Slashdot Mirror
How Many Keys Have You Pressed?
teardrop.ca writes
"A new project created by Jason Hooper involves the counting and displaying of statistical information regarding the number of keys you have pressed since sign-up to this project. A change from the distributed problem solving projects that have been around for awhile. " Finally
a truly frivelous use of distributed computing! It's a bit thin, looks like it
could be easily gamed, but damn it'd be funny if the whole world did this (never mind
the security and privacy issues). I'm curious how many more times some keys
are pressed then others (perhaps this would explain why my spacebars
always seem to break on my laptops :/)
No, it's not available for download yet. Their site says:
Pulse is currently not available for public download. It is in its beta phase and is currently undergoing tests by a group of friends on the internet. This will be the place to download Pulse when it goes public.
(NOTE: An OS/2 port is being considered.)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Wow, I'm amused about how many people replied to this article without actually having read the site. Jay's a good friend of mine, I know he wouldn't log the actual keys. Besides, when you go to the Privacy Policy on the page (Yes, you can visit the mentioned sites! What wonder!), it mentions what Pulse will and won't do:
It is the intent of Pulse to transmit the following information to dolphin.bitdevil.com on a basis whose periodicity is decided by the user through Pulse's configuration menus:
- user's account name as provided by user
- user's password for Project Dolphin as provided by user
- one integer that represents the total number of keys typed since last contact with dolphin.bitdevil.com for the same purpose
- the current time (represented by the number of seconds elapsed since midnight, 1 Jan 1970 UTC), according to the system clock on the user's computer
What it is guaranteed Pulse does not record, collect, or transmit to this server or any other destination:
- which keys the user types, with exception to the analysis of the very last key hit, in order to decide if it is a key that "counts" as a key being hit
- the contents of the user's hard drive or any other attached or internal or external storage device that may hold any type of data
- anything on the user's screen
So, for the benefit of the lazy people who can't be bothered to actually read the important information on a product's website, there you go - the important bits of the privacy policy. Oh, can I get your addresses? I'd like to send you a hard-copy of the link on a big fscking piece of clue-by-four. Jesus.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
I'm sure it is possible. Not easily, but I'm sure it is.
/. croud can find some, post haste ;)
Maybe using DLLs, or whatever. But there's no previously reported complaints via any search engine (tried a bunch of them).
But I'm sure the
That thing is used in some logic textbooks as the NOT symbol, and AppleScript (Macintosh scripting language) uses it at the end of a line to signal that the code continues on the next line (like how a \ is used at the end of a line in shell scripts):
set d to (display dialog "What the hell is this?"
with buttons { "OK", "Cancel" })
set x to button returned of d
In Unicode, it is U+00AC, and is called the not sign and an angled dash in the documentation [PDF].
Why did you mention UK keyboards; is that thing some kind of British symbol that I am unaware of? Or did you mean to type the pound sign and my browser is displaying it wrong? (I see a sideways L-like thing, FYI.)
Liberty in your lifetime
Actually, it is available to some people. Basically, the author's friends. I just started running Pulse today. It probably only occupies something like 1 MHz of CPU time and about 62K of RAM. Whoop-de-shit.
But yeah, it's entirely benign.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
M-E-T-O-O ?
Comeon. You know they just use "me2", or "me 2", or even if they try to spell it out, would just do "me to". I'd have to guess that the slashes in "ASL" are dropped more often than not too out of laziness. I have to agree with you on "lol" though.
Yes! That guy!
In terms of frequency, here are the percentages (out of _The Code Book_, by Simon Singh, page 19):
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
how frequently you press the keys on your keyboard in relation to each other is to just look at your keys. The friction generated by the movements of your fingers against the keys wears away the surface of the keys so that (1) the printed symbols begin to fade away and (2) the surfaces of the keys becomes smoother and smoother.
There's a smooth shiny oval-shaped area about 2/3's the way across my space bar (starting from the left) where I'm evidently accustomed to tapping that particular key. =)