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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."
The onion, where it's April 1st year round.
Or does the anchorwoman have a head shaped like an onion?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Maybe next they'll invent some way to dial a phone with just some sort of rotary wheel...
This reminds me of the Mactini on the The Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc
Seriously? A joke article on slashdot, on a regular news day..
1. 45 minutes to type a simple email.
2. The dude that said "I'll buy anything thats shiny made by Apple!"
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
This is a bit "out there", but to be perfectly honest I'd rather use a laptop running VISTA over that silly Macbook Wheel. It will take me more time to type an e-mail on that thing, then it would to send an e-mail on Vista. This is what happens when Steve gets sick, Apple gets desperate for ideas.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
- Yes, iWheel !
Next year's big Apple announcement will be the elimination of keyboards from the MacBook Air. Just touch sensitive pads so that we can make it even THINNER!!!!
And if I got the MacWheel Shuffle, I could NOT show up, and half the office wouldn't notice
You could get a cardboard cutout made of yourself to fool the rest of the office.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Leave it to Apple to reinvent the wheel...
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.
Your comment sucks. You suck. I love you.
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...
Puts me in mind of this recent spoof, by Peter Serafinowicz: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/348881/d4b348a0/de_mactini.html
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.
I look forward to playing UT2020 by waving my hands in the direction I want to turn and shouting 'fire'.
I'm already training for the steady decline toward inferior input interfaces by playing FPSes on the Wii.
the five blade razor...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
with Macbook Wheel
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
The Qwerty Keyboard is actually designed to separate often-used letter-pairs to opposite ends because it dates back to the old mechanical typewriters that used to jam up if you went too fast due to typebars being located beside one another.
There, fixed it for ya.
"Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes." QWERTY
As to why QWERTY is selected for computer keyboards, I can't find the answer. I believe it may partly be due to the popularity of the Selectric typewriter.
.
You can now get ergonomic keyboards that are designed to let you type as fast as you like
To PP:
I can ship you one if you like. Only $299.99 excluding S&H. It has 104 keys, allowing you to use your existing investments to the fullest!
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.
How did you Added your own Sentenced, The actor asked for an aardvark. 16uy89; ?
Sent from my MacBook Wheel.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
This is not a troll post. This is 100% insightful. Mod parent up! Idle and The Onion were funny back in like 2003 maybe.
Computer! rm -rf /var/www/old!
# rm -rf /
#
SHIT!
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
If I wanted to have to wade through The Onion's rubbish disguised as news all the time, I'd be over at Digg. The Onion, while funny, should NEVER be front page news at Slashdot - BECAUSE IT AIN'T NEWS! Seriously, what's next? Lolcats? Come on...
I support the FairTax www.fairtax.org
You could get a cardboard cutout made of yourself to fool the rest of the office.
It'd probably be less painfull if you got it made of cardboard.
Even better, for phones, you coukld have a wheel with the numbers arranged around it. Then to dial *any number*, you just rotate the wheel to the number you want! It would be great, much easier than those stupid pushbuttons.
Apples' latest must have gadget
Thi's seem's to have been written by a per'son who ha's no idea where to put hi's apo'strophe's