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Optimus Keyboard Pre-Orders In Mere Hours
godzillopiteco sends timely word that Art. Lebedev Studio is finally going to accept pre-orders for the Optimus Maximus Keyboard — in just under 11 hours at the time this story posts, according to the countdown timer on the site. (Late last year we were primed to pre-order in December 2006.) Read the project's blog for some recent developments.
When I first saw the picture of it, I thought that all of the buttons had the icons/letters painted on... and I thought to myself dang... you know what would be cool? If each key had its own display...
Then I kept reading. I will definitely be getting myself one of these!
As the car industry has known for years those are both very valid reasons!
Look at the import tuner market... non-functional body kits, huge spoilers on front wheel drive cars, 'carbon fibre' overlays for regular steel hoods, etc etc etc.
Supplying expensive equipment for the gullible is a very profitable business! Just ask the audiophiles! ;) *ducks*
Imagine some unscrupulous person coding something that updates your keyboard to bombard you with direct marketing, using the keys like a limited dot matrix.. or indeed, if the keys mapped fast enough, you could create cool music pulse effects etc. I must admit, I'd like on of these.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
The phantom was just another games console.
People actually want to do this, but the only thing stopping them is technology.
I guess at some point or other we have cursed keyboards for having fixed symbols and wished for something better, I remember the cards you used to place above your Fn keys for word processing and graphics programs, we all get freaked out remembering the keys to games and I would love to see my keys change fonts to match what I am typing.
This keyboard will give you all that, its not just another console - its new.
Having said all that, you can probably currently just keep a few customised boards and switch as needed for less than the current expected price.
liqbase
What I want is a USB Keyboard extension that is maybe twice as large as the number pad and consists of buttons that can be labelled individually. Then I'd like to be able to assign a sequence of key presses/characters to every one of these keys.
/mu. I don't need no fancy displays, I just want more keys!
I want to be able to press, for example, a key that's labelled instead of typing
where's all that Karma?
I assume you meant "wings" when you wrote "spoilers"*. Anyway, a wing or spoiler on a front wheel drive car is not counter-intuitive. Many racing series use wings on front wheel drive cars (for example, see SCCA's Speed World Challenge touring series, where a number of FWD cars from makes such as Acura and Mazda implement wings). Your assumption is that the wing is there to provide traction via downforce, which is definitely the case, but a wing/spoiler (especially a spoiler) also counteracts lift. The fact that the force is being applied to the rear of the car doesn't neccessarily mean the benefit is only seen by the rear wheels. The front wheels benefit as well, making it a useful addition in a high-speed racing scenario (as opposed to a low-speed racing scenario like autocross). A front splitter/spoiler is usually used in conjunction with the rear wing to help apply force to the front of the car as well as the rear.
That said, the park benches sold as wings to import tuners really are stupid, which was your original point. However "tunerz" wouldn't be buying non-functional cosmetic bits if there weren't functional reasons for the initial look. Tunerz buy aerokits and wings because race cars legitimately use aerokits and wings. The difference is that tunerz will never drive fast enough to see the benefit, and the kits they buy are intentionally exaggerated to emphasize form over function.
* A wing's core function is to generate downforce via negative lift -- it's an upside aerofoil; a spoiler's core function is to reduce upward lift by spoiling the airflow over the car's inefficent aerofoil shape that would otherwise lead to lift via Bernoulli's principle. While a wing may have a spoiling component, and a spoiler may also have a downforce component, the different designs maximize different effects.
At that price, I'd expect to get the Optimus *Prime* keyboard, and it better transform into the leader of the Autobots, too!
You have it. All Optimus models so far are like this: Optimus 101, Optimus 103, Optimus 113.
All of those are prime numbers, and I doubt it's coincidental.
To make the thing more platform-independent, they chose to make it's layout storage (which can't be stripped away quite well) available as USB mass storage, so (in theory) you could use it without any problems in linux, windows, solaris, (insert your favourite os supporting usb storage devices here).
Seeing the SD card slot on the newest pictures leaves me a bit puzzled about it even having this internal layout storage. We'll have to wait and see...
It's surprising that this idea never took off elsewhere. Granted, it would probably have been moderately (but not prohibitively) expensive then, but I'm sure that the cost would have come down. Maybe ACT had patented it, but if that was the reason, why would they sit on it?
I remember first coming across a photo of the Apricot PC keyboard in the late 1980s, six years after its release, and it *still* looked cool (I didn't realise it was that old at the time).
Given the amount of "extended functionality" PC keyboards over the years, it's surprising that this hasn't been done. It might not be as pretty as the Optimus keyboard promises to be, but it would have been a cheap way to add useful (or "cool") functionality, even moreso a few years ago. It seems like this would have been functionality lots of people would have liked at an affordable price, so why did it never appear?
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