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MacBooks to Feature iPhone's Multi-Touch?
Gadgets Lover writes "According to CrunchGear's 'trusted source' that the upcoming MacBooks which are expected to be released around October will support the iPhone's multi-touch technology built into their touchpads.
The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook's files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that's nothing new. I'm talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen)
On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."
The next MacBooks will also be powered by sunshine, float in mid-air, and cure cancer! Thank you Steve Jobs!
Prediction: Within a year, all Apple products with displays will have multi-touch. Laptops, external monitors, iPods, the whole shebang. Sure, most people won't use it all in the beginning. The UIs we have today aren't set up for it, neither are our office spaces. But Apple will bet the farm and just make is a Standard Feature on the bet that while the demand doesn't exist NOW, it'll appear out of whole cloth once it's so ubiquitous.
They did it w/ USB. They did it with mice.
"Blah blah greasy fingerprints on monitors" Yeah, anyone with half a brain can think of 10 reasons why this is dumb. But it's the crazy guy in the back of the auditorium who's going to figure out how to get rich off of it, and in doing so will make the standard transition from 'crazy wacked out goofball' to 'eccentric visionary'.
that truly redefines the highly acclaimed laptop-mile
... the Mactablet? I need a decent tablet, and Apple seems to be lining itself up for the ideal position to release one in. Decent touchpads, thin computers... logical, no?
Could not open
... I multi-touch a MacBook in a Apple Store I get dirty looks from the employees.
I have the last revision of the MacBook Pros that just came out. It's a great little laptop. It wouldn't surprise me too much if they did have multi-touch trackpads in the new Macs. It wouldn't surprise me if it was in mine and could be added with a software update. After all, they've supposed detecting when there are two fingers for a while, how much harder can it be to detect the stretching and squeezing motions? Apple has silently updated things before. For example, the cameras in the latest MacBook Pros are 1.3MP instead of 0.3MP. It's not exposed in software, but it's there.
The 1/2 the thickness thing? Never. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see that. That would be amazing. But I just don't think it's really possible with the MacBooks. Now if you got rid of the hard drive and optical driver, you'd have a better shot... but I'd still peg this as very unlikely.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Adding a few gestures to the multi-touch tackpad seems likely. Another iPhone technology that will undoubtedly appear in future Apple displays (of all kinds, iMac, laptops, and free standing) will be higher pixel densities. Leopard must be complete before such screens can be well used by consumer, so we won't see this before October.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I for one look forward to giving two fingers to the new MacBooks!
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Cool, assuming they eventually integrate this into their displays without breaking the bank.
It recently struck me how large the MBP's trackpad is. It's more than twice the area of the pad on my Dell D600. Multi-touch would be useless on a small trackpad, but the MBP's looks to be large enough to make it practical.
Some people won't try it until there's (1) a task that needs to be done, and (2) the only resource available is the unfamiliar one. It helps if there's a docent who doesn't have a vested interest. If she's visiting Aunt Marge for a week and wants to view some snapshots on her camera, Aunt Marge will walk her through the interface to get the task done without trying to sell her on anything. If this is a positive experience, then she might be interested in fiddling with some Macs at the Apple Store without talking to you or any of the blackshirts hovering around.
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Given that the current touchpads already have limited capabilities to sense the placement of multiple fingertips, Apple could probably implement some of the technology in Leopard and only release it in the final build. It would certainly be a great way to get a lot of free press.
and screen for a long time now. See Lenovo ThinkPad X60 for example.
She just plain doesn't want to switch, and there's no rational basis for her decision. As you've pointed out, at this point in time she is looking more for convenient rationalizations for not switching, "leaning curve" being one of the great excuses.
This is a common thing among people. They'd rather cling to outmoded ideas or irrational opinions to which they're already married because switching would be admitting they're "wrong," a terrifying prospect in modern day society, as the smallest admission of imperfection is blood in the water for the egotistical social sharks that populate our wars.
Basically, don't hold out much hope for her ever switching, as now that ego is involved she's incredibly unlikely to make any concessions.
I personally think that the next iPod will be rougly half the size of the ones we see today. After all, the next step for Apple is to make the scroll wheel obsolete by integrating all the necessities into the screen.
I think it's unlikely for Apple to release an iPod with a screen as big as the iPhone, simply because there is no need for so much information on a simple music player.
Full Tilt
As subject says. Once she sees your lack of issues etc, she will come around. The form factor is just so much sexier than a typical PC that also will appeal to a female. good luck!
I have a late 2006 Macbook with the Core Due (should have waited for the Core 2, oh well) and a Core 2 Duo iMac. Love them both. The Macbook has a scroll feature I just can't live without. Use one finger on the mouse pad and it moves the cursor as normal. Use TWO fingers and you can scroll any windows content vertically/horizontally. Every time I have to use a regular old laptop, I really miss this nice feature. These new features should be pretty nice additions to the Macbook
With that said, they only thing that bugs me about the Macbook I have is how hot the bottom gets. I had to buy a laptop pad which is a pain to have to remember to bring with me. In constrast, my Core 2 iMac is always cool and very silent. Are the newer models of Macbooks cooler so you can comfortably keep them on your lap?
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
so the hotter they get, the more power they generate. and the more power they generate, the longer they run. and the hotter they get, the more power they generate... but what determines when a section will automatically be jettisoned? if the LCD gets a crack in it, will it instantly be disconnected, so the rest isn't compromised?
What is...?
they won't run vista 64 bit.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Synaptics touchpads used on practically all notebook computers already support multi-touch features. These just have to be appropriately configured with software.
For example, using the Xorg drivers and GTK configuration applet gsynaptics, you can set up a touchpad to do different actions based on double-tapping, triple-tapping, scrolling via linear and circular dragging, etc.
So if Apple figures out how to make an intuitive user interface out of touchpad motions, that's pretty cool, and other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly!
My bicyles
Not to undermine your prophecy, but yeah okay we've got that from your previous comment !
Apple had a "Town hall" meeting with all employees on Thursday to kick off this iPhone thing. Finally, we got at least some confirmation that Apple is doing stuff with the macs again as Steve said, "The first leg is the Mac business, which Steve addressed by saying that they have the "best Macs" in the new product pipeline ever right now, and that the stuff coming out in the next year is "off the charts."
So if this is true(hard to believe the half size thing, but..) we should be seeing them soon I would wager. Though I doubt the macbooks would get a feature that their pro bretheren do not have first...
Monstar L
I think it would be great if the new track pads would be based on an LCD multi-touch screen. We could then have a mirror image or a partial image of our LCD monitor on the track pad. This would truly be an innovated change and add endless possibilities to user interface enhancements. They could probably use a smaller version of the iphone screen. Would this work?
Multi-touch or no multi-touch, it is still a touchpad. It amazes me that most laptops are made with the touchpad as the only pointing device. I have a Thinkpad with a TrackPoint pointing stick, and I could never go back to having just a touchpad. I don't care how you dress it up, touchpads are not a good interface.
gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen) On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."
Hopefully they'll be more serviceable, too. Personal best for disassembling a G4 iBook to get to the hard drive? 45 minutes, and that was after doing it three times. The screw count is staggering; one heat shield had TWELVE screws. Most of the screws lack threadlocker (or it isn't strong enough) and the screws are so loose they are almost ready to fall out after 3 years of daily use.
With IBM/Lenovo and Dell laptops (and probably many others), the drive can be accessed with one or two screws and they slide out of the chassis, even on their smallest+thinnest models. Why can't Apple do the same, especially given how Apple continues to supply mostly Toshiba drives, which have the highest failure rates of laptop drives? Even setting aside drive-manufacturer failure rates, drives are the most failure-prone components in any computer (well, save video cables and screen hinges, again in Powerbooks and iBooks.) I've never seen an Airport card or memory fail, yet they're the easiest to get to on almost any Apple laptop.
Please help metamoderate.
I am almost sure that the new LED backlit LCD display will the be thinning factor. Apple is rumored buying them in asia.
I worked on mac laptops full time at my last job.
Unless they start using solid state hard drives (which are still pretty thick) and there's some revolutionary breakthrough that allows them to shrink the optical drives even more (9mm thickness in the macbooks vs. [i think] 13 or 14mm in the ibooks/powerbooks) there is *no* way they can make these things less than about an inch thick.
I'd be happy to see it happen though. Then again, the damn things are already hard enough to work on.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
I'm talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen.
There's only one finger gesture I need for the iPhone and I don't even have to make contact with it to accomplish anything.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
I wonder if Apple will move the CPU and associated bridge to the top half of the laptop, so heat vents up and out the top, a la the iMac. That might drop the size by dropping a relatively big fan wheel, but I don't think there can be much more of a drop in thickness while still including an optical drive and all the necessary ports to the outside world.
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
Current Macbooks have multitouch detection. If you place one finger on the trackpad then move around with the other finger it scrolls around webpages.
I would imagine the current limitation is that it can't detection multiple positions, just that there is something else on the pad.
Someone mentioned that people's desks aren't set up right at the moment, and they are right. 95% of situations with current computers aren't set up in a way that a touchscreen would be ergonomically sound. Reaching out in front of you, reaching across you, etc... I think that making the trackpad to be more useful is probably for the best, but screen would be only for occasional use i think.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
same with cars for us geezers-a lot of us anyway. I just detest new cars with electric controlled everything and computer controlled this and that. Mostly because I grew up working on cars (starting in the 50s for me) that were quite simple to work on. I don't want power windows, I want a crank window with a dang VENT window in front of it. I don't want a computer controlled EFI, I want a normal carb with a ten buck rebuild kit. And etc. Ya, I can deal with it now but I think it sucks more than helps. Example, I had a dart, no power anything, all normal old time tech, got around 25 mpg, six passenger. GFs car, a much newer olds, power everything, spaghetti pluming and wiring, gets around 25 MPG, 6 passenger. More than 20 years diff in the tech, not much progress except more complex and way more expensive repairs. Perhaps it is cleaner running, don't know, but something to be said for simple, learning it, get on with your life.
Bottom line is I think people have a luddite threshold for different tech. Up to some point, acceptable, after that point, not. Different for everyone I bet.
I loved what multi-touch does for iPhone multi-media management. But the most difficult thing on the iPhone is typing text. This is less of an issue when the display reaches six inches or so.
The Mac version of the BSoD is the Transparent Multilingual Screen of Doom. Another word for it might be familiar to Linux/*BSD/Solaris/xNIX users: Kernel Panic.
I have only had ONE on any Mac running Mac OS X. That was because I had the buggy version of the WiFi driver (fixed now) and I hit a WiFi access point that was malfunctioning.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The Microsoft Salute is originally known as the Three-finger Salute. Ctrl, Alt, and Delete.
I am betting that the main factor reducing the thickness would be the LED-backlit LCD screens. Sony has had them in their VAIO TX and SZ lines for about a year now and they rock(that was one of the reason I bought a Sony instead of an Apply laptop). The screen is just about 3mm thick and it makes a considerably brighter screen and lighter laptop.
A comparison review of MacBook Pro and Sony VAIO SZ (with lots of pics) Note: This is different from the amazingly awesome superthin and superbright(and superexpensive) OLED screens that Sony is coming out with later this year. Click here for pics
This space for rent.
Several years back, Apple bought up a company that made multitouch keyboards and pads and employed the two professors who made it. It's not just software, the hardware is fundamentally different than single touch.
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http://www.fingerworks.com/
Look under news:
http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopi
I was just thinking on this. I work on macbooks and get to see them apart all the time. Here are some areas where thickness can be improved. Keep in mind when you are at this level, "every little bit helps", so if you can shave off 1/2mm somewhere, it's significant because it adds up to mm's.
The bottom case of the macbook is about 2.5mm thick. The bottom case of the tibook was 0.5 mm thick. Clearly they can do better than 2mm. That case can be beaten with a hammer without breaking it, it's insanely strong polycarbonate. I would bet they cut it to 1mm. The side walls of the case are also that thick and could stand to be thinner to save weight. This would of course make it more prone to damage by dropping, but if you're dropping your laptop, you deserve what you get.
The top case, which houses the keyboard, is quite thick. About 3mm. Because the keys are already pretty shortfall I don't expect a lot of improvement here, but I bet they can shave 1mm off it if they change the design below the keys.
The display is very thick for what it can be. The tibook was another good example of how to make a thin display. I am still surprised I didn't see cracked tibook displays all the time. The "shell" of the display was merely a sheet of metal, it served more as a cover to protect the LCD panel than to actually provide substance and stiffness. Today's LCD panels are very hardy and can serve as their own physical structure. The tibook's entire lid was the size of most LCD panels of the time. So again there is room for improvement. The macbook's panel is not easy to take apart and there are "no serviceable parts" inside so I have not opened one yet, but I suspect both top and bottom of the display can be drastically reduced in thickness.
INSIDE the macbook it's going to be tougher. There are a lot of parts that come right up to the underside of the top case, and it's hard to make a lot of things shorter at once. The optical drive is not made by Apple and is really not up to them, but that will end up being one of the primary factors I'm sure. The hard drive has a little headspace inside. There is a lot of open space on the logic board, so they have room to "sprawl" the parts a bit and cut down on height.
It would not surprise me if Apple went to a smaller hard drive. Right now the existing 2.5" laptop drives are physically a lot larger than they need to be. The higher capacity ones are two platter. It would not be too hard for them to redesign the drives to use only one platter and make them a good 30% thinner. 2.5" drives are up to 200+gb now so you would expect at least 100gb drives of that size, which is enough for most people. Heck, the original MBPs came with a max HD size of 120gb because at that time 120 was the largest commonly available 2.5" HDD. Do not be terribly surprised if the next macbooks come with a solid state HD. That will make them smaller for certain. Lighter too. Apple is well known for hugging the bleeding edge on technology, and this is right up their alley. It's also possible that if memory technology advances fast enough, we might see macbooks that use full height CF cards as solid state HDs.
The optical drive will probably be the hardest to get thinner. Traditional slot load drives pull the disk in, and drop it down to lock it onto the hub ring. If they could reverse this process and raise the hub and optics to meet the disk, they could lose a few mm. I haven't seen anyone try this yet though.
That brings up another issue entirely. Optical disks. Time's up, we need something new. Sure we've made improvements in capacity, from CDs, to DVDs, to DLDVDs, to blueray and such, but the physical size of the disks cannot change and there's not much left to do with the drives. This is another area I expect to see improvement in, industry-wide, in the next few years. It would be much more reasonable to make, for example, SD cards the new standard. We could even start seeing SD ROM cards, that you buy a retail box the size of a pa
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
velcro that cooler pad to the laptop. Can't forget it then.
Just type multitouch into youtube and you will see a lot of products from different companies. Apple is just first in the consumer market (as far as I know).
In response to this story, I had a look at the synaptics driver in Linux.
According to my dmesg output, the touchpad on my HP does indeed have the flag set for "SYN_CAP_MULTIFINGER", which I assume means it can report the positions of multiple touches.
Running "synclient -m 10" however reports a constant "0000000" under the "multi" field.
Anyone know how to properly access the multitouch data provided by the Linux synaptics driver?
is there some reason why it couldn't be the screen? is it really expensive to make a laptop screen a touchscreen?
I don't have a link, but somewhere out there on the web someone figured out how to mod OSX to throw up a windows BSoD when it kernel panics.
It's got fingerprint smudges all over it already!
Its just brilliant of apple to realize that the way the technology is supposed to be used is not how is used, (like hos bright do you have to be, right [but people will deny the evidence of their own senses in the face of everything {like how long did people think the earth was flat?}])
I look forward to being able to USE my flat panel display for the other half of interactivity and have the system recognize it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I imagine for artists and photographers this sort of thing would be amazing too; I played around a bit with the Wacom Cintiq at an Adobe conference recently using Photoshop and it was just incredible. Way too expensive but a hundred times better than using a Wacom tablet. So I'm all for any step in the direction of a MacTablet or touchscreen monitor. I just wish I could order now it instead of the MacBook Pro I just ordered....
They waste alot of space on connections to the outside, many that aren't used. How about using the bluetooth already built in, to pair with a device which has ports which you can buy separately and comes as a separate object, so when not in use it can be stowed away, or (example I never use firewire) it can be cut completely. So a separate unit you plug your usb stuff into, and it transmits the data via bluetooth. Maybe not for say, displays, but I think it may be viable for sound, or usb, or firewire, may need advances in speed though, but it'd be interesting technology (and a bit of fun could be had yoinking your colleagues USB stick via bluetooth :P)
Disclaimer: I am fully aware this idea is badly put forward, but I can't be bothered to rewrite.
Slashdot is not for technology enthusiasts. It's for people who dream of the days when computers were the size of closets, and who want a phone that "just makes calls".
And as long as there are more mothers than mother-fu ... uh, enterprises, Apple's solution is going to stand.
... uh, figs about you or your enterprise requirements.
Apple could give two fu
Start screaming at Dell to make their systems more usable and leave Apple alone.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What about shares in companies that make materials to teach reading comprehension? Sell, right?
Think about it.
:-)
With two, you could track the "upper-left corner" with the first and the "lower-right corner" with the second.
Of course you're then limited to only those points.
A true multi-touch interface is not (but then again, the "two corner" is better than nothing.
Steve Jobs' attachment to one button mice was not a question of $ but it was one of philosophical functionality.
Now that he's doing multi-touch, look for it to be done right.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Here's a link for replacing the kernel panic image in Mac OS X:
A New Screen of Death for Mac OS X
Sapere aude!
I think a lot of people are not understanding where this tech is going. Forget a two finger trackpad (what a retarded 'innovation') In fact forget the trackpad all together. Multi touch displays would not need a trackpad. That is the point - duh !
Thank you for the very bad movie reference. I have managed to almost forget it and you brought it back.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Oh, there was a time (must have been in the 10.2/10.3 days, don't remember exactly) when I had those on a regular basis. I'm the CTO of an advertising agency, and we had about 60 OSX Macs in a homogenous network with a multi-NIC FreeBSD 4 router which spoke AppleTalk for the Macs (lots of OS9-Macs) and TCP/IP for the civilized world. Due to reasons unknown, the AppleTalk daemon (atalkd) tended to slow down to a crawl sometimes, rendering the network almost unusable for the AppleTalk machines. (TCP/IP was unaffected.) Someone would then simply SIGHUP atalkd, which would remove the problems for the OS9 machines, but would panic a good portion of the OSX machines. We eventually threw out atalkd when we bought an XServe, which would run flawlessly.
Funny about that was that all machines were setup from the same image and shared the same configuration, so a software bug should be out, and the problems would occur to different machines each time it happened (around twice a week near the end), be it G3s, G4s, G5s... Interesting heisenbug.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
How about a Mac Mini revision where it's whole top side is a multi-touch tablet? That would be very cool. Ergonomically, it would have to be no more than 1.5cm thick so there'd be no room for an optical drive, hard disk, CPU, etc - yet another opportunity for Apple to display their typical elegant minimalism!
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
MacBooks don't cure cancer. The PS3 does.
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
Macbook touchpad already has HW capability for multitouch but it is not unabled in OSX. Under Linux I using it all the time. I configured it such so that when I touch with 2 finger it is like clicking middle button; 3 finger touch == 3rd button.
I haven't been keeping up on the Apple rumor mill, so I have a question. Is this October update supposed to be for just the ordinary MacBooks or for the MacBook Pro as well? I know a new version of each was released just a couple weeks ago - October seems a bit soon.
The existing touchpads already support multi-touch. The *driver* is what's making the double-tap show up as a right-click, so all they need to do is expose more of the touchpad info to the OS and then it's just a matter of software.
No idea, long time ago. If I had to guess, the dart would have been slightly heavier. It would go 110 for at least an hour or so and not overheat, too!
;)
errr..uhh..I mean, ummm... heard rumors on the internets to that effect...ya,. that's the ticket, *rumors*...
You may get better mileage with all the computer controlled jazz, but I am not so sure it is really cost effective when the vehicles cost thousands more just to buy them (I remember 12 month new car loans being the norm) and repairs are simply staggeringly high compared to old car parts and repair bills, even taking inflation into consideration. I think they could do a lot better by just sticking with developing cleaner fuels rather than trying to make inherently nasty gasoline burn clean. They've had decades and billions of dollars to try and do that, make gasoline burn clean, so now to see the results of all that effort, open any new car's hood and just l@@k! at that dang mess. Just look at all that crap! Beyond ridiculous, IMO.
They did two relatively cheap things that did the most to clean up driving, get the lead out, and put in PCV valves. That's about it, both make sense and are cheap. the rest..meh...waste of time, all that effort should have gone into replacing gasoline a long time ago, eespecially after the serious OPEC embargo wakeup call.
And I have been consistent! for 30 long loney and frustrating years I have been telling people to switch to the alternatives, for health, environmental, economic and political reasons! I feel *vindicated* looking at the headlines recently.
Speaking of which, cleaner and maybe cheaper fuels, I ran that jatropha tree biodiesel idea (from that article I put up at technocrat), by joe boss here and he is juiced on it, probably because he just found out one of his old good farmer buddies is doing a canola/rapeseed biodiesel farm project this season, his crop is in the ground already for it. When you got to buy diesel by the multi thousand gallon tanker lots, anything looks better than being stuck on a price structure you have no clue what the price will be next time you need some more.
Anyway, I have been tasked to find out if it is feasible in our climate or not, get some prices, etc. We'll see how it works out, we may be just a tad too far north for that particular tree though.
So, because some people can't use a technology, nobody should be able to?
Lots of people can't eat corn, maybe we should ban everything with corn in it too? And nuts. With the war, how many people are missing an arm? Best not make cars with stick-shifts...
I'm not saying ignore people with disabilities (many of my friends have serious disabilities), but you can't make the world one-size fits all. And, as much as blind people might not enjoy the new iPhone, deaf people may enjoy being able to send email, pictures, and videos from a pocket-sized device.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
USB was going nowhere until the iMac came out with only a USB connection for mouse/keyboard/floppy. I don't even remember any x86 motherboards where the USB wasn't just some random jumpers and an optional cable that had the regular connectors on an expanstion slot cover (so you had to give-up a PCI/AGP/ISA expansion slot to use the 'on-board' USB. Apple made USB and the mouse prominent technologies for consumer personal computers, and now they appear to be trying to repeat that for multi-touch, which was invented by other people, just like USB and mice.
I believe the case on the Macbook is extra thick because the iBooks flex too much when you move them around, eventually cracking the motherboard. I went through three motherboards in my iBook before apple replaced it with a Macbook, and Apple employees told me that the solution is to always use two hands when you carry the thing around. Which is really not acceptable for a portable computer, hence the iBook case was done away with while the Powerbook case was retained.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
What drove adoption of USB by PC makers wasn't the fact that it was available for the iMac, but the eventual availability of USB devices. The iMac represented too small a market to account for the effort device makers made to support USB.
I can. 3rd button is the right click.
Ya, perhaps too far north for us, we are in north georgia, close to tennessee line. Perhaps they have a slightly more cold hardy one, I'm looking into to it. Closest I have seen is claims that it can tolerate "some" frost.. As to the labor intensive, if I can pick a gallon of diesel every 5-10 minutes that's a dang good pay rate for me. At 30% yield by weight that's picking only three gallons with marble sized fruit-I think I can do that. I already *do* drudge farm work stuff. heh. If we can even cut the diesel bill in half plus guarantee a supply of *some* fuel, it will be worth it just for the economic future proofing peace of mind aspect, similar to how we run some solar now, use firewood as the primary heat, and grow a lot of our own food and have generator backups for power. Energy is important stuff, producing onsite is a huge technological and economic benefit. Trucks and tractors are thirsty guys and that's how we get our work done. If diesel goes up 50% and the rate we get for cluckeraptors and beefers doesn't..well? That and propane costs and electricity costs, etc are out of our hands, as is the wholesale costs that the big packer cartels will give the farmers. I mean, we slide just a scosh away from losing money all the time because of the food cartels and the middleman profits that *never* make it to the farmer. Example, if joe end consumer could pay just 5 cents-a nickle, literally 5 more pennies, that's it,-more for an entire small fryer at the store it would double our net. Double it. Margins are that thin right now. But we can't insist on that, the packers and the middleman skimmers/traders set the prices, and the government has made it near impossible to buck the big packers in any meaningful way. It takes multi millions of dollars and a ton of baksheesh to setup a packing house and get distribution contracts, it's near impossible, and just like the telcos, the big places have been buying each other up, making it worse and worse and worse for the farmers, we have less wholesalers to even think about selling to.
there's an expression, something about short and curlys...we're sorta stuck.
As to homegrown fuel, we are one geopolitical wildcard away from 100-200 bucks a barrel of crude, or worse than that even, think of it that way.
A lot of other farmers must be thinking similar, I am seeing a ton of interest in the farm mag rags about this subject, farm produced fuel systems. We *know* the system is being setup to bankrupt the farmers to get the land eventually for the huge corporations to own outright, you can smell it coming bigtime, like they did in the great depression version one, rig the economic system, crash it on purpose, pickup the real wealth at pennies on the dollar at the auctions. Lather rinse repeat, legalized mass theft. That's how the bigdogs operate, and they have total greed, and zero pity. If we as the producers of real wealth aren't eternally vigilant, we'll be en-screwed. It's a war on the middle class, the real wealth producers, easy enough to see that right now.
Anyway, I would like something with the homegrown fuel at a bare minimum to at least be able to run one pickup truck and one small tractor, with that, I can personally stay working no matter what else happens, say even as low as ten gallons a week. Might not be much, but in even a collapsed economy that would be enough for me to at least do some market gardening and such like.
When I was growing up I just heard too many horror stories from direct great depression victims, my older relatives, parents, autns, uncles, grand moms and great aunts and uncles-all of them. They *universally* had nothing but contempt for the government and wall street, they all called it some sort of big con. Both sides of my family lost all their holdings, and neither were any big stock market investors. But...the stupid stock market and the banks and government rig the system so the rich guys get even richer, always been that way so who am I to ignore that bit of reality. And I think they could perfectly well do it again. I like to learn from history at little, if possible. So what I know is-modern life takes electricity and transportation energy. If we can get decent backups for the "normal" way of doing that, so much the better.
but not with the *right* mouse button.
Apple bought this company called Fingerworks, they made keyboards also that you could gesture over. You could send in your Apple laptop and they'd send it back with a new keyboard in it, with no moving parts. If your gesture was typing the keyboard would react like a keyboard, but you could also wave your hands over it in various ways without touching it.
Given that Apple notebooks have had multi-touch in the track pads for years now, it could be that they are going to remove the track pad altogether and the same functions will happen by gesturing over the keyboard. They are trying to make stuff smaller right now, look how big the track pad is.
Another option is a notebook where the screen is multi-touch and where the keyboard should be you have another multi-touch screen. When you're doing video editing it could show a specialized keyboard, or show DJ turntables, or display any keyboard layout in any language, or show a newly updated layout for use with Unicode (give me smart quote buttons). All the stuff that Steve Jobs said about Treo keyboards being stuck one way goes double for a Mac/PC because it is much more general purpose.
It's great on a laptop, where people are closer to the screen by design. I have it on a Fujitsu lifebook, and miss not being able to do simple functions like press a button w/ my finger on other laptops.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Why stop with just the touchpad?
Use two opposing multitouch screens, instead of a screen opposing a keyboard and mouse.
Then your keyboard can customize to whatever application you want, with whatever customizations you desire.
You can then drag drop in interface modules, such as keyboard, trackpad + as many buttons as you want, number pad, faders and dials, music keyboard, drum machine pads, etc etc etc etc.
And it would be far easier and more durable than a keyboard - no key-crumbs, more water resistance, etc.
~!J!
Possibility, but when you need to do tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand birds all at the same time the facilities required get quite extensive. Joeboss has looked into it, it's millions of bucks, so that's out. Much smaller scale in this state they make it pretty hard, else I'd be doing it already. Just not cost effective until you are quite large, then it costs the big bucks to get established. Other states differ, the regs are all screwy and mixed up really.
Basically, for just me, I am trying to diversify as much as possible and reduce expenses at the same time. that's growing more of our own food and putting it up (put in a lot more fruit trees and bushes and vines this year for example, and made the garden 50% larger), getting another freezer so we can pack a whole beef in there for *us*, getting more solar, try to establish the biofuel, etc. Huh, got some baby quail today! Man are they *teeny tiny*. It all adds up, a plate of chow is a plate of chow eventually.
It's amazing to me that so many of even the already rich guys on wall street etc can't see how bogus the whole system is. The really rich guys won't let them have anything either, other than to suck up the blame when it crashes. Oh well, this is the internet age, people can read, learn some from history, and adjust their reality or not. If it gets to heads on pikes I'll stand back and watch, but don't have a lot of desire myself, I think their karma and being 100% tied to the just in time artificial scam economy system will be punishment enough.
Her reasoning is she'd have to learn a whole new way of navigating through an os and all that. She says this while she's bopping around on her Vista laptop. Yeah.
And ? Vista's no bigger a change than other versions of Windows have been in the last decade, or OS X has undergone from 10.0 to 10.4 (and smaller than, say MacOS Classic to OS X, or NeXTSTEP to OS X). The fundamental UI elements and procedures are still the same as Windows 95.