I learnt it during a summer internship in about a week, and never looked back to qwerty. This is purely a preference, and I heard both positives (speed) and negatives (fingers don't move as much so causes more rep strain injuries). It def improved my overall typing speed, but caused some grief when using CTRL+ZXCV and also in various games with one hand on keyboard (usually switch back to qwerty for them). You won't have as much problem switching because you already got the motorics skills down, just need to have the new layout in your head. Btw, switching back and forth between layouts takes about a few seconds for my head.

Its funny how a comment that was meant as a joke got flagged as flamebait. Guess my sarcasm and jokes are not ./ friendly :(

Dear Slashdot,

I am very confused. Should I love Apple or hate Apple? Should I feel sorry or angry about Samsung?

I am a simple individual, without many thoughts of my own, and I need guidance. When you say Apple's patent that got them $1 billion from Samsung is a bad thingtm and got invalidated - everyone seem to rejoice. Now you claim EU, which we all thought protected us from all the evils, is suing Samsung. Please please please, just say how we are suppose to feel towards these two behemoth.

Sincerely,
a humble little me.

Could you give a link? I couldn't find it. Thanks!

A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.

Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.

No no, its not about the strikes, its how many results you will get when searching! Goooogle = humongously too many, whereas usually you just need the one!

In the latest news, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are to be outlawed in the new law against piracy.
Promoted by RIAA & MPAA, the bill named Pirates-Copy-Paste (PCP) will help fight piracy by not allowing pirates to create a perfect digital replica of the original. Disabling copy/paste will also teach kids early on that if you create something, it should be fully yours, and not based on works of others...

Just spent an hour on the phone with Verizon, speaking with

Verizon Wireless - Katie (refused to give either last name or her employee ID)
Katie had absolutely no information on the next version releases, nor did she have any way to send request for this to be implemented. She called Motorola support @ 800-734-5870 with me on the line:

@Motorola: Kent, employee #352669 created a case ref # 111217-009859
No information yet except for the models provided, supervisor refused to speak with me on the phone.

Apparently just a run-around, without any info. I'm thinking of switching to another carrier/manufacturer.

There is a similar approach I once heard: Use 4 well-defined icons to encode any 32-bit value. You would only need 256 distinct icons to have a complete coverage. Remembering 4 icons like that is fairly easy. Plus if your application only uses 256 or 65K errors, you can reduce the number of icons to 1-2.

I can see a few alternatives:

* Advertising
    "Windows better than everything..." advertising campaign might be one. Massive consumer bombardment with "Windows 7" ads similar to what they did with Windows 95.

* Hardware
    Microsoft might follow Apple and Oracle, and start making their own hardware. Massively parallel chips geared towards both the vector and regular computations would be one idea.

Alternatively, their own servers (totally not their market segment, plus they will aggravate their relationship with Dell and others, so this is less likely.

* M & A...
    Buying Yahoo? Or better yet - Novel? That would be an interesting development. Novel has very little influence compared to their former glory, yet some of their technology (Moonlight?) might be valuable to MS. So instead of discrediting Mono project, MS might simply jump on it and start offering various open source solutions ... I know I'm daydreaming...

The process of the bill writing seems to me to be very similar with how the Wikipedia articles get started / mature. Wikipedia API was designed specifically to work with the bulk data (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php ) - we can just adapt a similar approach.

(Shameless plug: I was the dev who implemented the original wiki api)