If they allowed commercial servers on port 80 again, I'd switch in a second. This is some sweet "up" bandwidth for my needs and that price (which should be tempered with the fact that I'll have broadband at hom anyways). Currently I'm using DHS to put up a frame to my servers on other ports, but this isn't that viable for a commercial site (some firewalls at anal companies block http outgoing everything but port 80).
oops, I spoke too soon. The right mouse button on my laptop is a pain, relative to the left (which you get by tapping the pad). However, I saw in there that you can lower the maximum milliseconds yu can stay still before it aborts the gesture. I lowered it to 150, and that works very well.
Thanks, I've had the same problem the parent described with highlighting. Mostly it didn't bug me that much since I would just highlight right, and if I needed to abort the gesture I'd just left-right the mouse. This is much better tho.
But it in no way makes me more likely to CREATE something NEW.
I thought I had addressed this, but I never really did directly (halfway through the post I started to fall asleep). My bad. I was actually disagreeing with this point. A degree does help you create something new because it exposes you to things you wouldn't have gone to before. By having this exposure, the richer understanding I was talking about, it really does help create something new.
On the weekend for fun I started writing a distributed session manager. The cirriculum I took really applies and the thing that is special is that I know I wouldn't have learned that much on my own. I say think inside the box. Writing niffy code isn't the only thing in life, but it can be something you create that's new. It's hard to create new things without an understanding of what's old.
Similarily, a degree in fine art forces you into using artistic style you really don't care for. I'm not saying that a degree is the only thing that can make you talented, but I do feel a naturally talented person is stunting themselves by refusing to take a degree. A degree really does represent knowledge you wouldn't have otherwise. I'd love to be taking an MBA right now if I wasn't so freaking tired all the time, inspite of the recent studies that show it doesn't help increase salary. I know how much cool stuff I learned in my CS degree, and how much cool stuff there was in my operations research degree (which partly overlaps with an MBA). Because of this I know there's cool stuff in an MBA, I just don't know what it is (and reading a course outline doesn't help).
Degrees are handy if you want to work for others, as it makes it easier for them to believe you when you say "Im worth hiring". But makes not one ounce of difference when you want to do things for yourself
I disagree. Degrees are earned by taking curriculum. Curriculum forces you to take subject that you may not be interested in but have to anyways because they are part of the standard. Because of this a degreed technical person can have concepts that a nondegreed person would never think or want to know. But these concepts are helpful in programming, even business DB work.
It's a rare nondegreed person I talk to who understands order notation. To have to teach them that inorder to begin to address algorithmic efficiency is a task that doesn't have to be done with a degreed person. Rarer than that is one who knows what a state machine is and how it applies to parts of their work. Rarer still is one who understands stochastic algorithms and what variance is.
But even if you decide to bone up on these things there will still be things you don't learn because you haven't been forced to do so. Getting a degree from a good university really does make you a better person. When working on a tough problem at work and going through pages of results related to it in Google, the curriculum you know will help make the pages make more sence. I doubt that before my degree I could answer many of the questions on this page. I answered all but 3, and the 3 I didn't answer were because they would take more programming time than I cared to put in and 2 were covered in courses I took (the other is the spiral one which is relatively trivial). I'm fairly sure if I didn't go to university, I'd have been lost at O(n).
And no matter what you are "doing for yourself", you are working for someone else if it's income related. Be it the client as an independent contractor, the bank for a private company, or shareholders for a public company, everyone is accountable to someone. Having a CS degree will help you in programming, design, and architecture jobs. A CTO really should have an understanding of CS concepts in order to be an effective decision maker.
And if what you're doing for yourself isn't income related, then an educated background gives you a richer understanding of the things you do.
Debian has an Alpha port and, while I don't know how complete the packages are, Debian tends to have above 90% of the packages as aptable binaries on each platform.
I have a Mavica camera that records to floppy and I'd prefer that over compact flash or whatnot. The reason? If I'm on vacation and need more "film" it's cheap and available pretty much anywhere. Plus it's really easy to program utilities for, because you're just reading files from a disk (some of the compact flash ones will do this too, though). Currently I use a program that copies the file to one with the name based on the timestamp. Handy for knowing when the pic was taken.
Plus, nothing beats a floppy for when your PC is screwed up. Yeah, you can make boot CDs, but I find CD-R/RW to be a pain to use and really only use it because of the large size/standard reader. Floppies are easier to work with at that level.
Installation, though, CDs all the way. I was very happy when debian switched to tiny install CD instead of the 6 disks.
Unless it's written in Java, the client wouldn't be portable, and VNC is a lot smaller download than the JRE.
Re:Linux == Pleasure (for me, anyway)
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 2
There is nothing here that wasn't already accomplished with multiple desktops
Unsing multiple desktops in GNOME, I disagree.
Just a few clicks away. I've never found that it takes too long to get to something.
I agree that under multiple desktops, it isn't hard to get to the other desktops, but it still isn't the same. What requires clicks for you, required no clicks under this system. Fitt's Law applies, and the target in my scenario is a lot faster to arrive at than a desktop button, menu, or hotkey.
So, make the switch! Multiple desktops are a must-have feature (like tabbed browsing in mozilla), that you miss so much that it's painful to go back to anything else, once you've tried it.
To tell you the truth, multiple desktops aren't that great. Tabbed browsing is a must have for me in mozilla to the point that when I have to use IE (for work) I find myself middle clicking on links, and even if that weren't a problem, the time it takes to go back in IE is a lot longer than it takes to close a mozilla tab. That speed me up when I'm using the system.
Multiple desktops, on the other hand, organize but slow me down. So I don't particularily miss them when I'm using Windows. I separate my work mozilla from my browsing mozilla and have them on the same desktop without problems.
Really my problem with the desktop is that it either a) doesn't have enough space to arrage things beside each other so they are easy to look at simultaneously, or b) are so large it's hard to travel on them with a mouse without increasing the mouse speed to the poitn where it's hard to hit targets (again with the Fitt's Law)
And multiple desktops don't have the peripheral vision advantage. When a stock alert happens on desktop 3, you don't necessarily know about it. The desktop manager can flash if there's a new window, but an alert won't necessarily make a new window, it may just flash in the current window. Plus seeing the flashing "3" doesn't immediately say to you "stock alert". It just says "new window on desktop 3". Something you may not react to if you don't think "that's the desktop my stock alerts are on", especially considering all the times it was just mozilla unable to connect to the site.
Finally, multiple desktops don't currently have the ability to bring things closer or rescale them.
The point is that a VCR doesn't have a mouse or a keyboard, so the interface is limited to what you can do with a remote. While it is workable, it's nowhere near as nice as it could be.
Re:Linux == Pleasure (for me, anyway)
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My idea for a 3D UI is this:
First the input device is a head tracker and a standard wheel mouse. The output device is a 2D (monoptical) or a 3D (bioptical) head mounted display.
Think of a sphere that surrounds your head. That is the new "desktop". The applications are standard 2D applications that we know today. The windows are anchored to the sphere such that their plane is parallel to the tangentental plane at the center of the window. Forground applications are fully in front of background ones.
The mouse moves along the sphere until it visually falls on a window, then it moves in 2D within the window. Grabbing the title bar and dragging moves the center point on the sphere, and thus adjusts the orientation to still be parallel to the tangent.
Holding a special key (alt, maybe) and rolling the wheel expands and contracts the sphere. Holding another key and rolling on an application rescales the application. This is different from dragging the sides and corners as that changes the size the application thinks it has and thus changes layout and may obscure some information on the screen. Rescaling just allows you to make something small that you have to contract the sphere to get it closer to see well.
This design has a few good advantages:
- the user can place applications that are similar to each other close together, so that, for example, looking close to straight forward you have your work applications, while to the left you have websites. Changing context just involves rotating your head.
- the user can place less important applications to the sides. The looking straight forward is the most natural position to be in. Applications that aren't important harder to look at areas. For eample a stock ticker may be above and to the right, and you can check it by glancing there. Also, you can take advantage of the human peripheral system that has been tuned to detect movement over providing clarity. A stock alert that pops up there will be noticed by the user but not interrupt the application they are working on unless they choose to look. - Because the sphere is actually a 2D surface in 3D, it can use normal 2D tools, such as the mouse, to navigate on. Yet, it still allows the user to arrange things in a 3D space, without actually worrying about how to move in the 3rd dimension. - Since the user will typically only place windows where they can physcally rotate their head to, the windows all end up being within reach fairly quickly. - It's natural for humans to interact with the world by standing in one spot and rotating their head. It isn't as natural for us to fly in all 3 directions. - No changes to existing applications need to be made. They don't have to know they are being projected in a 3D world.
If linux were to have this, I doubt I would ever go back to windows (much like I can't go back to IE because of what it lacks over Mozilla). Now, I can go between them without caring because they aren't very distinct, featurewise.
I don't feel this is entirely true, in spite of the studies. I've been put onto a project after an application was launched and the performance was horrible. My job was to make it perform better. I worked 90+ hours, with one week being 108 hours, for 3 weeks and got a very large part of the system rewritten on in the back and middle tiers, much much more than I could have in 120 hours.
I agree that I couldn't sustain that for much longer (there were indeed still performance problems in some modules, but they were infrequently used and I had to go back down to 40 hours), but just because you are working more than 50 hours doesn't necessarily equate to less or the same code as 40. Also, I think I got more done than I would have with the same number of hours spread across 7-8 weeks, but only because no one could bug me at night to do other stuff.
I'm not sure why you are worried about this. At least in the snopes version, the part that claimed Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley was the one who wrote it was fairly obviously not done by the person who wrote the letter: in the erroneous copy it stated "A young airman from Hill AFB responds to her article below. He ought to get a bonus for this!"
The common answer I've heard for this is to start a fire in the B direction of you. Then just walk into the burned up area when that fire has moved, as the other fire can't go there. Apparently this is an actual technique used by fire fighters. However, I've I'm on a really narrow island, I'd run for the water and wade in it (it says I can't swim, but that doesn't mean I can't wade).
Hmmm, I got a completely different answer: d=a^b; return d&a|~d
d holds where a and b agree, and thus outvote c. ~d is logically where c must be partaking in a winning vote (although it could be winning in some d bits as well).
If the MPAA owns the copyright, then why don'tthey just tell the television stations that they can't air it without the bit set? Why push in FCC regulations when you can just require it anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
If they allowed commercial servers on port 80 again, I'd switch in a second. This is some sweet "up" bandwidth for my needs and that price (which should be tempered with the fact that I'll have broadband at hom anyways). Currently I'm using DHS to put up a frame to my servers on other ports, but this isn't that viable for a commercial site (some firewalls at anal companies block http outgoing everything but port 80).
oops, I spoke too soon. The right mouse button on my laptop is a pain, relative to the left (which you get by tapping the pad). However, I saw in there that you can lower the maximum milliseconds yu can stay still before it aborts the gesture. I lowered it to 150, and that works very well.
Thanks, I've had the same problem the parent described with highlighting. Mostly it didn't bug me that much since I would just highlight right, and if I needed to abort the gesture I'd just left-right the mouse. This is much better tho.
Simple, just charge the indians who use the site a fee to cover their expenses with the ISP and take a little off the top.
But it in no way makes me more likely to CREATE something NEW.
I thought I had addressed this, but I never really did directly (halfway through the post I started to fall asleep). My bad. I was actually disagreeing with this point. A degree does help you create something new because it exposes you to things you wouldn't have gone to before. By having this exposure, the richer understanding I was talking about, it really does help create something new.
On the weekend for fun I started writing a distributed session manager. The cirriculum I took really applies and the thing that is special is that I know I wouldn't have learned that much on my own. I say think inside the box. Writing niffy code isn't the only thing in life, but it can be something you create that's new. It's hard to create new things without an understanding of what's old.
Similarily, a degree in fine art forces you into using artistic style you really don't care for. I'm not saying that a degree is the only thing that can make you talented, but I do feel a naturally talented person is stunting themselves by refusing to take a degree. A degree really does represent knowledge you wouldn't have otherwise. I'd love to be taking an MBA right now if I wasn't so freaking tired all the time, inspite of the recent studies that show it doesn't help increase salary. I know how much cool stuff I learned in my CS degree, and how much cool stuff there was in my operations research degree (which partly overlaps with an MBA). Because of this I know there's cool stuff in an MBA, I just don't know what it is (and reading a course outline doesn't help).
Degrees are handy if you want to work for others, as it makes it easier for them to believe you when you say "Im worth hiring". But makes not one ounce of difference when you want to do things for yourself
I disagree. Degrees are earned by taking curriculum. Curriculum forces you to take subject that you may not be interested in but have to anyways because they are part of the standard. Because of this a degreed technical person can have concepts that a nondegreed person would never think or want to know. But these concepts are helpful in programming, even business DB work.
It's a rare nondegreed person I talk to who understands order notation. To have to teach them that inorder to begin to address algorithmic efficiency is a task that doesn't have to be done with a degreed person. Rarer than that is one who knows what a state machine is and how it applies to parts of their work. Rarer still is one who understands stochastic algorithms and what variance is.
But even if you decide to bone up on these things there will still be things you don't learn because you haven't been forced to do so. Getting a degree from a good university really does make you a better person. When working on a tough problem at work and going through pages of results related to it in Google, the curriculum you know will help make the pages make more sence. I doubt that before my degree I could answer many of the questions on this page. I answered all but 3, and the 3 I didn't answer were because they would take more programming time than I cared to put in and 2 were covered in courses I took (the other is the spiral one which is relatively trivial). I'm fairly sure if I didn't go to university, I'd have been lost at O(n).
And no matter what you are "doing for yourself", you are working for someone else if it's income related. Be it the client as an independent contractor, the bank for a private company, or shareholders for a public company, everyone is accountable to someone. Having a CS degree will help you in programming, design, and architecture jobs. A CTO really should have an understanding of CS concepts in order to be an effective decision maker.
And if what you're doing for yourself isn't income related, then an educated background gives you a richer understanding of the things you do.
So, you're saying that these people shouldn't have thought about what goes in the space?
OMG. 5 mod points isn't enough to rate how funny this is. still laughing out loud
That's silly. Xerox machines are analog copying devices. It's digital ones that are bad.
not entirely serious. not entirely joking.
Debian has an Alpha port and, while I don't know how complete the packages are, Debian tends to have above 90% of the packages as aptable binaries on each platform.
It stops after a while.
I don't think so. A few minutes of her sitting on my lap and I could see myself getting stiff.
I have a Mavica camera that records to floppy and I'd prefer that over compact flash or whatnot. The reason? If I'm on vacation and need more "film" it's cheap and available pretty much anywhere. Plus it's really easy to program utilities for, because you're just reading files from a disk (some of the compact flash ones will do this too, though). Currently I use a program that copies the file to one with the name based on the timestamp. Handy for knowing when the pic was taken.
Plus, nothing beats a floppy for when your PC is screwed up. Yeah, you can make boot CDs, but I find CD-R/RW to be a pain to use and really only use it because of the large size/standard reader. Floppies are easier to work with at that level.
Installation, though, CDs all the way. I was very happy when debian switched to tiny install CD instead of the 6 disks.
Yeah, it must suck to be an idiot.
LOL. That was great!
Unless it's written in Java, the client wouldn't be portable, and VNC is a lot smaller download than the JRE.
There is nothing here that wasn't already accomplished with multiple desktops
Unsing multiple desktops in GNOME, I disagree.
Just a few clicks away. I've never found that it takes too long to get to something.
I agree that under multiple desktops, it isn't hard to get to the other desktops, but it still isn't the same. What requires clicks for you, required no clicks under this system. Fitt's Law applies, and the target in my scenario is a lot faster to arrive at than a desktop button, menu, or hotkey.
So, make the switch! Multiple desktops are a must-have feature (like tabbed browsing in mozilla), that you miss so much that it's painful to go back to anything else, once you've tried it.
To tell you the truth, multiple desktops aren't that great. Tabbed browsing is a must have for me in mozilla to the point that when I have to use IE (for work) I find myself middle clicking on links, and even if that weren't a problem, the time it takes to go back in IE is a lot longer than it takes to close a mozilla tab. That speed me up when I'm using the system.
Multiple desktops, on the other hand, organize but slow me down. So I don't particularily miss them when I'm using Windows. I separate my work mozilla from my browsing mozilla and have them on the same desktop without problems.
Really my problem with the desktop is that it either
a) doesn't have enough space to arrage things beside each other so they are easy to look at simultaneously, or
b) are so large it's hard to travel on them with a mouse without increasing the mouse speed to the poitn where it's hard to hit targets (again with the Fitt's Law)
And multiple desktops don't have the peripheral vision advantage. When a stock alert happens on desktop 3, you don't necessarily know about it. The desktop manager can flash if there's a new window, but an alert won't necessarily make a new window, it may just flash in the current window. Plus seeing the flashing "3" doesn't immediately say to you "stock alert". It just says "new window on desktop 3". Something you may not react to if you don't think "that's the desktop my stock alerts are on", especially considering all the times it was just mozilla unable to connect to the site.
Finally, multiple desktops don't currently have the ability to bring things closer or rescale them.
The point is that a VCR doesn't have a mouse or a keyboard, so the interface is limited to what you can do with a remote. While it is workable, it's nowhere near as nice as it could be.
My idea for a 3D UI is this:
First the input device is a head tracker and a standard wheel mouse. The output device is a 2D (monoptical) or a 3D (bioptical) head mounted display.
Think of a sphere that surrounds your head. That is the new "desktop". The applications are standard 2D applications that we know today. The windows are anchored to the sphere such that their plane is parallel to the tangentental plane at the center of the window. Forground applications are fully in front of background ones.
The mouse moves along the sphere until it visually falls on a window, then it moves in 2D within the window. Grabbing the title bar and dragging moves the center point on the sphere, and thus adjusts the orientation to still be parallel to the tangent.
Holding a special key (alt, maybe) and rolling the wheel expands and contracts the sphere. Holding another key and rolling on an application rescales the application. This is different from dragging the sides and corners as that changes the size the application thinks it has and thus changes layout and may obscure some information on the screen. Rescaling just allows you to make something small that you have to contract the sphere to get it closer to see well.
This design has a few good advantages:
- the user can place applications that are similar to each other close together, so that, for example, looking close to straight forward you have your work applications, while to the left you have websites. Changing context just involves rotating your head.
- the user can place less important applications to the sides. The looking straight forward is the most natural position to be in. Applications that aren't important harder to look at areas. For eample a stock ticker may be above and to the right, and you can check it by glancing there. Also, you can take advantage of the human peripheral system that has been tuned to detect movement over providing clarity. A stock alert that pops up there will be noticed by the user but not interrupt the application they are working on unless they choose to look.
- Because the sphere is actually a 2D surface in 3D, it can use normal 2D tools, such as the mouse, to navigate on. Yet, it still allows the user to arrange things in a 3D space, without actually worrying about how to move in the 3rd dimension.
- Since the user will typically only place windows where they can physcally rotate their head to, the windows all end up being within reach fairly quickly.
- It's natural for humans to interact with the world by standing in one spot and rotating their head. It isn't as natural for us to fly in all 3 directions.
- No changes to existing applications need to be made. They don't have to know they are being projected in a 3D world.
If linux were to have this, I doubt I would ever go back to windows (much like I can't go back to IE because of what it lacks over Mozilla). Now, I can go between them without caring because they aren't very distinct, featurewise.
I don't feel this is entirely true, in spite of the studies. I've been put onto a project after an application was launched and the performance was horrible. My job was to make it perform better. I worked 90+ hours, with one week being 108 hours, for 3 weeks and got a very large part of the system rewritten on in the back and middle tiers, much much more than I could have in 120 hours.
I agree that I couldn't sustain that for much longer (there were indeed still performance problems in some modules, but they were infrequently used and I had to go back down to 40 hours), but just because you are working more than 50 hours doesn't necessarily equate to less or the same code as 40. Also, I think I got more done than I would have with the same number of hours spread across 7-8 weeks, but only because no one could bug me at night to do other stuff.
I'm not sure why you are worried about this. At least in the snopes version, the part that claimed Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley was the one who wrote it was fairly obviously not done by the person who wrote the letter: in the erroneous copy it stated "A young airman from Hill AFB responds to her article below. He ought to get a bonus for this!"
The common answer I've heard for this is to start a fire in the B direction of you. Then just walk into the burned up area when that fire has moved, as the other fire can't go there. Apparently this is an actual technique used by fire fighters. However, I've I'm on a really narrow island, I'd run for the water and wade in it (it says I can't swim, but that doesn't mean I can't wade).
Hmmm, I got a completely different answer:
d=a^b;
return d&a|~d
d holds where a and b agree, and thus outvote c. ~d is logically where c must be partaking in a winning vote (although it could be winning in some d bits as well).
He tries to sue the arena and fails. You probably should actually read about negligence. In the case you describe, there wasn't any.
Oh, and we aren't talking about skating rinks. Your comment is a non-sequiter.
Just asking for a "friend", right? :)
If the MPAA owns the copyright, then why don'tthey just tell the television stations that they can't air it without the bit set? Why push in FCC regulations when you can just require it anyway?