The Control key is in the right place, it doesn't hog the desk the way those big 105 key monster do.
The emphasis is on being compact, though, so be warned that getting function keys requires a 2-key combination, holding down an "Fn" key together with one of the other keys (eg, the numeric 1 becomes F1).
I've been intrigued, but haven't had the courage yet to try out something that looks incredibly efficient (one-handed, Ma!) and good for portable use, too, the Twiddler.
This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
Of course everyone recognizes this for sales droid talk, telling people What They Want to Hear.
Nevertheless, it's significant that Bill Gates not only recognizes the sentiment of user's not liking to be locked into one product by virtue of using another, but that he is actually willing to give voice to it publicly.
Especially when so much of Microsoft's corporate culture has been built upon leveraging, using products that either ubiquitous or well-designed (yes, I must admit that) to lock users into other products that are either poorly designed and/or expensive.
some people actually prefer reading a book to staring a computer screen
I couldn't agree with you more completely.
I've found the phosphors on my vt100 were getting painful to look at, so I just printed out all 4000 of the published RFCs on my dot matrix printer.
No need to spend money on those needless books when I can learn everything from the source.
I do have a question, though.
I've read up on this HTTP and have been using telnet on port 80 to answer all those GET commands that have been coming into my website.
The problem seems to be that the users are getting tired waiting for me to type in the results and are going away. I've even tried cutting and pasting the answers into my telnet window, but it's still taking a long time.
If you ask me, this whole HTTP and HTML thing is highly overrated.
Yes, Powerpoint has become a de facto standard for presentations and it really has some nice features. Getting TeX math rendering is not built-in nicely and requires going to 3rd party vendors.
I've long lamented that a similarly powerful presentation tool wasn't there in the free and open source world.
What I'd really like to see is something which uses SVG and MathML so that vector graphics, dynamic illustrations and TeX-quality mathematics could all be produced and saved in an open XML based format. A file where, if you really wanted, you could open it up in any old text editor and fix a typo in a line in some slide, or change the color of some symbols in an equation. Something which could be accessed using XML parsers available for Perl, Python and C++ so that standard free programming tools could be used to create and modify documents automatically, instead of through some GUI, or by buying a proprietary library.
Something like this would take off, especially if support for international glyphs were built in from the outset and the XML specifications included not just content, but also standardized rendering rules that are so important for presentations.
How about I don't want 1 single company delivering broadband to my door?
I agree with you completely.
But the reality is this: it costs some money to build in broadband The Last Mile to your house.
Completely open competition would oblige each company to build its own fiber to your backdoor. It would be needlessly expensive and wasteful, just as in the days of old when competing railroads would sometimes build rail lines next to one another.
So everyone agrees it's most efficient to build just one link over the last mile.
But who's going to foot the bill and pay for maintenance of the line (backhoe accidents, etc.)?
If Company X does it, then they get exclusive access to your house. If you want another Provider Y of service, then that company can't just use Company X's lines into your house for free.
Ask Company X and Provider Y how much Company X should get payed for use of their lines and the only thing they'll agree upon is that the price will be bounded
0 < price < What_Company_X_charges_per_month
and that's the quagmire we've been sitting in for a loooooong time here in the good ole USA.
The only way I see for things to happen is for wireless access to obviate the need for 1 provider of lastmile service, or for an impartial party, like the government, to provide the last mile service and charge all service providers the same for access.
Later, if (when) the government proves an inefficient maintainer of last mile service, they could contract that out (with periodic rebids and no sweetheart terms) to businesses completely unrelated to the ISP/Cable TV - businesses that were exclusively maintainers of cable and nothing more.
After the parade of ridiculous witnesses showing the *AA lawyer goons going after Joe Citizen the Department of Justice and John Ashcroft will be embarrassed that their Patriot Act is a wimp by comparison.
Seriously, though, it should give some people pause when some random 11 year old getting sued by the RIAA for a "gravely serious violation of copyright law causing billions in loss CD sales" tells everyone that they aren't making tons of money selling "stolen" tracks that get off the internet, tracks that they hear all time on the radio anyway so what's the big deal?
It's really hard for common people to take this artificial issue seriously - they can't identify with the problem, because it's only genuinely serious problem to the people whose money stream is affected by unrestricted trade of media.
Back in my teenage years I worked for McDonald's and they required me to punch a timeclock.
They basically calculated your hours to the nearest 1/4 hour and you paid (if you could call it that) to the nearest quarter hour.
If you were 2-3 minutes late, not a big deal.
If you were 10-15 minutes late, you'd start getting comments from an assistant manager and after some number of such incidents unreliable employees would get canned, pretty much as you would expect.
The interesting thing was that I would sometimes clock in about 8-10 minutes early and might clock out a few minutes late, enough that I would, horror of horrors, work 8.25 hours that day, which meant some 1.5 salary according to law.
I'd say on the one hand that your employer ought to cut you some slack, just to allow for the variability in commute times.
The flip side is to start punching the clock religiously, go ahead and let `em start paying you a quarter hour of overtime here and there and see if the bureaucracy doesn't start to get to them.
If your employer is adamant about employees providing high precision coverage of a time window, then they can afford to pay it.
I guess there's XML and there's XML and getting between them is not necessarily easy.
Microsoft made a big deal about the most recent versions of Office writing out XML, but that was because XML was a buzzword, sounded as if it might be more open than ".doc", and was essentially a selling point.
From what I've read, people have been underwhelmed with the XML coming out.
But your question is a good one when you see the potential for XSLT transformations that enable OpenOffice to import and export DocBook XML.
If only a similar set of transformations could be developed for OpenOffice to import and export the XML of the latest version of Microsoft Office. From what I understand, the schema is not documented and the formatting and rendering rules for documents are still kept a private affair, just as it has been for.doc files.
Direct hard money contributions to the campaigns haven't been nearly as much of a factor as the soft money, which amounted to half a billion dollars in the 1999-2000 election cycle.
I agree with a recent editorial in The Atlanta Journal Constitution that hopes the SCOTUS upholds the McCain-Feingold closing of soft money loopholes.
So I can see how when a bill comes in from Nigeria to some random department's web server at a university in Myanmar that the threat of fine will have a profound impact, NOT!
The penalty that is understood is loss of network service.
Successively, pestilant host owners should be notified and given a decent interval to fix their problem.
If not, then the ISP is notified and given a decent interval to get the owner to clean up his act or to disconnect service.
Likewise, up the chain, to the largest ISPs, who would have to agree to knock down major service if the client didn't play the game.
Seems to me that Verisign has effectively given themselves a huge number of domains for almost no money.
Think about all the variations in misspelled names and non-existant (till now) domains. Gotta be a humongous number of possible combinations.
Unless Verisign is prepared to offer the same great deal to other people interested in buying domains, then it ought to be time to question whether they're sufficiently impartial to deal with this task and whether another company or entity ought to be in charge of this important task.
The first thing people discover with OpenOffice is that it's about 95% * Office97.
There are enough remaining compatibility issues with MS' products and the problem of not having the same full suite of good work-alike fonts that Sun and other vendors like Ximian - er - Novell - have been addressing.
I sympathize with Sun. I've used their products on the desktop since the mid 1980's, but these days a Linux box is on my desktop and Suns sit back in the server room. It's only a matter of time before their role there is commoditised, because that's the direction everything is going.
Whatever computer desktop exists in the future, it's going to cost less than the desktop that exists now. That has stark implications in terms of the profit margin that companies like Sun or Microsoft can hope to drum up.
In this kind of environment it's difficult for IT companies that need to find new markets where they can truly offer a value-added product.
If I were Sun, I'd be looking into embedded devices. What were servers 10-15 years ago will soon be cheap enough to buy at Walmart in a blister pack. Perhaps Jini was before its time, but the idea is correct - software for networking devices that discover their environment easily and, hopefully, securely.
So I hear about this ssh exploit the exact same day that my inbox has Markus Friedl's announcement of the release of OpenSSH 3.7.
Either someone on the ssh team is making money from new releases or some black hat, upon downloading 3.7 and seeing the exploit fixed, decided to strike while the iron was still hot (machines weren't yet upgraded).
But after you make double copies of backups of your system, verify the UPS and backup generators work,
make sure
you can get to a safe place to wait out the storm.
[Back in `86 when Gloria rode up the east coast, I stayed at work, mainly because it was one of those concrete edifices that would stand through winds a lot higher than my apartment building.
Bring plenty of bottled water, battery-powered radios, cell phone, books to read, munchies, blankets and a pillow.
When Ballmer lost the Munich deal and went for an extended ski holiday in Switzerland, he already knew what was coming.
With all the licensing pain, arm-twisting upgrades, incompatible Office formats, treadmills from last year and the worms from this year, the momentum will gather and feed itself.
As more companies, governments and educational institutions worldwide adopt Linux, there will be more coders and money to make Linux more usable and an even more favorable migration path for users.
Two years from now everyone will be amazed except for the zealots who will be shaking their heads wondering "What took it so long?".
Corporate users arguably don't need mp3 or video codecs.
True.
But MyCorp is starting to distribute a few training and standard disclaimer (safety, good citizenship, eeo, etc.) videos here and there. (The TV generation is taking over.)
And, guess what? The WMP files won't play straight out on my Linux box.
lazy stupid managers not taking the time to ensure they hired quality labor, not knowing how to appropriately measure performance.
They're not that stupid.
They know full well that any repercussions about performance won't hit the fan for many months, by which time their genius cost-saving measure will have gotten them promoted up and out of the morass that his replacement will need to deal with.
And, of course, the replacement is going to look bad, because "the previous manager" as a genius and this new manager is letting things slide downhill.
Monopolies are almost always the result of intervention in the free marketplace by the State.
What kind of interventions by the State led to Standard Oil and U.S. Steel?
It seems to me that any logical businessman would seek monopoly and its benefits if he were in a completely laissez-faire situation. The State needn't lift a finger.
Government intervention is necessary to remove corruptions like monopolization from the system.
Exactly.
Broad competition under capitalism works quite well.
It's when someone starts to "win" too much and uses their weight to unfairly crush competitors that otherwise could contribute more to society's overall well-being.
We've never had true free enterprise and people wouldn't like it if we did - we'd end up with a pyramid in which the self-interest of "one" would be met by system supported by "all but one".
Empirically, regulated capitalism has worked pretty well compared with alternatives.
But there are still challenges, not just with monopolies in specific market sectors, and with government corruption, but also with regard to information and the media.
Most of "we, the people" live in a haze, acting on emotion and instinct, because it is beneficial to some interests that we do.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been quite happy with my Happy Hacking keyboard for several years.
The Control key is in the right place, it doesn't hog the desk the way those big 105 key monster do.
The emphasis is on being compact, though, so be warned that getting function keys requires a 2-key combination, holding down an "Fn" key together with one of the other keys (eg, the numeric 1 becomes F1).
I've been intrigued, but haven't had the courage yet to try out something that looks incredibly efficient (one-handed, Ma!) and good for portable use, too, the Twiddler.
This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there.'
Of course everyone recognizes this for sales droid talk, telling people What They Want to Hear.
Nevertheless, it's significant that Bill Gates not only recognizes the sentiment of user's not liking to be locked into one product by virtue of using another, but that he is actually willing to give voice to it publicly.
Especially when so much of Microsoft's corporate culture has been built upon leveraging, using products that either ubiquitous or well-designed (yes, I must admit that) to lock users into other products that are either poorly designed and/or expensive.
some people actually prefer reading a book to staring a computer screen
I couldn't agree with you more completely.
I've found the phosphors on my vt100 were getting painful to look at, so I just printed out all 4000 of the published RFCs on my dot matrix printer.
No need to spend money on those needless books when I can learn everything from the source.
I do have a question, though.
I've read up on this HTTP and have been using telnet on port 80 to answer all those GET commands that have been coming into my website.
The problem seems to be that the users are getting tired waiting for me to type in the results and are going away. I've even tried cutting and pasting the answers into my telnet window, but it's still taking a long time.
If you ask me, this whole HTTP and HTML thing is highly overrated.
Gasp!
Why, this is totally unprecedented!
This hasn't happened since...uhm...well...for at least about 15 minutes now.
Powerpoint has become almost indispensable
Yes, Powerpoint has become a de facto standard for presentations and it really has some nice features. Getting TeX math rendering is not built-in nicely and requires going to 3rd party vendors.
I've long lamented that a similarly powerful presentation tool wasn't there in the free and open source world.
What I'd really like to see is something which uses SVG and MathML so that vector graphics, dynamic illustrations and TeX-quality mathematics could all be produced and saved in an open XML based format. A file where, if you really wanted, you could open it up in any old text editor and fix a typo in a line in some slide, or change the color of some symbols in an equation. Something which could be accessed using XML parsers available for Perl, Python and C++ so that standard free programming tools could be used to create and modify documents automatically, instead of through some GUI, or by buying a proprietary library.
Something like this would take off, especially if support for international glyphs were built in from the outset and the XML specifications included not just content, but also standardized rendering rules that are so important for presentations.
How about I don't want 1 single company delivering broadband to my door?
I agree with you completely.
But the reality is this: it costs some money to build in broadband The Last Mile to your house.
Completely open competition would oblige each company to build its own fiber to your backdoor. It would be needlessly expensive and wasteful, just as in the days of old when competing railroads would sometimes build rail lines next to one another.
So everyone agrees it's most efficient to build just one link over the last mile.
But who's going to foot the bill and pay for maintenance of the line (backhoe accidents, etc.)?
If Company X does it, then they get exclusive access to your house. If you want another Provider Y of service, then that company can't just use Company X's lines into your house for free.
Ask Company X and Provider Y how much Company X should get payed for use of their lines and the only thing they'll agree upon is that the price will be bounded
and that's the quagmire we've been sitting in for a loooooong time here in the good ole USA.The only way I see for things to happen is for wireless access to obviate the need for 1 provider of lastmile service, or for an impartial party, like the government, to provide the last mile service and charge all service providers the same for access.
Later, if (when) the government proves an inefficient maintainer of last mile service, they could contract that out (with periodic rebids and no sweetheart terms) to businesses completely unrelated to the ISP/Cable TV - businesses that were exclusively maintainers of cable and nothing more.
This should be fun.
After the parade of ridiculous witnesses showing the *AA lawyer goons going after Joe Citizen the Department of Justice and John Ashcroft will be embarrassed that their Patriot Act is a wimp by comparison.
Seriously, though, it should give some people pause when some random 11 year old getting sued by the RIAA for a "gravely serious violation of copyright law causing billions in loss CD sales" tells everyone that they aren't making tons of money selling "stolen" tracks that get off the internet, tracks that they hear all time on the radio anyway so what's the big deal?
It's really hard for common people to take this artificial issue seriously - they can't identify with the problem, because it's only genuinely serious problem to the people whose money stream is affected by unrestricted trade of media.
Back in my teenage years I worked for McDonald's and they required me to punch a timeclock.
They basically calculated your hours to the nearest 1/4 hour and you paid (if you could call it that) to the nearest quarter hour.
If you were 2-3 minutes late, not a big deal.
If you were 10-15 minutes late, you'd start getting comments from an assistant manager and after some number of such incidents unreliable employees would get canned, pretty much as you would expect.
The interesting thing was that I would sometimes clock in about 8-10 minutes early and might clock out a few minutes late, enough that I would, horror of horrors, work 8.25 hours that day, which meant some 1.5 salary according to law.
I'd say on the one hand that your employer ought to cut you some slack, just to allow for the variability in commute times.
The flip side is to start punching the clock religiously, go ahead and let `em start paying you a quarter hour of overtime here and there and see if the bureaucracy doesn't start to get to them.
If your employer is adamant about employees providing high precision coverage of a time window, then they can afford to pay it.
I guess there's XML and there's XML and getting between them is not necessarily easy.
Microsoft made a big deal about the most recent versions of Office writing out XML, but that was because XML was a buzzword, sounded as if it might be more open than ".doc", and was essentially a selling point.
From what I've read, people have been underwhelmed with the XML coming out.
But your question is a good one when you see the potential for XSLT transformations that enable OpenOffice to import and export DocBook XML.
If only a similar set of transformations could be developed for OpenOffice to import and export the XML of the latest version of Microsoft Office. From what I understand, the schema is not documented and the formatting and rendering rules for documents are still kept a private affair, just as it has been for .doc files.
You're still locked-in, dude!
Direct hard money contributions to the campaigns haven't been nearly as much of a factor as the soft money, which amounted to half a billion dollars in the 1999-2000 election cycle.
I agree with a recent editorial in The Atlanta Journal Constitution that hopes the SCOTUS upholds the McCain-Feingold closing of soft money loopholes.
So I can see how when a bill comes in from Nigeria to some random department's web server at a university in Myanmar that the threat of fine will have a profound impact, NOT!
The penalty that is understood is loss of network service.
Successively, pestilant host owners should be notified and given a decent interval to fix their problem.
If not, then the ISP is notified and given a decent interval to get the owner to clean up his act or to disconnect service.
Likewise, up the chain, to the largest ISPs, who would have to agree to knock down major service if the client didn't play the game.
Distributed problem fixing at its finest.
Seems to me that Verisign has effectively given themselves a huge number of domains for almost no money.
Think about all the variations in misspelled names and non-existant (till now) domains. Gotta be a humongous number of possible combinations.
Unless Verisign is prepared to offer the same great deal to other people interested in buying domains, then it ought to be time to question whether they're sufficiently impartial to deal with this task and whether another company or entity ought to be in charge of this important task.
how will they kill OpenOffice?
They won't.
They'll leverage it.
The first thing people discover with OpenOffice is that it's about 95% * Office97.
There are enough remaining compatibility issues with MS' products and the problem of not having the same full suite of good work-alike fonts that Sun and other vendors like Ximian - er - Novell - have been addressing.
I sympathize with Sun. I've used their products on the desktop since the mid 1980's, but these days a Linux box is on my desktop and Suns sit back in the server room. It's only a matter of time before their role there is commoditised, because that's the direction everything is going.
Whatever computer desktop exists in the future, it's going to cost less than the desktop that exists now. That has stark implications in terms of the profit margin that companies like Sun or Microsoft can hope to drum up.
In this kind of environment it's difficult for IT companies that need to find new markets where they can truly offer a value-added product.
If I were Sun, I'd be looking into embedded devices. What were servers 10-15 years ago will soon be cheap enough to buy at Walmart in a blister pack. Perhaps Jini was before its time, but the idea is correct - software for networking devices that discover their environment easily and, hopefully, securely.
So I hear about this ssh exploit the exact same day that my inbox has Markus Friedl's announcement of the release of OpenSSH 3.7.
Either someone on the ssh team is making money from new releases or some black hat, upon downloading 3.7 and seeing the exploit fixed, decided to strike while the iron was still hot (machines weren't yet upgraded).
But after you make double copies of backups of your system, verify the UPS and backup generators work,
[Back in `86 when Gloria rode up the east coast, I stayed at work, mainly because it was one of those concrete edifices that would stand through winds a lot higher than my apartment building.
Bring plenty of bottled water, battery-powered radios, cell phone, books to read, munchies, blankets and a pillow.
When Ballmer lost the Munich deal and went for an extended ski holiday in Switzerland, he already knew what was coming.
With all the licensing pain, arm-twisting upgrades, incompatible Office formats, treadmills from last year and the worms from this year, the momentum will gather and feed itself.
As more companies, governments and educational institutions worldwide adopt Linux, there will be more coders and money to make Linux more usable and an even more favorable migration path for users.
Two years from now everyone will be amazed except for the zealots who will be shaking their heads wondering "What took it so long?".
Corporate users arguably don't need mp3 or video codecs.
True.
But MyCorp is starting to distribute a few training and standard disclaimer (safety, good citizenship, eeo, etc.) videos here and there. (The TV generation is taking over.)
And, guess what? The WMP files won't play straight out on my Linux box.
lazy stupid managers not taking the time to ensure they hired quality labor, not knowing how to appropriately measure performance.
They're not that stupid.
They know full well that any repercussions about performance won't hit the fan for many months, by which time their genius cost-saving measure will have gotten them promoted up and out of the morass that his replacement will need to deal with.
And, of course, the replacement is going to look bad, because "the previous manager" as a genius and this new manager is letting things slide downhill.
Can I please make some money, too, by using SSL for some previously plain text protocol and serving as a certifying authority between any two parties?
Should I be concerned that I could read this easily?
Yes, it means you've been reading /. far too much.
IIRC, Transmeta chip performance was something that depended on its learning how to optimize for a specific task.
Existing benchmarks tended to emphasize how fast each of several tasks were accomplished once.
So Transmeta's offerings tend to look worse than they might be in use, day to day.
"I seem to be having a case of deja vu"
Probably because you've already seen the FCC push some not so open standards in digital broadcast radio.
Monopolies are almost always the result of intervention in the free marketplace by the State.
What kind of interventions by the State led to Standard Oil and U.S. Steel?
It seems to me that any logical businessman would seek monopoly and its benefits if he were in a completely laissez-faire situation. The State needn't lift a finger.
Government intervention is necessary to remove corruptions like monopolization from the system.
Exactly.
Broad competition under capitalism works quite well.
It's when someone starts to "win" too much and uses their weight to unfairly crush competitors that otherwise could contribute more to society's overall well-being.
We've never had true free enterprise and people wouldn't like it if we did - we'd end up with a pyramid in which the self-interest of "one" would be met by system supported by "all but one".
Empirically, regulated capitalism has worked pretty well compared with alternatives.
But there are still challenges, not just with monopolies in specific market sectors, and with government corruption, but also with regard to information and the media.
Most of "we, the people" live in a haze, acting on emotion and instinct, because it is beneficial to some interests that we do.
Particularly annoying are the recorded messages
I've noticed this trend recently, too.
Since I've let my answering machine and Caller ID screen my calls, most telemarketers go to /dev/null.
But some of them leave messages, with crafty wording to delay the time interval before you'll recognize that it's just voicemail spam.
At one point I thought there were laws againts leaving unsolicited messages, but perhaps there's a loophole.
Maybe my outbound message needs to include some legal boilerplate?