Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Rendering, Munich, Clones
How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."
Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"
Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."
Offically official.
Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!
One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"
Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."
The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"
It's time for sco to feel the PAIN!
Only the near-daily security updates.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
No suprise they choose SuSE... SuSE just dominates the market place over there with Mandrake coming in second. Alas, RedHat is largely US based.
--------
Free your mind.
While I'm glad to see M$ go down and lose revenue just as much as anyone else, I really feel that we should be more focused on corporate adaptation of Linux in Germany, instead of trying to win the GNU/M$ battle through government intervention.
Quit linking to bugzilla, you insensitive clod!
sulli
RTFJ.
... the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo ...
IIRC, the Raelians' symbol used to be a Star of David with a Swastika inside. They changed it a few years ago to the swirly thing. Anyone else remember this?
I heard SCO is adding an "M" their name to make it SCOM. This will make it more closely resemble SCUM.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I was looking at the Raelians' website after the Linus story then, after leaving the site my Safari browser unexpectly quit.
Could the Raelians have some secret plan to use a buffer overflow to exploit my computer to attack their critics?
The i began to think, is the Steve Jobs religion just to incompatible with the Raelians? I mean, who needs two god like icons. Steve in his black atire could be the Anti-Raelian, afterall why would he let anyone clone Steve?
must....render....munich....clones
Santa Cruz Unix ..? ...midgets?
Someone help me out with this last letter here!
SCO has MUCH case law on their side, which I will not cite
Gee, there's something new
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
no, I feel the pain for the over 300 dollars deficit in my wallet for such a keyboard.
Seriously though - I would LOVE to try one, but affordability is definitely not one of its good traits. Anybody knows a place where you can rent one for a week? in japan, possibly?
otoh, while not having had any touchstream experience, I can speak from the perspective of a dvorak user - which is the pain of having to resort back to qwerty anywhere else. Not so much a problem for me now, but if you work in IT and needs to troubleshoot people's computers - forget it. (I read stuff like "after you learn dvorak you can revert back to qwerty and be fluent in both" which I am finding out is total bullshit - as much as I like the dvorak layout - switching to qwerty on the fly is not easy)
Not to mention in places such as BIOS and the such, you don't even have the OPTION to configure a dvorak keyboard...
Similar things I predict for touchstream users - you will go to another computer and wave your hand jedi-like and nothing happens and it will cause a ton of frustration. Heck, just imagine going between work and home. Having big trouble affording one, No way in a billion years I can afford two... I will wait for neurological interfaces instead - well, if we are not already batteries / control modules inside the matrix already.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
So, what, that means I just have to think about it and the letters appear?
The excuse is irrelevant... without details, it's just more FUD
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No stock, but one of my best T-shirts was a "Caldera" T-shirt. I'll miss it....
-Derek
you should never reveal your sources.
If only SCO had hired you before all this, they wouldn't have had to sue IBM. And they'd be making boatloads of money licensing their valuable source code.
Here's the Bugzilla text:
;)
===
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Even though the given testcase might be an abusive use of CSS and as of that to
be considered invalid html the browser crashes on loading this page.
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. load the testcase
Actual Results:
crash
Expected Results:
rendered the page - at least somehow
<html>
<body>
<fieldset style="position:fixed;">
<legend class="bblack14">Crash test</legend>
hello world content
</fieldset>
</body>
</html>
==
The bug is fixed in the nightly build.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Does anyone know if it's also fixed in recent nightly builds of FireBird (The Browser Formerly Known As Phoenix)?
hmmm... last time i checked, "all the available documentation" did not include any actual evidence (unless you are now under a sco nda?). all the information you could possibly obtain from novell couldn't help you there... it seems a bit strange that you could arrive at such a conclusion without knowing what sco's "proof" is, no matter how good a lawyer you may be. then again i am no lawyer, so what do i know? - cheers!
Citing case law, which is public (otherwise it'd be sealed, eh?), == selling your friend up the river?
Anyways, it all just smells of FUD. Watch this.
I talked with a few lawyer buddies of mine who work for the firm SCO hired (but are not on the specific case). They say this is a slam dunk - the evidence they have is really quite significant and will stun the community. I will not share the details on the evidence, although you can find it in your newspaper. They said Linux users would definitely have to pay some sort of fee for use.
See, I can play that game too. Except I'm not posting anonymously, so I'm probably not going to come across as credible.
No, they don't generally reveal their sources... But they do generally reveal what they're reporting. "SCO is going to win. Someone told me why. But I can't tell you, or someone might guess who my friend is" is not reporting. It has no substance. It says nothing. Fittingly, it was moderated as a Troll.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I just got my touchstream keyboard today. My typing is a little slower but it's still faster than most peoples typing. I have more mistakes but not that many more, ( and most of them are from the rearamgement of the keys from a normal keyboard, not from touch typing). I really like it already. The gestures are great and not having to move your hand to move your mouse is very nice. It's definately expensive, but it was my graduation to myself. Anyway, I think it's great. As the price for the technology comes down, I imagine everyone will be using this type of thing.
I do security
is incredible. I recently bought one (DVORAK no less) and it's made interacting with my computer a lot more productive.
Also, I don't buy the story about difficulty in going between QWERTY and DVORAK as I do it each day between my home machines and the one I use at work. If there was a problem, it's not that expensive to buy two ($300... for good hardware, it's not a bad price!).
If anyone who reports to me preferred a non-QWERTY keyboard, I'd be happy to purchase one for him/her to use. It's very much akin to someone who is left handed wanting lefty scissors.
To compare the release of a fix for a Mozilla bug in a nightly build of the development trunk to the release of an Explorer patch is an apples and oranges comparison at the least. Post the story when the Mozilla bug fix has been run through a complete test cycle and appears in a stable release. Put another way, if Mozilla had a system designed to drive the fix out to every user including the secretaries and the grandmothers in the nursing home (maybe it has, I don't know), you might have a story if they drove their fix out before Microsoft drives theirs out. To know whether the comparison made today means anything, you'd have to know whether Microsoft has fixed this in their internal nightly builds.
Want logic games?
Try some of the games in Mame (also available for Linux/Unix) such as: Boxy Boy, Chicken Shift, Logic Pro, Logic Pro 2, Phozon, Pushman, and Wise Guy.
Some of these can are real real brain-busters.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
That PortaLogica looks pretty cool to me. Wonder if it runs on my computer...
Doesn't mention any system requirements at all. Maybe it runs on my old C64. They do mention the C64.
That must be it.
Last time I heard, TechTV is owned in part by Paul Allen. Is it just possible that this whole brewhaha is nothing more than a charade designed to get us to say "X-box" all the time? Oh no... it's working. No thanks. I'll keep my $24.99-20%+shipping and spend it on beer or something.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Dude they have now applied slashdot armor to their website. No more getting slashdotted!!
When ever you go there it loads a Flash Intro.
Looks like they're taking this "keep slashdot out" attitude quite seriously!
No, they just moved the servers to the outer space and what you saw was a glitch during the transition.
Jobs? Which jobs?
that's the problem. you can't buy dvorak keyboards anywhere reasonable - and certainly not with the same selection of split boards / tiny boards / wireless boards, etc, so the easiest way is to set the keymapping (this can be done in windows and linux alike - i have no idea about macs, however, though i assume no problems).
this means that you may have to rearrange some keys on the keyboard, but once you start to touchtype you don't need to do even that (besides laptop keys are notoriously easy to break); To me this is the more elegant* way to do things, because while you can map a standard qwarty board to whatever you want, if your board was hardwired dvorak, when you want to type, say, german, you are fsck'd (see below for more details).
* i say elegant because this removes the dependency of keyboard with OS. there is a layer in the keyboard driver / handler / blah that does a mapping of key pressed (0xABC) to a character (alphanumeric / control / whatever, or something in japanese, even). modifying this translation layer is more universal but does have the side-effect of making BIOS etc difficult. Yes even if you had a hardwired dvorak you can translate it to german / whatever with this layer too, but that means you have to make your own table. not fun in unix, and even less fun (is it even possible?) in windows.
anyways - the other downside is that for some input methods, like say japanese / chinese, you can't match a dvorak map to it, so it's still qwerty. however with those languages, dvorak is not designed to be the most suitable anyhow, so i am not complaining that much.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The SCUM are SCAMming us. They don't even own the trade secrets about which they are suing. They just want to SCIM a little money by selling their stock while it is high. Of course, maybe they didn't realize that corporate officers have certain honesty requirements under the law. I hope they enjoy their cushy jail cells with their soul mates from Enron.
Alas, RedHat is largely US based.
Alas, Redhat indeed.
As far as I'm concerned RedHat is not ready for prime time - and WON'T be until:
1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.
2) Their quickstart manual includes a clear description (accessable to neophytes - and keystroke-by-keystroke again) of both
* how to install the system (Of particular interest as of 6.x: Tell 'em how to make sane choices for the size of the partitions.) and
* how to obtain and install security upgrades.
3) Their install documentation includes a step-by-step, keystroke-by-kestroke recipe for going:
* from a blank computer and their CDROMs,
* through an intermediate system installed from the CDROM image
* To the SAME system but with the kernel built from the supplied sources.
4) Their in-depth manual includes a section giving a COMPLETE list of the configuration files twiddled by each of the functions of each of the graphic-interface admin tools. (And don't tell me to read the source or look it up on the net. You're a packager. Package it already.)
5) Their quickstart manual tells me how to adjust the screen parameters. (And DON'T tell me to go figure out X. Give a recipe.)
C'mon, guys! Get a tech writer and assign him/her the task with 2), 3), 4), and 5) as the goals.
(And while we're at it, the Gnome and/or KDE crews really ought to do a desktop tool, on the model of Apples', for tuning the screen, and RedHat should have it in the default menus.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The website is accessible once again. Time to /. BTW, anyone else feel that the only thing the Raelians are missing is the black clothes and the tennis shoes???
i agree. that was the most difficult thing to get used to. I didn't have so much problem because i used the cursor keys (yes yes, not *true* geek, fine).
but in other apps cut/paste etc would fudge one over too (for example ctrl-c / ctrl-v are mapped to ctrl-i and ctrl-. respectively).
You can train yourself to get past it, but not the easiest.
I have been convincing myself to re-learn qwerty by doing "float-typing" (don't know what's you'd call that), i.e. don't give a damn about the homerow, and the thumb-only-hits-space typing methodology that I think is holding everyone back.
The "home-row" would roughly become (from left pinky to right pinky)
a/s, e, r, t, b/space [left-hand]
n/space, h, u, i, o/p [right-hand]
the homerow roughly corresponds to the dvorak homerow, but stuff that has consecutive s and a, or o and p, would require finger shifts. almost like a piano, i guess.
we'll see. that may turn out to be the ultimate solution in the end. or neurological interface
My life in the land of the rising sun.
It also doesn't help with teaching logic or starting up your brain in the morning, after all the usual aim is to minimise either the cost (by using cheaper gates and as few as possible) or the delay (by using faster gates and as few in series as possible) plus you can always make something more complicated whereas there is a 'best' solution (possible a few) using cheaper/faster as the metric.
Also if you want to flesh it out more posting the damn source on your web page would be a good start, "source available on request" just means I won't bother wasting my time...
You get the prize, the first person to mention Paradroid!.. I'll have to check out NightHawk. I honestly think paradroid was *VERY* instrumental to my career path and a LOT of tinkering (both hardware and software) growing up.
meh
Zero force typing is a myth. When you type, whether on a flat surface or a keyboard, your fingers at some point need to change directions (move up/down, etc.). The forces to bring that about either come from your own muscles or from the keyboard.
Normal keyboards are carefully designed to cushion the strike and let you recover energy to make your finger go up again after going down. That's what all those little springs, levers, and rubber pads are for in your keyboard. A flat surface has none of those.
The difference is similar to jumping barefoot on concrete vs. jumping barefoot on a trampoline. Which would you rather do? Keyboards basically give you a carefully designed trampoline for each finger, and that's good.
When I was learning Dvorak, I printed out a Dvorak keyboard layout and had it rest against my monitor and the function keys of my keyboard.
That way, when I _really_ needed to know where a letter was, I would just look at the picture, rather than the keyboard. After a few hours, you stop looking at the paper -- and you don't have to worry about starting the bad habit of looking at the keys on your keyboard.
You can still learn Dvorak on ergonomic keyboards / converted typewriters / etc without having to mash the carefully-designed hardware.
It all goes downhill from first post
well, do they list what other OSes they tried, and all the scores? There's GOT TO BE plenty 0 fun flamebait in that list!
no, BTW, didn't read any german article, thanks, I am only bilingual, english, and bubba.
I worked at Cisco Systems for five years and in my department they had a guy who regular fell asleep in his cubicle. Did he get fired? No, they promoted him and moved him to a different department where, from what I hear, he still falls asleep.
What are Novell's legal actions it refers to in its letter to SCO?
It is obvious that they could revoke all licenses that were entered into with SCO Group which kill all SCO Gruop licensing plans and income! It also by pure design takes the least amount of time to implement.
Is there any other legal optins Novell has besides the obvious ones such as this one above?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
you could be right.
However, RH9 comes with a significant amount of desktop SW out of the box. From OpenOffice.org to a nautilus window that pops up when you insert a blank CD into a burner --and provides the means to burn a new disc from there. From spreadsheets to GIMP, Python to Perl, GNOME to KDE.
From Evolution to Mozilla, and a large quantity of games and screensavers, spreading across 3 CD-ROMs, and a full install of ~5 GB.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Just puts it back at what it cost to pre-order. The pre-order price was $20, and now it's $25, minus 20%...
Not that great a discount, but a good second chance, I suppose.
This is why real browsers such as Opera and Mozilla offer tabbed browsing. Open links in new tabs. When your done just kill the tab and your still on the original page. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm surprised nobody's ever tried a FPS based around the same idea as Paradroid - your character as a "wraith" that takes over other entities within the game, with a puzzle game to determine whether the takeover is successful or not.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It's not a bug, it's a feature! The "crash" input type allows the user to crash the browser. It's very useful and another Microsoft (TM) innovation.
Yeah, gotta love Micrsoft's technique of "embrace and expand". Pretty soon they'll implement
<input type bsod>
and
<input type format_C>
No comment.
The book is an effort to get us all saying "Hacking" and "XBox" together - so the average person-on-the-street will hear "Hacking" along with "XBox" a lot and think "Man, I'd better avoid THAT lest my credit card goes to luxuriously furnishing a remote Siberian crime fortress!".
That's why I bought the book, even though I have no XBox nor plans to buy one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you consider "damn" and "hell" swearing I suggest you tell daddy to not let you use the computer anymore.
Clearly the work "stupid" annoyed some people. I can't understand why, since it was used in the description of a method of scoring, not in the description of a person or the entire product.
In fact in that context stupid and pointless are synonymous, so why have you put them in differnt categories? I used stupid to mean pointless. And I considered it an extreme circumstance - as in it was something I thought was a major flaw in an otherwise good product.
If a the winner of a race was declared the one who took the longest to run it, I would use the word stupid to describe that scoring mechanism.
Similarly, a logic game which awarded more points for longer, more complicated, less efficient solutions is something for which I would also describe the scoring system as stupid.
I honestly think the scoring system described for that game is stupid - ie. pointless and worthless. But only the scoring system, the rest of it seems good and useful to me.
I didn't insult the author of the game at all. I didn't take my frustrations out on them.
I simply criticised one aspect of the game that I think is not just suboptimal but damaging to the rest of the game. And mentioned something about making getting the code more difficult than it needs to be.
I still can't see how it wasn't constructive.
A scoring system which would give a higher score to adding a large number of randomly interconnected gates and then adding a not gate before each output that was wrong; then it would to actually thinking and creating an efficient cricuit seems counter-productive to me.
What don't you like in recent Gnome? I run it with Sawfish, and it's not bad IMHO. I never ran Gnome before though, only KDE some time ago and Windows all the time.
Alternatively try this book
As not all of us can read German, I thought a link to the
English version of the press release on SuSE's website would not go astray.
I use IE and have tabbed windows. Does that make it a real browser now?
Try Avant Browser then please STFU. It's a browser, it lets me view media, and it does its job fine. You Mozilla users are getting real boring with your elitism.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Usage defined meaning, so dilution certainly affects it.
:)
Then again I guess it could be argued that 'damn' the context I used it could mean "the least valuable bit". Or even just plain "damned".
Anyway this is slashdot, informal writing is much more common than formal.
It's a step closer to being a real browser. It's recent improvements in CSS support go a long way towards that end too.
:) I'm not quite sure why people bother copying features from Opera and Mozilla to IE but if it pleases them to do so rather than to just use one of these then I guess it's their time so I don't care. I don't really like the preview image of Avant with the multiple windows inside the main window. To me those kind of programs are annoying. Why would you want a tab that wasn't full-browser? Just curious. :)
Avant looks okay but still to IE'ish for me. Especially with those default XP colors. I assume by looking that you can skin it not to look like a candy factory exploded.
When a product is good I praise it. I choose not to praise products that suck. Is that elitism? Since anyone is free to improve their own product or just switch to the one I recommend it hardly seems so.
If I get bored maybe I'll see if Avant will run on my Linux box. IE6 runs fine but sometimes minor things can make one Windows program run fine while another brain farts.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Don't forget the --proxy=off otherwize you just kill your ISP.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Imagine a FPS related to Paradroid... you are the little "Wraith" flying around trying to free a ship.. you can take over other bots (heck, why not use the same sceme), the logic game would come up overlayed on the 3-d screen, imagine a "3d- chessboard" style view, your "inputs" on your side, theirs on the other side.. and it just jumps into action, you having a very short time to make the lights all your color to "take over" the bot. I think it would work quite well.
meh
Looks like there *IS* a pc (and a heavily modified Linux version) Here:d 90/paradroid90/frames.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/paradroi
meh
Or at least vim does.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I would take a look at freedroid, which is an excellent SDL based clone of paradroid. Very playable and nice!
Check it out, IMHO it is a bit better than nighthawk.
Moritz
Can you imagine how different the geek-world would look if Hitler had had a guru-beard instead of that tiny little mustache that he ruined for the rest of the world?
Last post!
Okay, from what I can gather, those who have one of these keyboards love it, but those who don't either are sceptical of the touch typing or wary of the price. This is what I expected when I submitted this.
By zero force, they mean that no movement is required on the part of the key, you need only touch the area on the touchpad. The only necessary force is that of gravity on your finger, since the sensor can "see" your finger even when it barely touches the pad. It is actually quite easy to use after a while, and the biggest obstacle is keeping the hands from drifting while typing. Using it without some sort of padding to elevate the heals of my hands is both painful and annoying since my hands tend to drift quite a bit otherwise. Touch typing is very possible, if the hands are kept stationary. In fact, I am forced to touch type since I got the Qwerty keyboard and type in dvorak, which most dvorak users will agree is commonplace.
Dvorak... This keyboard remaps its keys in the firmware. I don't use soft-dvorak because the extra keys (read about the programmers pad) would be un-mapped and wrong. I also very frequently revert back to Qwerty with only about 2-3 or sometimes 5 minutes of painful confusion, usually after not typing qwerty for a while. Actually, it is sometimes more painful reverting to mechanical keyboards, even those in dvorak, since my hands get so spoiled by the ZF typing.
Also, using emacs is surprisingly easy with the included gestures. Ctrl-x? easy, thumb and middle finger dragged together. Ctrl-s? thumb and first three fingers dragged together. Et cetera. Those and similar gestures are actually intended for cut, save, etc, but each gesture is mapped to a keystroke, so it can be used anywhere that keystroke is appropriate. Also, using two fingers on the left hand, you move the cursor around. They include a touchstream.el script supposedly used for some extra shortcuts, but I have yet to try that out.
Personally, and obviously, I find the gestures and the ease of typing (easy on the fingers I mean) to far outweigh the $340 price tag ($40 for the tent stand, now included with LP). I do not usually lay down that much money for a gadget, but I had to try it, and as it was frequently mentioned, these things are hard to find for demo. Let's fix this by taking a chance and investing in one (no I do not work for Fingerworks). I would be very willing to let anyone in my area (waco, TX) demo the keyboard. If you are convinced on the gestures, but not on the typing, buy the gesture pad for $150 last I checked.
Great technology, and the price will drop when more people give it a chance.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
This bit of bash is necessary for any Dvorak user.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
Although the transfer of copyright does not have to be recorded, the fact the SCO has been asking Novell to transfer copyright in the last several months implies that they did not receive it in the initial System V agreement. True, this is Novell's side of the story, but when SCO back-tracked and said their lawsuit was about breach of contract not copyright, it only adds strength to Novell's assertion.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No they *must* not. If you've ever played the piano, you'd know that it is possible to play fast and pianissimo. It may be hard for *you*, but it's rather easy for me and probably others.
Say it with me once again: B-A-S-I-C P-H-Y-S-I-C-S!
If object a is moving at a higher rate of speed than object b when it strikes object c, object a will transfer more energy to object c.
In other words, it will hit harder. This isn't rocket science.
I don't doubt that you can train yourself to play extremely lightly on a piano. However, the situation isn't exactly analogous because you play music at a FIXED METER. You're not trying to bang the keys as quickly as you possibly can, which is exactly what you're trying to do with a keyboard. And when you're trying to move your fingers as fast as you possibly can, you're going to bang.
With training it's possible that you can play fast and pianissimo, but you'll NEVER be able to play as fast as you can banging away because "playing fast" and "playing softly" and fundamentally at odds with one another as I described. For this reason you'll NEVER be able to type as fast with a capacitance keyboard as you can with a conventional keyboard.
If you choose to disbelieve in physics I can't help you.
I believe in reality, and reality is that i _own_ such a keyboard.
Reality is further that i _am_ as fast on this keyboard as on any other (not at last thanks to the smart drivers that correct what you type if your hands are slightly off)
Reality is also that i no longer have to take hour-long breaks from typing because my _wrists_dont_hurt_anymore.
I really can live without your basic physics, thanks.
One line response: Biomechanics (esp. that of the hands) is not basic physics.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
Two words: permanent marker
(And a $1.25 keyboard from Goodwill...)
My keys now have 2 letters each, one handwritten.
I believe in reality, and reality is that i _own_ such a keyboard.
Bully for you. I'm not speaking from ignorance though. As I said, I've used capacitance keyboards before. I the keyboard I used was virtually identical in size and shape to a regular keyboard except that it angled slightly. It was intended for insudtrial applications. I used it in conjunctions with a wrist wrest, mouse, and mouse rest. I noticed that:
1) It was difficult to type quickly due to a lack of tactile feedback from the keyboard. On a regular keyboard you know when you have pressed a key by touch, but on a capacitance keyboard you don't thave this feedback. I noticed that I could type at a relatively low speed easily, but when I increased my typing speed typos became much to frequent to be feasible. I didn't mention this before because I believe this problem can probably be overcome by training (I only used the capacitance keyboard for about 2 weeks), plus it's probably an issue unique to high-speed touch typists like myself. I didn't mention this before because it's not an "ergonomic" issue.
2) "Hovering", which other people mentioned. On the keyboard I was using meant that prolonged contact with a particular key meant repitition like this: ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd This means that when you're not actually typing you have you "hover" your hands over the keyboard, which is hard on the wrists. I think someone mentioned this wasn't a problem on your keyboard though I don't know why.
3) Using the capacitance keyboard was hard on my fingers. I actually have fingernails and I noticed they were getting bent and damaged as well as slight bruises on each fingertip after using the capacitance keyboard. After a little while it became slightly painful to use at high speed. It took me a while to realize this because I would naturally slow down my speed because of the pain. After playing around I eventually included tht it just wasn't feasible to type quickly on this kind of keyboard. This is the phenomena that I discussed in earlier posts.
I believe that this last problem was the most serious, which is why I have been focussing on that.
Reality is also that i no longer have to take hour-long breaks from typing because my _wrists_dont_hurt_anymore.
Were you using proper wrist rests on conventional keyboards? I noticed no difference in terms of wrist strain between the capacitance keyboard I was using and a conventional keyboard.
Heh, but you're the kind of guy who touches the glass of his monitor, I'll bet :)
I could never stand to deface my computer that way...
It all goes downhill from first post