• somedudenamedbob (unregistered) in reply to joeyadams
    joeyadams:
    Actually, Dvorak is roughly 8% different than QWERTY if only letters are considered (A and M are in the same place). When I was learning Dvorak, I found having two letters from home to be quite helpful.

    I do find Dvorak to be quite ergonomical, but I don't recommend trying to learn it if you have a paper due any time soon :-)

    You don't have monkeys typing your papers for you? Oh, you must be a freshman, or a mathematician.

  • Quirkafleeg (unregistered) in reply to PG4
    PG4:
    Symantec Netbackup support's only response is....

    "Turn up the logging levels more, run your jobs and send us the logs and we will look at them."

    This goes on for days and weeks.

    Well, if they look at those logs, they're doing exactly what they said that they'd do. So what are you complaining about? ☺

  • Gerrit (unregistered) in reply to Kemp
    Kemp:
    We still know about keyboard layouts though. Having spent most of my life dealing with OSes that don't realise that "I live in the UK" probably means I want the UK version of the layout, the first thought that comes to mind when you press a button and something else appears is "oh, the layout's wrong again".

    In the Netherlands the opposite happens. I recently helped a friend who bought a new laptop. The Windows install had kindly offered to set everything to Dutch, including the keyboard layout. The thing is, nobody uses a Dutch layout, I may have seen a few around 1985, but the US layout is the norm here. The laptop had a US keyboard and my friend saw all his special characters being messed up.

    Background: The Dutch language has the ij digraph, which is often considered to be the 25th letter of the Dutch alphabet, replacing the y which is not used in native Dutch words (but it is in loanwords). The letters are joined in handwriting, but in print the separate letters i and j are always used. The Dutch keyboard layout had ij as a single letter. But before proportional fonts were the norm the single position occupied was far too narrow for the combination, the result was ugly. A separate i and j looked better. In my perception that is the reason the Dutch keyboard layout and corresponding character set never became popular. Nobody had a use for them, and US layouts offered everything we needed. Ok, we didn't have our own currency sign, but that was simply a fancy f (for florin). Everybody understood a plain f. Problem solved.

  • Former ex-pat (unregistered) in reply to Gerrit

    Ahh, Dutch practicality strikes again.

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to Gerrit
    In the Netherlands the opposite happens. I recently helped a friend who bought a new laptop. The Windows install had kindly offered to set everything to Dutch, including the keyboard layout. The thing is, nobody uses a Dutch layout, I may have seen a few around 1985, but the US layout is the norm here. The laptop had a US keyboard and my friend saw all his special characters being messed up.

    Well in the start of this century I worked at a cable company which still had old style terminal keyboards (with F1 - F32) some of them where in the Dutch layout.

    And 6 years ago I bought a laptop from Dell and they delivered it with a Dutch keyboard layout (for some reason American companies like Dell, HP (then Compaq) and others seem to like doing that...). The only positive thing I remember is that the at (@) has its own key. My previous layout BTW did NOT have a ij digraph.

  • LookingforSxxx (unregistered)

    Hi! Is it weird that I am 23 and still a virgin? I would like to invite you to join my circle of friends on _ Black White Cupid c/o-m **—- My username is “looking4sexxx” Give me your comments on my photos. I’m waiting 4 u.

  • (cs) in reply to highphilosopher
    highphilosopher:
    I thought everyone had a My Computer icon in OS X. It's the one you enable by going to Terminal and typing "rm -rF /" right?
    Wrong:
    $ rm -rF / rm: unknown option -- F Try `rm --help' for more information.

    $

  • (cs)
    Not an actual genius, mind you, but just a tech support guy who worked at the Apple Store and, therefore, got the prestigious title of Genius™.
    That's not how you spell "pretentious"!
  • Quirkafleeg (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Actually, it would make much more sense if the keyboard sent the letter code. That way, you wouldn't get keyboard mapping issues at all. They would just be told at manufacture time what the mapping was.
    Numbers? Symbols? Modifier keys? Other special keys? The codes may still require some OS-specific translation.

    I for one wouldn't knowingly buy such a pre-defined keyboard, at least not without there being a driver which effectively makes it a normal keyboard. (Yes, I'm using a customised keymap.)

    […] It's not like there's not a CPU in your keyboard anyway, so why not use it to send the real data?
    The real data being key-down and key-up information? Well, yes, it does that quite nicely.

  • Zog (unregistered) in reply to AndrewB

    Ol el G!

  • Brad (unregistered)
    Remy Porter:
    AndrewB:
    I use Dvorak. Seriously.

    Me too.

    I like it. I'm not going to get religious about it, though- the scientific evidence that it's actually superior is rather poor. Any advantages to it are rather minor, at best.

    From what I can tell, the reports of scientific evidence that it's inferior are inferior. I don't think it's significantly superior, just slightly. I converted due to the significantly reduced hand/finger movement. Most programmers don't actually type enough to worry about problems, but over a lifetime, I'm sure it helps.

  • USitas = American nationalism syndrome (unregistered) in reply to David
    David:
    USitas = American nationalism syndrome:
    Don't be stupid. BSDs and Sun and SGI etc. have also done that. And they looked great, too.

    Valid point, but those are niche / specialty devices which were never intended to reach a mass audience (and haven't). Apple on the other hand developed a machine that your grandmother can turn on and use out of the box (as long as her name isn't Devorak at least). Then they sold millions of them to people at all levels of computer skill in a vast array of industries.

    Now that's impressive!

    Catering mass audience isn't exactly impressive, Ronald.

  • tame (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Not an actual genius, mind you, but just a tech support guy who worked at the Apple Store and, therefore, got the prestigious title of Genius™.
    That's not how you spell "pretentious"!
    Genius™

    Added redundant text here to appease the annoying spam filter.

  • FIA (unregistered) in reply to USitas = American nationalism syndrome

    [snip]

    USitas = American nationalism syndrome:
    Guest:
    But [OSX is] not UNIX.. it's based off of BSD, close to UNIX but it's no SYS V.. it's a varient yes, just like AIX or BSDi, but not UNIX
    BSD is Unix, you burke!

    To be fair, so is OSX.

    "sausage egg and chips", is this not SPAM enough for you?

  • (cs)

    I have seen Mr. Internet on a few mailing lists. These are public support lists for some open source software. Some n00b sends an email and thinks that he is in contact with the helpdesk of a company. He gets swamped by tens of very helpful users. And then he gets other people's problems. Mr. Internet starts mailing the well known "unsubscribe" mails.

    After a year or so, Mr. Internet comes back, very angry because his email (with footer from his company, and all his stupid rants) is duplicated all over the internet.

    Standard answer:

    1. Find out who the owner of the website is where you saw your name.
    2. Contact them.
    3. Bugger off.

    Sometimes it actually works if you contact the person responsible for a website to get your data removed. For example there are some very nice forum moderators out there who will do that if you ask nice.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to USitas = American nationalism syndrome
    USitas = American nationalism syndrome:
    Catering mass audience isn't exactly impressive, Ronald.

    If you just enjoy tinkering with technology, or if you feel that it makes you "special" to have a mastery over something that the general public does not (unfortunately this condescending attitude describes many of the developers I've had to fire over the years) than you're welcome to setup a little workspace in your mother's basement and tinker away.

    But if you want to have a successful career in the IT industry than you'd better figure out how to connect with your users and make the technology accessible to them because they will be writing your paycheck.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to paulm
    paulm:
    I usually find it's second. Off the top of my head from when I last reinstalled windows:
    1. Set location to UK
    2. Change keyboard to UK (can't it guess? I've already said I'm in the UK!)
    3. Timezone - London/GB - Hello! In the UK! I don't want my clock set to GMT-8!

    Come on! I've said I'm in the UK! Can't it guess the next two settings based on that?

    Not necessarily. I could certainly imagine a French-speaking person living in the U.S. who would want a French keyboard but a U.S. time zone, etc.

    While I can see it's a pain to have to set multiple things, it would be far worse if the computer just guessed what you wanted and provided no easy way to override that. Like, say, MS Word automatic formatting.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Dear Mr User:

    If you insist, we can remove your name from the Internet.

    But understand that if we do this, you will immediately cease to exist. The Internet is the focus of all reality, and if you are not listed there, you cannot exist anywhere.

    We removed President Stover from the Internet last year after he imposed a tax on email and now everyone thinks that Mr Obama immediately followed Mr Bush, and of course the tax is forgotton.

    Please advise on how we should proceed.

    Sincerely,

    Internet Tech Support Team

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