Slashback: Rendering, Munich, Clones 301
How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."
Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"
Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."
Offically official.
Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!
One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"
Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."
The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"
Re:Not quite a true victory in munich (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not quite a true victory in munich (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SCO lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Munich (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Munich (Score:0, Insightful)
Mozilla bug fixed and apples and oranges (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not quite a true victory in munich (Score:5, Insightful)
It took the PC about 15 years to take the entreprise.Things like that don't happen overnight. But there is always a point when the critical mass has been reached and from that point on the trend cannot be stopped anymore. Linux is well positioned to reach that critical mass within a few years if ibm/Suse/kde continue to follow their roadmaps as they have done so far.
Re:Do not /. Bugzilla... (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone else remember the comments about how shitty IE was for having a bug like this?
Zealotry will come and bite ya in the ass. Hehehe...
Alas RedHat indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Alas, Redhat indeed.
As far as I'm concerned RedHat is not ready for prime time - and WON'T be until:
1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.
2) Their quickstart manual includes a clear description (accessable to neophytes - and keystroke-by-keystroke again) of both
* how to install the system (Of particular interest as of 6.x: Tell 'em how to make sane choices for the size of the partitions.) and
* how to obtain and install security upgrades.
3) Their install documentation includes a step-by-step, keystroke-by-kestroke recipe for going:
* from a blank computer and their CDROMs,
* through an intermediate system installed from the CDROM image
* To the SAME system but with the kernel built from the supplied sources.
4) Their in-depth manual includes a section giving a COMPLETE list of the configuration files twiddled by each of the functions of each of the graphic-interface admin tools. (And don't tell me to read the source or look it up on the net. You're a packager. Package it already.)
5) Their quickstart manual tells me how to adjust the screen parameters. (And DON'T tell me to go figure out X. Give a recipe.)
C'mon, guys! Get a tech writer and assign him/her the task with 2), 3), 4), and 5) as the goals.
(And while we're at it, the Gnome and/or KDE crews really ought to do a desktop tool, on the model of Apples', for tuning the screen, and RedHat should have it in the default menus.)
Re:Not quite a true victory in munich (Score:3, Insightful)
And Microsoft is basically a government nowadays anyway.
-
Re:Mozilla bug fixed and apples and oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
There is something to saying that a nightly build is not the same as a fix in the stable branch but often such fixes are backported and distributed to end users (via their distro) so that the users don't have to use unstable builds or wait for the next stable version.
Re:Alas RedHat indeed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alas RedHat indeed. (Score:4, Insightful)
A good example is that many enterprise apps when ported from DOS to Windows tried to be more novice friendly by making moving between fields a mouse action where before they were a TAB action. This requires the users hands to leave the keyboard, find the mouse, find the pointer, move the pointer to the next box, click that box, move back to the keyboard, and resume typing. It wasn't long before many of these programs began adding back in the ability to TAB to the next field. Yes, to newbies the mouse seemed easier.. but experienced workers hated the change and it could badly damage the businesses productivity.
Stability and speed is also important. KDE/Gnome especially IMO are going the wrong way in these areas as they try to satisfy Windows users.
Besides - the desktop is a dying concept. Embedded devices to a large degree will take the place as novice users interface of choice. Why figure out how to do something with a powerful (but possibly complex) interface when you can use a handheld gadget that has three buttons and can do what you need (and only what you need)? Obviously you'll still have desktops just as we still have command line interfaces.. but they'll shift from being a cashcow to being a geek tool.
I predict a near future in which less complex devices, similar to (or the same as) game consoles are used by most people for tasks like web browsing, word processing, etc. The systems will likely run Linux or a similar OS but in a version that has been stripped of anything unneeded.. configured especially for the given hardware and tested for stability. I think they'll have a desktop but given the limited capabilities of the systems that the desktop will be very lightweight. Just to step further out on a limb I'll guess that Apple and Sony will be the two major competitors in this market.
Re:the pain of input devices (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure I've seen vim scripts that do exactly this. Try searching for "dvorak vim".
Re:Not quite a true victory in munich (Score:3, Insightful)
The good news is that Linux doesn't need to win all the battles. In fact, with Microsoft's overwhelming market share we don't hardly need to win any to gain ground.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has to maintain revenue growth if they are going to keep their investors happy. They can't afford to lose any customers, and they either have to actually gain customers, or they have to charge existing customers less. When the economy recovers and it becomes clear that Microsoft is not going to recover along with it then investors will finally see the light and Microsoft's price/earnings ratio will fall from its present near 30 level to much closer to 10. When it becomes clear that Microsoft is vulnerable to Linux then the fun will really begin.
Right now CIOs believe that Microsoft is invincible. Disabuse them of that belief and Linux Total World Domination is inevitable.
Re:there is no such thing as "zero-force typing" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alas RedHat indeed. (Score:3, Insightful)
A whole lot of people don't actually see that as a problem of any sort, and that seems to be difficult for others to grasp. Maybe Linus shouldn't have made that "world domination" joke so early on.
Re:there is no such thing as "zero-force typing" (Score:2, Insightful)
It's basic physics. Think about it. In order to type quickly, your fingers MUST move faster. This means that if you're typing fast your finger WILL hit the key harder due to the increased speed. This means that the faster you type on a keyboard, the harder your fingers impact the keyboard and the more "damage" you do.
Regular keys effectively act like sponges or airbags absorbing and softening the impact of each stroke. This is not the case of a capacitance keyboard like the Touchstream where each keypress is the equivalent to impacting a wall.
Now you might claim that a light touch can compensate for this, but it seems impossible to me. In order to type fast your fingers MUST impact the keys harder, so it seems to be that on a capacitance keyboard the goals of comfort and fast typing are fundamentally opposed. This has certainly been my experience in the capacitance keyboards I've used.
There is also the issue of "work". In a properly designed keyboard (like the old "clickity" IBM keyboard I'm using right now) has enough force in the springs to physically move the finger up. On mine the springs are powerful enough the the "return" actually lifts the finger up about 1 mm from the key. What this means is that there is little, if any, "work" involved on the "return stroke". In a capacitance keyboard this is not the case, a user must lift his finger himself.
Now you could argue that I'm exaggerating the effect of these "impacts", and they might be less of a problem that I think when compared to the damage caused by the extra "work" of having to press a regular key. Of course, a capacitance user also has the extra work of lifting his fingers. I'm not sure which is worse, but my instinct is that the "impacts" are a bigger problem than the extra work in pressing the keys.
Re:You haven't been playing piano (Score:2, Insightful)
Say it with me once again: B-A-S-I-C P-H-Y-S-I-C-S!
If object a is moving at a higher rate of speed than object b when it strikes object c, object a will transfer more energy to object c.
In other words, it will hit harder. This isn't rocket science.
I don't doubt that you can train yourself to play extremely lightly on a piano. However, the situation isn't exactly analogous because you play music at a FIXED METER. You're not trying to bang the keys as quickly as you possibly can, which is exactly what you're trying to do with a keyboard. And when you're trying to move your fingers as fast as you possibly can, you're going to bang.
With training it's possible that you can play fast and pianissimo, but you'll NEVER be able to play as fast as you can banging away because "playing fast" and "playing softly" and fundamentally at odds with one another as I described. For this reason you'll NEVER be able to type as fast with a capacitance keyboard as you can with a conventional keyboard.
If you choose to disbelieve in physics I can't help you.