What ever happened to the 'old' style computer tablets - you know, the kind which were first laptops, and secondarily tablets?
You can buy them from HP. (And other companies.) I have a... tx1000? I believe is the model.
The problem is, they're too heavy to really use as tablets for more than a half-hour or so at a time. This device might be also, but it's much lighter than my HP tablet, so maybe it would be fine.
I turned my swap in Vista (yeah, yeah, I know) off for about a solid year until I ran into a program that couldn't cope with that. Not sure what it was trying to do that was failing (trying to allocate gigs at a time?), but I just set my swap size to like 150% of physical memory size, and that program was happy.
Anyway, I did tons of useful work on my computer with swap off... there was only one program that couldn't cope with it, everything else (and the OS itself) was golden. Try it.
When I installed Windows 7, I didn't tinker with the VM settings, though... some combination of laziness, and 7 being faster enough to not bother.
I find that amazing too. When someone asked me about a keyboard shortcut in Windows, I just looked it up in the help file... on their computer... and they stared at me like I was wearing a live raccoon as a hat.
(For the record, they knew there was a one-press shortcut for "Lock Desktop" but didn't know what it was. I just went to "Help and Support" in Vista's Start menu, typed in "lock computer", and there is "keyboard shortcuts" listed as the second option. Bam. It's Windows-L FYI, I didn't know it either, but I use it all the time now.)
Bullshit. You've obviously never had to do anything serious on either platform. If you had, you'd realize that Linux is much easier to customize and configure to the desired needs. Much easier to lock-down. Much easier to prevent virus infectiions. Much easier to install software reliably. This is all bunk spread by idiots who barely know how to wipe their own asses.
Possibly, but if you're in a corporate environment, Windows makes it a lot easier to distribute that locked-down config (or any other config) to all of the computers on the network. And that's really the feature corporate environments care about most. (Well, most of them at least.)
* Results in a huge number of open windows, most of which you don't want to use.
I can't speak for GNOME, but in Mac OS (back when it was spatial) you could simply hold the Command key while opening an item to automatically close its parent folder. That solves that problem nicely, assuming GNOME's implemented a key for it.
* At the end, you have a crapload of open windows to close
Same as the first point.
* Each new window open in a slightly different location, meaning your mouse pointer is no longer over the same part of the interface.
Each window will open at the same location and size it was last time you saw it (which is the whole point of spatial) meaning that if you've engaged the spatial portion of your brain, you'll probably already have the mouse pointer there before the OS even finishes rendering it... your brain knows exactly where the window will appear, and probably exactly where the icon you want to click is in its vast store of spatial memory, so you can use your computer at an almost subconscious level.
This is the entire point of implementing a spatial file browser in the first place.
(That all said, I can't speak to the quality of GNOME's implementation-- you can easily botch a spatial implementation, ala Windows 95. Mac Classic's was good though.)
* There's no "Back" or "Up" buttons - to go to the previous or parent folder you must hunt out the desired window by mouse (or use Alt-Tab).
In Mac Classic, you could Command-click the title bar of a window to show a menu of its parent windows. Or, if you want to use the parent, you could simply not close it when you open the child window in the first place.
* No one-click navigation to just view a folder then go back (I use the back button on my mouse constantly).
What does "go back" mean in this context? You could program a mouse button to close the frontmost window, which would be similar to "going back" (I suppose?).
The fact that you think in terms like "go back" means you need to forget a *lot* about browser-based file systems before you can really start using the spatial one fully. I have the opposite problem-- I learned on a spatial system, so browser systems drive me *batty*.
* Once you close an un-wanted window, there's no way to get back to it (it if suddenly becomes wanted) short of re-opening every window between wherever your shortcut opens Nautilus, and that location.
Well, if you want it, don't close it in the first place. Duh?
I'm not sure how to respond to that, or how it's any different in a browser-based file system?
* There's no easy way to jump from one part to a widely separated part of the filesystem (technically a feature of tree view, common in browser-view file managers).
You could just make a shortcut/alias/whatever your OS calls it. Again, duh? Spatial file systems still have shortcuts, you know.
So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view?
The average person's spatial memory is much faster and more reliable than their rote memory.
To me it's nothing but a hassle, a slowdown in the process, and cluttering of the screen/taskbar, and an inconvenience to those of us used to very rapid navigation using the mouse alone.
That's because you're so used to a browser-based file system that you can't break your old habits and give a spatial one a real chance. Which is fine-- the two concepts aren't necessarily mutually-exclusive, and could in theory be implemented side-by-side in the same file manager.
(See, for example, this series of articles at Ars which both explains/defends the spatial concept, and outlines exactly how it can live alongside a browser-based file system: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/04/finder.ars )
As for your mouse problem, I can't help you. When I need to rapidly navigate something on my computer I put my left hand on the keyboard so it can fire off shortcuts while I'm mousing with my right. That's typically how computers are designed to be operated... if I'm only using the mouse, almost by definition, I'm doing something more casual.
Of course. They always copy the worst of all ideas Microsoft, and on top of it, do it way too late too. To make sure that really everybody already knows and hates that from MS, and disables it as the first action of installing a Gnome... uuum I mean Windows desktop.;)
Goddamned I'm going to see this over and over again in this thread.
Look, listen-up...
Apple introduced the spatial concept in 1984 with Mac OS, and it worked beautifully-- they quickly gained a reputation for being the easiest-to-use and highest-quality GUI at the time, and really until OS X was introduced. Ok? Apple.
Microsoft, when they released Windows 95, attempted to copy the spatial concept... but they fucked it up. What really bugs me is why people would assume that Microsoft *didn't* fuck it up and that the concept was flawed and not Microsoft's particular implementation-- when did people on Slashdot start thinking that all Microsoft software is perfect?
What you're complaining about isn't the concept of spatial file browsing, which is a really good idea that's had at least one extremely strong implementation. What you're complaining about is Microsoft fucked-up implementation, which was awful.
If your first exposure to spatial file browsers was the Mac Classic Finder, then you'd probably love the concept and you'd demand it in your current OS of choice. Mine was, and I do. If your first exposure to the spatial concept was the Windows 95 abomination, then you've never experienced a real spatial file browser.
(Unfortunately, with this decision, they seem to not exist any longer. Windows has never had one. OS X certainly doesn't, a sore spot for Mac Classic users. I can't speak for the quality of GNOME's, as I've never been able to use Linux due to hardware incompatibilities.)
The whole idea of introducing that Win95 "feature" was one of the more craniorectal decisions on the part of the Gnome developers, and I suspect they knew it.
Windows 95 was the most botched spatial file browser implementation ever. Well, except maybe the one in OS X Finder before they gave up and stopped pretending it was supposed to even be able to do spatial.
In other words, the feature was bad because Microsoft fucked up the implementation, not because the idea was bad. In fact, Mac OS built a reputation as the easiest-to-use OS around when it was based around spatial concepts through-and-through.
Spatial file browsing is more intuitive for two groups of people:
1) People coming from Mac OS Classic 2) People who have never used a computer before
If GNOME thinks they're getting a lot of new users from either of those groups, they're deluding themselves.
But the real point is that, in most people... the vast majority of people... spatial memory is far, far stronger than rote memory. It's different for geeks, but even then it might only be because years of BASH shells have trained their rote memory to be as-strong or stronger.
Spatial took a bit hit when Microsoft "implemented" it for Windows 95, but completely screwed it up in every imaginable away-- surprisingly, even people who think all Microsoft software is a crime against humanity blamed the concept of spatial browsing instead of blaming Microsoft's specific implementation of that concept.
And Apple, after perfecting the concept, let the NeXT guys loose on their file browser... of course the NeXT guys had no clue what spatial was, or how to implement it, and somehow managed to make a version somehow even more botched than the Windows 95 version.
This is a sad decision for me, because it means that once and for all, there are no file browsers that keep the damned icons and windows where I goddamned put them. A lifetime of fumbling trying to find files and windows... lovely.:(
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually visited Facebook? It's actually very bandwidth-conservative as far as sites go. You'll never see more than one video per-page, nor will you ever encounter background music, and I have no idea if it can even do Slideshows, but if it can you have to click-through to them.
This sort of throttling by carriers is unheard-of in more advanced countries, such as Finland or Sweden.
Yeah Finland and Sweden are so much more advanced. The other day I was flying to LA on a Finnish jet and I caught myself thinking how great that was compared to those lousy Boeing models...
I dunno, my company in Seattle is pretty relaxed about the whole affair. They've never had an issue with me putting less than 40 hours on a timesheet. Maybe you just work for a crappy company, but don't generalize the entire US based on your experience.
Bullshit. Good programmers are great at expressing themselves, thats what programmers DO. That excuse is made by crappy 'programmers' who are really just introverts who aren't actually good at programming but rather are even worse at dealing with other living creatures.
Amen, I agree 100%.
I would also say that good programmers understand the *entire* business they're in, not just the tiny bits of it relating to code. Or, alternatively, if they don't understand the entire business, they have the confidence and communication ability to learn it from their co-workers-- who in most cases are also customers.
The best programmer, IMO, is the one who can meet with groups in the company, have a "wait a second-- we can automate this!" moment, and who follows-through.
One guy has great productivity creating a frequency distribution report. It works, looks good, and everyone is happy. It took him a week to do. The uber coder could have batted that out in an afternoon, but instead spent a week ensuring that histogrammer behind the report was multi-core aware and could scale to billions of data points without dragging the system to its knees.
I would argue that a coder who gets distracted by irrelevant issues is not, in fact, an "uber-coder." It definitely limits the tasks you can assign to him if he really digs into the billions-of-row multi-core performance for every single task. And I think one of the most important skills a programmer can have is to be aware of the entire problem domain, and know which tasks are worthwhile and which are not-- instead of just burying his nose into an editor 8 hours a day.
But anyway, that's just me, and I don't manage programmers, so take that how you will.
I'm great at swooping in when there's problems and fixing the crap out of them. The rest of the time I'm just 'meh', and when I don't have a deadline I have trouble getting anything productive done at all.
It helps when a lot of people at your company aren't very technical, so you can automate something they've been doing manually and they look at you like you've just performed a miracle. I got a 20 step process down to a 3-step process by simply doing steps 2-19 through a database query instead of dozens of error-prone Excel operations.
Anyway, I work for a company that either recognizes my value, or I suck-up enough to get noticed, as I'm doing very well pay-wise.
They just realized that small websites were an untapped revenue source.
They were only untapped because nearly all smaller websites dropped the fly-by-night ad networks after the.com bust when most of those ad networks decided not to pay out money they owed.
SomethingAwful wrote a great article about the trials and tribulations of getting ad revenue on a (relatively) small website before and during the.com crash... I wish I could find it. They basically went through an ad network about every 6 months, dropping each one the first time their payments were late until finally giving up and finding an alternate revenue source (charging for forum access, in SA's case.)
Anyway, the only thing Google did to gain that revenue was to actually pay site owners what they owed. That's it. It's the "be mediocre, but also don't fuck up" strategy that's worked so well for Microsoft over the years.
"We want all our products open... except the ones that make us a lot of money"
Nothing wrong with that. (At least I don't think there is.) I just hate the undeserved reputation Google has for being so holy and good. Especially when they're basically scamming advertisers by artificially-inflating the value of search placements. (Not that you'd ever see an article about that here on Slashdot.)
Course, they also used to forward chain mails about "if you forward this to 10 people, Bill Gates would send you $200." and we would have to tell them that emails can't be tracked like that.. Of course, with 1x1 images in emails now.. they can..
Actually, the majority of mail clients now won't load images from remote servers. Tracking email was much more effective in the Windows 9x days than it is now.
My favorite was a letter to the editor in a local paper from someone worried that the power plants would shut down on Y2K because, and I quote: "they would think it was 1900, and this city didn't have power in 1900."
Yes, because the programmers of the power plant's software made sure to add in an extensive database of historical knowledge. Obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
What ever happened to the 'old' style computer tablets - you know, the kind which were first laptops, and secondarily tablets?
You can buy them from HP. (And other companies.) I have a ... tx1000? I believe is the model.
The problem is, they're too heavy to really use as tablets for more than a half-hour or so at a time. This device might be also, but it's much lighter than my HP tablet, so maybe it would be fine.
I turned my swap in Vista (yeah, yeah, I know) off for about a solid year until I ran into a program that couldn't cope with that. Not sure what it was trying to do that was failing (trying to allocate gigs at a time?), but I just set my swap size to like 150% of physical memory size, and that program was happy.
Anyway, I did tons of useful work on my computer with swap off... there was only one program that couldn't cope with it, everything else (and the OS itself) was golden. Try it.
When I installed Windows 7, I didn't tinker with the VM settings, though... some combination of laziness, and 7 being faster enough to not bother.
Toss in Lotus Notes [...] and you have a full swing helpdesk nightmare.
Fixed that for you.
I find that amazing too. When someone asked me about a keyboard shortcut in Windows, I just looked it up in the help file... on their computer... and they stared at me like I was wearing a live raccoon as a hat.
(For the record, they knew there was a one-press shortcut for "Lock Desktop" but didn't know what it was. I just went to "Help and Support" in Vista's Start menu, typed in "lock computer", and there is "keyboard shortcuts" listed as the second option. Bam. It's Windows-L FYI, I didn't know it either, but I use it all the time now.)
Bullshit. You've obviously never had to do anything serious on either platform. If you had, you'd realize that Linux is much easier to customize and configure to the desired needs. Much easier to lock-down. Much easier to prevent virus infectiions. Much easier to install software reliably. This is all bunk spread by idiots who barely know how to wipe their own asses.
Possibly, but if you're in a corporate environment, Windows makes it a lot easier to distribute that locked-down config (or any other config) to all of the computers on the network. And that's really the feature corporate environments care about most. (Well, most of them at least.)
* Results in a huge number of open windows, most of which you don't want to use.
I can't speak for GNOME, but in Mac OS (back when it was spatial) you could simply hold the Command key while opening an item to automatically close its parent folder. That solves that problem nicely, assuming GNOME's implemented a key for it.
* At the end, you have a crapload of open windows to close
Same as the first point.
* Each new window open in a slightly different location, meaning your mouse pointer is no longer over the same part of the interface.
Each window will open at the same location and size it was last time you saw it (which is the whole point of spatial) meaning that if you've engaged the spatial portion of your brain, you'll probably already have the mouse pointer there before the OS even finishes rendering it... your brain knows exactly where the window will appear, and probably exactly where the icon you want to click is in its vast store of spatial memory, so you can use your computer at an almost subconscious level.
This is the entire point of implementing a spatial file browser in the first place.
(That all said, I can't speak to the quality of GNOME's implementation-- you can easily botch a spatial implementation, ala Windows 95. Mac Classic's was good though.)
* There's no "Back" or "Up" buttons - to go to the previous or parent folder you must hunt out the desired window by mouse (or use Alt-Tab).
In Mac Classic, you could Command-click the title bar of a window to show a menu of its parent windows. Or, if you want to use the parent, you could simply not close it when you open the child window in the first place.
* No one-click navigation to just view a folder then go back (I use the back button on my mouse constantly).
What does "go back" mean in this context? You could program a mouse button to close the frontmost window, which would be similar to "going back" (I suppose?).
The fact that you think in terms like "go back" means you need to forget a *lot* about browser-based file systems before you can really start using the spatial one fully. I have the opposite problem-- I learned on a spatial system, so browser systems drive me *batty*.
* Once you close an un-wanted window, there's no way to get back to it (it if suddenly becomes wanted) short of re-opening every window between wherever your shortcut opens Nautilus, and that location.
Well, if you want it, don't close it in the first place. Duh?
I'm not sure how to respond to that, or how it's any different in a browser-based file system?
* There's no easy way to jump from one part to a widely separated part of the filesystem (technically a feature of tree view, common in browser-view file managers).
You could just make a shortcut/alias/whatever your OS calls it. Again, duh? Spatial file systems still have shortcuts, you know.
So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view?
The average person's spatial memory is much faster and more reliable than their rote memory.
To me it's nothing but a hassle, a slowdown in the process, and cluttering of the screen/taskbar, and an inconvenience to those of us used to very rapid navigation using the mouse alone.
That's because you're so used to a browser-based file system that you can't break your old habits and give a spatial one a real chance. Which is fine-- the two concepts aren't necessarily mutually-exclusive, and could in theory be implemented side-by-side in the same file manager.
(See, for example, this series of articles at Ars which both explains/defends the spatial concept, and outlines exactly how it can live alongside a browser-based file system: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/04/finder.ars )
As for your mouse problem, I can't help you. When I need to rapidly navigate something on my computer I put my left hand on the keyboard so it can fire off shortcuts while I'm mousing with my right. That's typically how computers are designed to be operated... if I'm only using the mouse, almost by definition, I'm doing something more casual.
Of course. They always copy the worst of all ideas Microsoft, and on top of it, do it way too late too. To make sure that really everybody already knows and hates that from MS, and disables it as the first action of installing a Gnome... uuum I mean Windows desktop. ;)
Goddamned I'm going to see this over and over again in this thread.
Look, listen-up...
Apple introduced the spatial concept in 1984 with Mac OS, and it worked beautifully-- they quickly gained a reputation for being the easiest-to-use and highest-quality GUI at the time, and really until OS X was introduced. Ok? Apple.
Microsoft, when they released Windows 95, attempted to copy the spatial concept... but they fucked it up. What really bugs me is why people would assume that Microsoft *didn't* fuck it up and that the concept was flawed and not Microsoft's particular implementation-- when did people on Slashdot start thinking that all Microsoft software is perfect?
What you're complaining about isn't the concept of spatial file browsing, which is a really good idea that's had at least one extremely strong implementation. What you're complaining about is Microsoft fucked-up implementation, which was awful.
If your first exposure to spatial file browsers was the Mac Classic Finder, then you'd probably love the concept and you'd demand it in your current OS of choice. Mine was, and I do. If your first exposure to the spatial concept was the Windows 95 abomination, then you've never experienced a real spatial file browser.
(Unfortunately, with this decision, they seem to not exist any longer. Windows has never had one. OS X certainly doesn't, a sore spot for Mac Classic users. I can't speak for the quality of GNOME's, as I've never been able to use Linux due to hardware incompatibilities.)
The whole idea of introducing that Win95 "feature" was one of the more craniorectal decisions on the part of the Gnome developers, and I suspect they knew it.
Windows 95 was the most botched spatial file browser implementation ever. Well, except maybe the one in OS X Finder before they gave up and stopped pretending it was supposed to even be able to do spatial.
In other words, the feature was bad because Microsoft fucked up the implementation, not because the idea was bad. In fact, Mac OS built a reputation as the easiest-to-use OS around when it was based around spatial concepts through-and-through.
Spatial file browsing is more intuitive for two groups of people:
1) People coming from Mac OS Classic
2) People who have never used a computer before
If GNOME thinks they're getting a lot of new users from either of those groups, they're deluding themselves.
But the real point is that, in most people... the vast majority of people... spatial memory is far, far stronger than rote memory. It's different for geeks, but even then it might only be because years of BASH shells have trained their rote memory to be as-strong or stronger.
Spatial took a bit hit when Microsoft "implemented" it for Windows 95, but completely screwed it up in every imaginable away-- surprisingly, even people who think all Microsoft software is a crime against humanity blamed the concept of spatial browsing instead of blaming Microsoft's specific implementation of that concept.
And Apple, after perfecting the concept, let the NeXT guys loose on their file browser... of course the NeXT guys had no clue what spatial was, or how to implement it, and somehow managed to make a version somehow even more botched than the Windows 95 version.
This is a sad decision for me, because it means that once and for all, there are no file browsers that keep the damned icons and windows where I goddamned put them. A lifetime of fumbling trying to find files and windows... lovely. :(
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually visited Facebook? It's actually very bandwidth-conservative as far as sites go. You'll never see more than one video per-page, nor will you ever encounter background music, and I have no idea if it can even do Slideshows, but if it can you have to click-through to them.
In short, you're full of crap.
Better to stick with Java which gains new features, to be generous, at a glacial pace. Right?
Bravo!
Now how about applying it to all the other posts in this fucking useless thread that are off-topic?
Hi! Mods? I'm Off-Topic! Remember me?
Yes but I managed to get the elusive +2 Flamebait mod. Wooo.
This sort of throttling by carriers is unheard-of in more advanced countries, such as Finland or Sweden.
Yeah Finland and Sweden are so much more advanced. The other day I was flying to LA on a Finnish jet and I caught myself thinking how great that was compared to those lousy Boeing models...
I dunno, my company in Seattle is pretty relaxed about the whole affair. They've never had an issue with me putting less than 40 hours on a timesheet. Maybe you just work for a crappy company, but don't generalize the entire US based on your experience.
Bullshit. Good programmers are great at expressing themselves, thats what programmers DO. That excuse is made by crappy 'programmers' who are really just introverts who aren't actually good at programming but rather are even worse at dealing with other living creatures.
Amen, I agree 100%.
I would also say that good programmers understand the *entire* business they're in, not just the tiny bits of it relating to code. Or, alternatively, if they don't understand the entire business, they have the confidence and communication ability to learn it from their co-workers-- who in most cases are also customers.
The best programmer, IMO, is the one who can meet with groups in the company, have a "wait a second-- we can automate this!" moment, and who follows-through.
One guy has great productivity creating a frequency distribution report. It works, looks good, and everyone is happy. It took him a week to do. The uber coder could have batted that out in an afternoon, but instead spent a week ensuring that histogrammer behind the report was multi-core aware and could scale to billions of data points without dragging the system to its knees.
I would argue that a coder who gets distracted by irrelevant issues is not, in fact, an "uber-coder." It definitely limits the tasks you can assign to him if he really digs into the billions-of-row multi-core performance for every single task. And I think one of the most important skills a programmer can have is to be aware of the entire problem domain, and know which tasks are worthwhile and which are not-- instead of just burying his nose into an editor 8 hours a day.
But anyway, that's just me, and I don't manage programmers, so take that how you will.
I'm great at swooping in when there's problems and fixing the crap out of them. The rest of the time I'm just 'meh', and when I don't have a deadline I have trouble getting anything productive done at all.
It helps when a lot of people at your company aren't very technical, so you can automate something they've been doing manually and they look at you like you've just performed a miracle. I got a 20 step process down to a 3-step process by simply doing steps 2-19 through a database query instead of dozens of error-prone Excel operations.
Anyway, I work for a company that either recognizes my value, or I suck-up enough to get noticed, as I'm doing very well pay-wise.
They just realized that small websites were an untapped revenue source.
They were only untapped because nearly all smaller websites dropped the fly-by-night ad networks after the .com bust when most of those ad networks decided not to pay out money they owed.
SomethingAwful wrote a great article about the trials and tribulations of getting ad revenue on a (relatively) small website before and during the .com crash... I wish I could find it. They basically went through an ad network about every 6 months, dropping each one the first time their payments were late until finally giving up and finding an alternate revenue source (charging for forum access, in SA's case.)
Anyway, the only thing Google did to gain that revenue was to actually pay site owners what they owed. That's it. It's the "be mediocre, but also don't fuck up" strategy that's worked so well for Microsoft over the years.
What he's saying sums up as:
"We want all our products open... except the ones that make us a lot of money"
Nothing wrong with that. (At least I don't think there is.) I just hate the undeserved reputation Google has for being so holy and good. Especially when they're basically scamming advertisers by artificially-inflating the value of search placements. (Not that you'd ever see an article about that here on Slashdot.)
Not quite. If you believe that your manager is wrong, go to his boss.
Wow, going over your boss's head for something as trivial as this? Bad, bad career move.
Here's my career advice: don't take career advice from people on Slashdot. Even me.
Course, they also used to forward chain mails about "if you forward this to 10 people, Bill Gates would send you $200." and we would have to tell them that emails can't be tracked like that.. Of course, with 1x1 images in emails now.. they can..
Actually, the majority of mail clients now won't load images from remote servers. Tracking email was much more effective in the Windows 9x days than it is now.
GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman
GAME TO OF HELLO STARCRAFT YOU LIKE WOULD TO PLAY? GROUTY!
My favorite was a letter to the editor in a local paper from someone worried that the power plants would shut down on Y2K because, and I quote: "they would think it was 1900, and this city didn't have power in 1900."
Yes, because the programmers of the power plant's software made sure to add in an extensive database of historical knowledge. Obviously.