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Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel"
CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."
Seriously? A joke article on slashdot, on a regular news day..
Personally, I thought it was a bit of a waste of space but its "The Onion" what else could is be?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
However, on a more serious note, it's just a matter of time before the keyboard and mouse go away. Perhaps it isn't going to happen quite as soon as some people predict, but eventually with gestural control and the ever-improving implication of voice recognition technology, there just won't be a need for direct, physical input.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure I'm not alone in not looking forward to being surrounded by an office full people jabbering at their computers, so speech recognition, even if it ever gets to a level of accuracy that makes is speed-competitive with a keyboard, will still not be suitable for a lot of working environments. And I'm not all that convinced that is is improving very quickly - current products seem to need a lot less training than those of 10 years ago, but the best you can get out of them doesn't seem much better than what could be achieved back then. Gesture recognition won't stand on it's own as an input medium, although I can see it being more useful in the forseeable future than speech recognition. Personally I see direct physical interfaces persisting right up until we can have a wireless brain interface to take over.
Oh no... it's the future.
I'm sure this being on the front page of /. has nothing to do with the Macworld Expo keynote that takes place in a matter of hours...
Try writing and formatting a 20-page brief, 150-page thesis, or a thousand 2-page letters on your cell phone if you need any proof that the full keyboard is here to stay.
Oh, and then, after you finish all that, try to write a speech recognition program without using a keyboard.
This is a story that clearly belongs in idle. It is also, in one dudes opinion, from the top of that pile. So if the category exists, does the cream of it not belong on the front page?
PK
Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
Where do you think that many Slashdot stories originate from? That's right - from other sections, of which Idle is just one. And they can appear on the front page! Wow! -1 to you, for being a humourless plonk.
Having actually read the parent and its parent, I, unlike you, am aware that the claim was that "it's just a matter of time before the keyboard and mouse go away." That means no keyboards at all, and it's preposterous, a few cell-phone novels from the people who grow square watermelons notwithstanding.
Your suggestion that people balked at computers because they did not view them as practical is not backed up in history, nor do you provide any citation to any serious claims of that sort. The computer was originally presented as a business machine that could replace the typewriter. Typewriters had already been popular for nearly 100 years, and were an invention born out of necessity: Business communications during the Industrial Revolution demanded a faster way to create correspondence.
Unless and until another interface is capable of performing all computing tasks at least as efficiently as the keyboard, the keyboard will be commonplace. It may be removed from certain applications, but until a better technology for writing (and formatting, as I pointed out earlier in my call to write those documents on a cell phone) letters and the like comes along, every office PC will have a keyboard.
This is not a troll post. This is 100% insightful. Mod parent up! Idle and The Onion were funny back in like 2003 maybe.