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posted by
mrcoolbp
on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:19AM
from the dagnabbit-stupid-freaking.... dept.
from the dagnabbit-stupid-freaking.... dept.
A 37-year-old Colorado Springs man was cited for discharging a weapon within city limits after shooting his Dell computer 8 times with a 9mm handgun. The police report said that he "was fed up with fighting his computer for the last several months" and shot it in a back alley behind his home. What was not mentioned is exactly why he was so "fed up" with his computer. Could this senseless and violent tragedy have been avoided if his PC were running Linux instead?
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Colorado Man Ends Battle With Computer by Shooting it 8 Times
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Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being
that a belch is more satisfying.
-- Ingmar Bergman
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:45PM
I mean, here we've got something w/ more cache (let alone memory) than I used to have storage space, but the effective / perceived performance is still about what it used to be.
When I got my first copy of Mac OS X running on a 400MHz G3, it felt about the same performance and was like to using my 25MHz 68040 NeXT Cube at home --- what happened to the amazing performance on the new hardware of the Mac OS X Developer's Preview of which people said, ``Runs with an unbelievable crispness.'' and ``Windows just vanish and appear instantly when you click or double-click''?
I tried a Windows 8 tablet, and while it was kind of nice in some ways, the performance wasn't as much of an improvement as I was hoping for, and some Windows interface aspects drove me nuts (if I've written something, and let it stand, it shouldn't be changed when I write another word).
I really wish that there were better choices and better technologies, faster programs and less bloatware. I miss the days of programs such as WriteNow and Altsys Virtuoso.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:39PM
Along those lines, personally I get annoyed at typing in the proprietary Windows World. I'm not sure how the Apple World works in regards to this, but I assume it's similar.
Here's the thing. I was chatting about a character in Vikings the other day and I needed this dude: þ. It's two strokes! Good grief, what's wrong with the Windows World?! In the Windows World I'd need to fire up character map or else visit decodeunicode or somesuch and rely on copypasta to even get that letter. In the FOSS World, all I do is hit compose, t, h, and blam! þ! there it is. Granted, that's three key presses, but good enough.
I can fully understand why somebody would want to blast a windows machine if all she knew was the Windows World. It seems to me that the Windows World is fundamentally anti-human. Now, granted, HairyFeet is here, and I don't yet have a way to pass the HairyFeet Challenge, especially given my OS of choice, Gentoo (and my package manager of choice, Paludis, omg fscking blockers ahoy!). But when I need some weirdass fucking letter, it's right there at my fingertips. Like this one: ⚧. Yes, I actually have the transgender symbol mapped to meta+1. I can also play cards: ♠♥♦♣. And music: ♩♫♭♮, No, I have no idea how that helps me. Pointers! ←→↑↓↖↘↙↗! I can easily type all of these. Usually it's just being pedantic about things like ñ or ä or ð.
(btw, many thanks to the devs behind this site for unicode support, my hat is off to you, and i haven't even gone into hanja or other asian writing systems)
So anyway, you were talking about performance. I'm getting great performance out of XFCE. Heck, my slow-ass laptop is doing great with Enlightenment E17. My only complaint is how long Chromium takes to fire up, but there's always Midori.
(Score: 3, Informative) by quacking duck on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:06PM
You need *three* key presses to get þ on FOSS world? On Mac it's just two (if you're using US Extended keyboard layout): Option + t
;-)
All the major diacritical marks (e.g. é î œ ç ö ò etc) have been accessible for literally decades using two or three keypresses on a standard US keyboard layout, while Windows is still stuck on alt-XXX numpads (admittedly this gives Windows keyboard access to hundreds more exotic characters and symbols via keypad alone, whereas on Mac you'd have to browse through and click in a character palette).
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:10PM
Where is this "compose" key on the keybord? I treid googled and failed to find the info..
I use a logiteck pc keyboard running linux gentoo.
(Score: 2, Informative) by draconx on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:52PM
It has to be enabled in your keymap. Search for compose in the xkeyboard-config man page. You can apply the options with setxkbmap.
For example: setxkbmap -o compose:menu sets it to the menu key.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Tuesday April 28 2015, @09:22PM
And whereis the menu key?
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Thursday April 23 2015, @12:13PM
There was a utility which enabled an emulation of DEC's Compose key for their word processors --- Compose.exe which afforded that sort of capability (had a really cool feature where one could tap and get a scrolling list of all the characters in the current font --- very handy). It was broken in a late Windows 95 beta though.
There are a couple of commercial programs for such, Kovach Computing had one which I registered and last I checked there was Allchars: http://allchars.zwolnet.com/ [zwolnet.com] (which is now opensource).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:38PM
I just hold down Alt Gr and press p. My FOSS needs less keypresses than your FOSS! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @02:51PM
You'll never have a fast "Windows". If you want fast and reliable, you'll have to turn to Linux.