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Mac Book Author David Pogue Interviewed
MacSlash writes "There's an interview over at MacSlash with David Pogue, the New York Times Tech columnist and author of lots of stuff, including the best-selling Mac OS X: The Missing Manual and his brand new Piloting Palm, The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry. The interview deals with subjects like the future of Mac OS X, how Unix programmers are providing some of the best new stuff, and even why Pogue uses Windows to write his books."
For interested non-Mac Slashdot readers, David Pogue was an early champion of Hotline (Mac warez tool of choice) and MP3 before it hit the bigtime. He wrote humorous and interesting stuff for the inside back cover of MacWorld before Andy Inahtko did and some time after John Dvorak. Now he has Pogue press (affiliated with O'Reily Books) and writes for the NYTimes. check www.pogueman.com for his web site.
Am I the only one to notice that the Mac postings on Slashdot are getting hardly any comments? Well, here's my contribution to the cause of getting the apple.slashdot.org site off the ground. Good luck with it.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Apple ditched the ADB protocol a long time ago. The first G3 was the last machine to use this interconnection bus. I don't know what internal protocol is used in current PowerBooks, but I don't think it is ADB(my guess would be USB).
Note that ADB is a Bus protocol, like USB (on many counts, ADB is the ancestor of USB) it defines nothing about the positions of the keys, or what events the device should generate, it simply specifies how devices on the bus communicate.
You are mixing up many things:
I don't know what signal a generated by the keyboards on key presses and releases, are you talking physical signals, or GUI events?
As for the position of control on the keyboard, it is not broken by design, but good design for Macintosh users. You have to understand that the control key is not used a lot in Mac OS, all keyboards shortcuts are done with the clover/apple (and contextual menus) key, and special characters accessed with the alt key, so it makes sense to move this key out of the way.
If I contrast this with my Sun keyboard, where half of the key don't work (Props, Find, Help, PrintScreen, Scroll-Lock. the volume and contrast keys) I find it difficult to blame Apple.
Honnestly a Unix user can use a Mac keyboard (I'm doing it), it simply requires a little time to get used to. Try switching all the time from the Swiss-French Keyboard to the US keyboard - and the Mac mapping for accents characters and the Sun mapping, that's a real challenge!
The Mac laptops still use ADB for their internal keyboard and touchpad:
luser@puter:~$ dmesg | grep -i adb
--
adb: starting probe task...
adb devices: [2]: 2 c3 [3]: 3 1 [7]: 7 1f
ADB keyboard at 2, handler 1
ADB mouse at 3, handler set to 4 (trackpad)
adb: finished probe task...
This in a recent iBook.
The Caps-lock key on the keyboard physically sends only one event per keypress. I.E. the toggle action is built in to the keyboard rather than being handled in the protocol or drivers. Furthermore the event gets sent on the downstroke the first time, but on the upstroke when Caps-lock is released -- so there's not even a reasonable way to emulate Control-key behavior. This issue gets rehashed on debian-powerpc-user about every month.
This "flaw" really only makes a difference if you're an Emacs person. I prefer Vim personally. *ducks*
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I've used it a couple of times, too, as I'm not all that good with cli stuff yet. He's got some simple directions in there for that, too.
Overall, I'd recommend it; it's both well-written and it covers most of the basic bases. It's worth the $25, especially if you have relative newcomers who are trying to get up to speed.