they offered a bag of keytops for Dvorak which I used before learning to touch on that layout. (Thank you, Mavis Beacon!) DIP switches on the bottom of the keyboard let you switch layouts.
Also on PC, miss using (but still have) a DAS Keyboard - flat black, clicky keys like an IBM, no stencils on the buttons. (Between that and having the Dvorak layout enabled via software, it was difficult for anyone but me to sit down and use the machine. Security through obscurity, anyone?)
But it's OK, I really don't mind not using those anymore, because the keyboard on my '09 MBP is still chunking along quite nicely. Took a little time getting used to it, but now anytime I sit at another machine (even the little bluetooth thing attached to my Samsung tablet) it feels weird.
Between the NSA, FaceBook, and Cortana, there will be no need for keyboards.
By combining predictive text technologies with routine snooping on every detail of our private lives, not only typing, but actual, human-to-human conversation will be rendered obsolete.
This will turn out to be a good thing; not having to bother with the tedious task of composition, everyone will have more time to stare at their Wall.
I miss the days when the only other person that truly knew what was inside my head was Santa Claus.
The Difference Engine, his collaboration with Neal Stephenson.
Holmes-era Scotland Yard employing a huge analog computer that runs on steam!
I tried to read the article, but it was too hard to think about.
Actually, it does raise some good issues, but one corollary of its central point - that as systems grow more complex, the potential for error increases - is that as time goes on, our understanding of how to solve a particular problem will change.
Putting Lovelace aside, we've only been working with software for less than a century. Many of humanity's technologies are quite a bit more mature, stable, and less prone to such error, as we've had time to work out the kinks.
Were this article to be re-visited in 2117, many of the "problems" it raised would no longer exist (though certainly other, newer ones that had yet to be "debugged" would).
Why don't we just have the current US CEO declare hurricanes (especially those with foreign sounding names) to be illegal immigrants, and thus not allowed to enter the country?
I for one would love to see our Border Patrol agents try to stop one; not to mention what kind of wall it would take, or how we'd get the storms to pay for it...
What I'll be doing less than a year from now is not updating FF.
Of the couple of dozen or so add-ons installed over the years, I only use a handful on a regular basis, and one of those (probably in the minority here) is Tab Groups. The author has already stated he's not converting it to the new system, and has released the source, but the voluminous free time it would take for me to do the port is not alas in my current repertoire.
If Mozilla wants even a chance at staying relevant, they should let the program run both WebExtension or XUML as needed.
No sense completely alienating your customer base; especially when you're no longer #1.
Just find one or more friends who also want to maintain good backups, build encrypted boxes for each location and be each other's off-site storage...
Seems the obvious choice would be the Libre Foundation, but my snarky humorous side would love to see Google take over and somehow use the stewardship in their never-ending fight with Ellison et all...
We all know what happened to WinAmp.
The llama whipped back, and it got it's ass kicked...
"Ready Player One", by Ernest Cline (should come out in theaters sometime later this year).
"Armada", also by Cline.
"His Share of Glory", The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth
"Quarry", by Max Allen Collins
"Arkwright", by Allen M. Steele
"Laravel Up and Running", by Matt Stauffer
Others, but they were so six books ago...
I'd always thought sleep was for helping to retain memories, not erase them.
During sleep, we are not recording nearly as much data as when awake, giving the brain the opportunity to prioritize which earlier experiences need to be retained in long-term storage.
Many theorize that during REM sleep, while dreaming, we are actually re-living various experiences gathered throughout the day. By re-examining these experiences, they have a better chance of being retained long-term.
Remembering a pretty sunset years down the road may be pleasurable, but will not help you stay alive in the physical sense.
On the other hand, remembering to immediately jump into the tree when catching scent of a predator you haven't run across in quite some time, just might save your life.
It's this latter form of experience, getting put into long-term storage partially by initial experience, partially be repetition via dreams, that helps us to enjoy more sunsets.
The former will fade, leaving just a shell of its presence, if any.
This is a hideously bad idea. Every time someone clones a repo, they effectively have a made a full backup of the source. As we just saw with GitLab, one cannot ever have too many backups.
Obviously , because we're hacking into the payroll department...
My '09 MPB is still going ... after replacing the superdrive and logic board, and upgrading to a SSD drive and the max of 8GB memory.
Apple seems to forget that their premier laptop, while a portable, is also a pretty powerful computer used by loads of people worldwide.
While it's nice to have portability as an option, in practice mine is usually plugged in, with an external monitor.
Probably the real reason they won't go beyond 16GB isn't energy as they say, rather nobody's going to shell out for their hideously overpriced, soldered-to-the-board memory.
I'm never buying another Apple product I can't work on, and upgrade myself. Unfortunately, Adobe still has no path to running on Linux, so it would have to be a VM of either M$ or Apple's own OS. Either way they're not getting any new hardware sales from me until they realize that while the walled garden might be fine for tech-clueless cell phone users, folks that know what they're doing don't like being held prisoner to their machines.
OMG, I have a hangnail! Better amputate! At the neck!
Seriously, destroying the entire laptop? Why not just replace the drive?
This is precisely why I'm still running on a seven year old MBP.
Though with only a core-2 duo CPU it's quite a bit slower than current models, you can actually upgrade memory and repair it all by yourself!
Hopefully Fake Tim Jobs will wake up one day and realize that by making the hardware impossible to work on, Apple is alienating the very tech savy people who came to love said machines in the first place.
Am never buying another Mac until they dump the glue and soldered memory.
For awhile, used Steve Gibson's Perfect Passwords page - https://www.grc.com/passwords....
;)
.php every time.
;)
Then decided to go in-house - eavesdropping on an SSL connection? That's possible?
Started with this script: https://gist.github.com/tylerh...
Changed it up a little so I could pass a number (otherwise it defaults to 63 chars), removed the limitation of zero vs upper-O, number one vs lower-L, etc. (didn't make sense as I'd just be pasting anyway), and put an alias in my bash init so I could call it without typing
Decided never, ever to use a password on more than one site.
Of course, if I lose the password file, I'm screwed..
Use a variation of it to generate alpha-numeric folder names (say, for a Laravel code folder, or many other uses).
While M$ has never been afraid of alienating their user base, one has to wonder: Does no one use task manager or Process Explorer anymore?