I think one thing people forget about is the fact that at the time the first Pentium 4's came out there was almost no programs that took advantage of the SSE2 multimedia extensions that the Pentium 4 introduced. That meant the major advantage of the Pentium 4 was not usable for some time.
Today, the current generation of multimedia authoring programs, games, illustration programs and CAD/CAM programs does take advantage of SSE2 instructions, and in that case these programs will run well even with the slower Pentium 4's. The current Pentium 4's using the Northwood core are extremely fast because of the generous 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die. I expect these programs to run even faster with the Prescott core CPU's with their 1024 KB L2 cache, which are due in the second half of 2003.
It'll be interesting to see if the Barton core Athlons due this fall will be able to run SSE2 instructions. If it can, the more modern CPU core of the Athlon plus SSE2 support plus 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die will make for one seriously fast CPU.:-)
What is known is that while von Braun did visit Nordhausen, he was never shown the fact the slave laborers there were literally worked to death building V-1's and V-2's there. It is also known that the workmanship was of poor quality, and the documentary said about 40% of the V-2's failed in use.
However, after the US Army pretty carted off most of the contents of the Nordhausen factory to the USA, the V-2 derivatives built in the USA were of much higher quality, and those rockets fired from the White Sands Missile Range did a lot to pave the way for our modern rockets. Indeed, I believe it was in 1948 that a WAC Corporal rocket fitted to the top of a V-2 achieved an amazing altitude of several hundred miles.
While 21" monitors are very nice in display quality, they do have a couple of downsides:
1. A 21" monitor consumes quite a lot of power. They average about 150-170 W draw when running in full power mode. Most larger-screen LCD's consumer about 1/3 to 1/4 of that.
2. A 21" monitor also weights a lot, too. They weight over 70 lbs. in weight on average, which could strain some desk designs. A top-end 19" LCD weights about 13-15 pounds in comparison.
3. A 21" monitor takes up a huge amount of space depth-wise.
Besides, today's 18-19" LCD's at 1280x1024 resolution are getting quite good. For around US$950, you can get top-end NEC and Viewsonic models with very sharp displays and very fast response times (necessary to play games and play back DVD's).
Actually, CARB has for some years required that diesel fuel must have no more than 80 parts per million of sulfur compounds, which is the strictest standard in the world. The so-called clean diesel fuels sold in Europe and Japan have about 300-400 parts per million; Diesel #2 fuel sold in the USA has as much as 2,000 parts per million of sulfur compounds!
When the whole USA switches to low-sulfur diesel fuel, expect a major rise in the sales of modern diesel-powered cars because now we can apply common-rail direct-injection systems (which lowers fuel consumption even further because of more precise fuel delivery) and can use modern particulate traps and catalytic converters (since they won't be corroded by what amounts to sulfuric acid fumes) to reduce emissions to ULEV levels.
While bicycling is great if you have a lot of flat land (like in the South Bay), you can forget about bicycling on the hills of the Bay Area unless your bicycle's derailleur is in really good condition or you have one of these new bikes with auto-shifting gear systems.
If someone comes up with a folding bicycle with an auto-shifting derailleur I'll buy one in a New York minute! Unlike regular bikes folding bikes allow you to travel most transit systems without limitations (e.g., BART limiting bicycle stowage on their trains between Oakland and San Francisco during rush hours).
Only one problem--the Jetta TDI is not sold in California and a number of Northeastern states because the exhaust emissions from the engine don't meet current emission standards.
To meet emission standards will require a new low-sulfur diesel fuel--something we won't get until 2005.:-(
I think the biggest resaon why we don't see that many diesel cars in the USA is the fact the diesel fuel sold in the USA has WAY too much sulfur compounds in the fuel, which is highly-corrosive to the fuel-delivery and exhaust control systems found on European diesel cars.
With the EPA mandate to reduce sulfur compounds to under 80 parts per million in diesel fuel by 2005, this may open the way for highly-efficient diesel cars that will offer almost the same performance as gasoline-fuelled engines but at 35-45% better fuel efficiency. And with little or no sulfur compounds to deal with, we can use common-rail direct-injection systems for extremely precise fuel delivery and modern particulate traps and catalytic converters that will ensure that diesel cars meet the ULEV emissions standard.
Already, a demonstration of how effective a diesel engine can get is the amazing Duramax engine found on current-model GM pickup trucks. The Duramax engine allows a pickup truck to pull 8,000 pound trailers at 18 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency, compared to 9 mpg for the equivalent gasoline engine!
If you are willing to buy a hybrid car, get either the Honda Civic Hybrid or the Toyota Prius.
The nice thing about a hybrid car is that not only do you get extremely low emissions (both cars I mentioned meet the world's toughest standard for gas-powered automobile engines, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Super-Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (SULEV) standard), but you can refuel from any gasoline station and get way over 400 miles between fillups.
Note that the Prius does take some getting used to though. The instrument panel is located on the center of the dashboard, the acceleration and braking on the Prius feels a bit different than a regular car in many ways. Mind you, the Prius has excellent interior room and a surprisingly roomy trunk, not a mean feat with space needed to hold the batteries.
If I remember, ATI's Rage Fury board used two Rage 128 Pro chips on the video card. Problem was, the performance increase wasn't really worth the extra money for the two GPU's on a single card, especially when nVidia introduced the GeForce series of GPU's.
Think about it: the GeForce4 Ti4600 only needs one GPU chip to achieve its amazing 3-D performance; why bother with the engineering and chip cooling hassles of a dual-GPU setup?
If people think Intel has won the CPU war, they've kind of deluding themselves.
Remember, the AthlonXP 2200+ is essentially a shrunk-down CPU core based on the current Palimino core design. That means it still has the same 256 KB of L2 cache. What happens when AMD's new Barton CPU core with the 512 KB L2 cache arrives later this year? I think AMD CPU performance will take a major jump once that happens, and will become competitive with the Intel Northwood-core Pentium 4's with their 512 KB L2 cache.
Is it small wonder why Intel is spending large amounts of money to develop the Prescott core Pentium 4 on the 0.09-micron process and 1024 KB L2 cache? At 1024 KB L2 cache, that's reaching Xeon-class server CPU territory.
Despite what people think about the other parts of an ATI graphics card chipset, you have to admit that ATI almost single-handedly killed off the need for a dedicated decoder card in terms of DVD playback for computers with AGP ports. Their support for both hardware motion compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT) starting with the Rage 128 chipset meant you saved some 35-40% of CPU cycles decoding DVD's compared to an all-software solution using WinDVD or PowerDVD.
And everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon, too. Note that the nVidia's GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti chipsets and the new Matrox Parhelia chipset have at least HWMC and iDCT support for DVD decoding.
I'm not sure if a distributed computing solution is going to work against a machine along the lines of Deep Blue and is descendants.
You must remember Deep Blue is computer running several thousand processors in massively-parallel fashion to compute chess moves--and all of it closely-coupled to reduce computing times. You try computing chess moves over a distributed network and by the time you get the solution over the distributed network (even if it's the faster Internet2) a Deep Blue class machine would have computed the equivalent of 2-4 moves already.
Actually, there are a few other advantages to running biodiesel fuel:
1. Because of its purity, biodiesel fuel has no issues of sulfur dioxide emissions or particulate emissions. That means with a relatively low-cost catalytic converter a biodiesel-powered vehicle could easily meet the current ULEV and possibly even the SULEV standard for exhaust emissions.
2. Diesel engines by nature if properly implemented can actually offer the same power output of a gasoline engine but consume way less fuel for that same output. For example, GM's amazing Duramax engine for the large pickup trucks has easily as much pulling power as their top-end gasoline engine for that truck, but instead of getting 9 mpg pulling a 9,000 lb. trailer you get 18 mpg!!
3. People forget that when Rudolf Diesel first developed this engine design the primary fuel he used was peanut oil, of all things. That means he knew that using oil extracted from any high-carbohydrate plant it could fuel this car.
In short, with the right policy in place we could take huge tracts of farmland here in the USA and grow any high-carbohydrate crop (corn, wheat, sorghum, alfalfa, sugar beets, sugar cane, sunflower, and rice) and turn a large fraction of the production surplus into the distillate needed for biodiesel fuel. Even a diesel fuel with a 30% biodiesel and 70% mineral diesel fuel mix that has sulfur particles reduced to 80 parts per million could result in cars and light trucks getting 35-45% better fuel mileage, given diesel's natural efficiency.
I wouldn't say not serious, but let's just say the base design of the flat-panel iMacs remind me too much of the type of furniture you get at an IKEA store (someone once called the new iMac iKEA), and I tend to agree).
I was hoping that the base of the new iMac would be more squarish in design so it better blends in on a standard office desk.
Basicly China and India CAN'T reduce their CO2 exhaust.
But China and India have other VERY serious pollution problems that is not addressed by the Kyoto Protocols.
I have relatives who have visited China in the last few years and they tell me the smokestack and vehicle exhaust pollution problems in Chinese cities make Los Angeles at a Stage II smog alert seem like a minor problem in comparison. And China has never really developed effective means to combat water pollution, with effluents from their major cities going straight out into the rivers and oceans with what amounts to no sewage treatment.
Like I said in another message, I won't support the Kyoto Protocol because it does nothing to reduce Third World pollution problems.
The reason why we're finally seeing the Nokia 9290 and the Handspring Treo shipping in the USA is the fact both AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless are doing large-scale rollouts of GSM digital cellular systems here in the USA, and the 9290 and Treo were designed for GSM operation.
Given that AT&T and Cingular are huge cellular companies, that at once provides a large enough user base for these types of advanced cellphones here in the USA. That means the USA could be riding the wave of 3GSM third-generation cellphones almost as fast as folks in Europe and Japan, since everyone will be using roughly the same digital cellular standard.
It might work for continuity purposes (in George Lucas' mind), but frankly, most Star Wars fans prefer Episodes IV-VI to be as unchanged as possible even after Episode III is released. Lucas will be accused to overtinkering with the first Star Wars trilogy, and that won't win him friends among old-time Star Wars fandom, that's to be sure.
It's because HP patented their ink-jet cartridge designs.
However, HP runs the very risk of being sued in a manner similar to the famous U.S. v. United Shoe Corporation case (1941), where the courts ruled that a company cannot use its patents to eliminate competition. It's the same problem that will now pester Rambus with the SDRAM patents.
It's cases like these half-filled ink cartridges that may result pretty soon in a major investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over policies in regards to ink cartridges for inkjet printers.
This may result in companies like Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark being sued for violating the Clayton Antitrust Act due to tying issues (e.g., customer is forced to buy replacement part only from one manufacturer). We may end up seeing all four companies being forced to license inkjet cartridge production to approved third parties, which will drastically reduce the cost of replacement cartridges.
(By the way, in regards to the razors, a number of third parties have been making razor refill blades that fit razors built by both Gillette and Schick for some years.)
Given that a manned trip to Mars will be a multinational mission, we would probably see the following flags planted on that planet once we land:
1. United States 2. European Union 3. Russian Republic 4. Canada 5. Japan 6. United Nations
The first five flags are listed because the countries listed plus the countries of the European Union will provide the technical expertise needed to build the spaceship and the lander systems. The UN flag will be included because this mission will truly be going for all mankind.
I agree with your sentiments despite your pejorative header.:-)
Look, the technology is mostly in place to attempt the so-called Mars Direct mission that has been espoused for a number of years.
We really need to bring back the spirit that brought Apollo to the Moon; imagine the possibility with the right funding that we could have a manned mission to Mars and it will be done in time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence (2016).
Besides the obvious boon of what we'll learn once we get manned missions there, what science we learn developing the spacecraft and landing systems for the Mars Direct mission could have huge benefits here on Earth; after all, the technology developed for the Apollo program is a major reason why I can type this message on Slashdot.org. ^_^
In typing class, you are taught to hold your hands in a certain way, to never cross your hands and to keep them bent at an unnatural angle. Holding your hands in the same position as what typing teachers drill into their students increases the chance that you will do damage.
Now you know why Microsoft developed that split keyboard design for the Natural series of keyboards. What these Microsoft keyboards do is force the wrists back to their natural straight position when you type, which frequently reduces the stresses on the wrist when typing for long periods of time.
They do take some getting used to initially but after typing on a Natural keyboard for a few months, when you type on a regular-layout keyboard the regular units feels very cramped and uncomfortable.
Question: how much do you have to pay to get the Kinesis keyboard you're using? The Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard is usually under US$40 (you can sometimes get the OEM versions at computer shows for just over US$20).
The old IBM 101's had great feel when typing on the keys but the fact you have to angle both wrists to use the keyboard (a big problem with standard layout keyboards in general) makes them not comfortable to use for long periods of time.
I like the Micorsoft Natural keyboards (despite the fact they do take some getting used to initially) because you keep your wrists straight when typing on this keyboard, which means you can type for long periods of time comfortably.
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I think one thing people forget about is the fact that at the time the first Pentium 4's came out there was almost no programs that took advantage of the SSE2 multimedia extensions that the Pentium 4 introduced. That meant the major advantage of the Pentium 4 was not usable for some time.
:-)
Today, the current generation of multimedia authoring programs, games, illustration programs and CAD/CAM programs does take advantage of SSE2 instructions, and in that case these programs will run well even with the slower Pentium 4's. The current Pentium 4's using the Northwood core are extremely fast because of the generous 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die. I expect these programs to run even faster with the Prescott core CPU's with their 1024 KB L2 cache, which are due in the second half of 2003.
It'll be interesting to see if the Barton core Athlons due this fall will be able to run SSE2 instructions. If it can, the more modern CPU core of the Athlon plus SSE2 support plus 512 KB of L2 cache on the CPU die will make for one seriously fast CPU.
What is known is that while von Braun did visit Nordhausen, he was never shown the fact the slave laborers there were literally worked to death building V-1's and V-2's there. It is also known that the workmanship was of poor quality, and the documentary said about 40% of the V-2's failed in use.
However, after the US Army pretty carted off most of the contents of the Nordhausen factory to the USA, the V-2 derivatives built in the USA were of much higher quality, and those rockets fired from the White Sands Missile Range did a lot to pave the way for our modern rockets. Indeed, I believe it was in 1948 that a WAC Corporal rocket fitted to the top of a V-2 achieved an amazing altitude of several hundred miles.
While 21" monitors are very nice in display quality, they do have a couple of downsides:
1. A 21" monitor consumes quite a lot of power. They average about 150-170 W draw when running in full power mode. Most larger-screen LCD's consumer about 1/3 to 1/4 of that.
2. A 21" monitor also weights a lot, too. They weight over 70 lbs. in weight on average, which could strain some desk designs. A top-end 19" LCD weights about 13-15 pounds in comparison.
3. A 21" monitor takes up a huge amount of space depth-wise.
Besides, today's 18-19" LCD's at 1280x1024 resolution are getting quite good. For around US$950, you can get top-end NEC and Viewsonic models with very sharp displays and very fast response times (necessary to play games and play back DVD's).
Actually, CARB has for some years required that diesel fuel must have no more than 80 parts per million of sulfur compounds, which is the strictest standard in the world. The so-called clean diesel fuels sold in Europe and Japan have about 300-400 parts per million; Diesel #2 fuel sold in the USA has as much as 2,000 parts per million of sulfur compounds!
When the whole USA switches to low-sulfur diesel fuel, expect a major rise in the sales of modern diesel-powered cars because now we can apply common-rail direct-injection systems (which lowers fuel consumption even further because of more precise fuel delivery) and can use modern particulate traps and catalytic converters (since they won't be corroded by what amounts to sulfuric acid fumes) to reduce emissions to ULEV levels.
While bicycling is great if you have a lot of flat land (like in the South Bay), you can forget about bicycling on the hills of the Bay Area unless your bicycle's derailleur is in really good condition or you have one of these new bikes with auto-shifting gear systems.
If someone comes up with a folding bicycle with an auto-shifting derailleur I'll buy one in a New York minute! Unlike regular bikes folding bikes allow you to travel most transit systems without limitations (e.g., BART limiting bicycle stowage on their trains between Oakland and San Francisco during rush hours).
Coolfish,
:-(
Only one problem--the Jetta TDI is not sold in California and a number of Northeastern states because the exhaust emissions from the engine don't meet current emission standards.
To meet emission standards will require a new low-sulfur diesel fuel--something we won't get until 2005.
I think the biggest resaon why we don't see that many diesel cars in the USA is the fact the diesel fuel sold in the USA has WAY too much sulfur compounds in the fuel, which is highly-corrosive to the fuel-delivery and exhaust control systems found on European diesel cars.
With the EPA mandate to reduce sulfur compounds to under 80 parts per million in diesel fuel by 2005, this may open the way for highly-efficient diesel cars that will offer almost the same performance as gasoline-fuelled engines but at 35-45% better fuel efficiency. And with little or no sulfur compounds to deal with, we can use common-rail direct-injection systems for extremely precise fuel delivery and modern particulate traps and catalytic converters that will ensure that diesel cars meet the ULEV emissions standard.
Already, a demonstration of how effective a diesel engine can get is the amazing Duramax engine found on current-model GM pickup trucks. The Duramax engine allows a pickup truck to pull 8,000 pound trailers at 18 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency, compared to 9 mpg for the equivalent gasoline engine!
If you are willing to buy a hybrid car, get either the Honda Civic Hybrid or the Toyota Prius.
The nice thing about a hybrid car is that not only do you get extremely low emissions (both cars I mentioned meet the world's toughest standard for gas-powered automobile engines, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Super-Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (SULEV) standard), but you can refuel from any gasoline station and get way over 400 miles between fillups.
Note that the Prius does take some getting used to though. The instrument panel is located on the center of the dashboard, the acceleration and braking on the Prius feels a bit different than a regular car in many ways. Mind you, the Prius has excellent interior room and a surprisingly roomy trunk, not a mean feat with space needed to hold the batteries.
If I remember, ATI's Rage Fury board used two Rage 128 Pro chips on the video card. Problem was, the performance increase wasn't really worth the extra money for the two GPU's on a single card, especially when nVidia introduced the GeForce series of GPU's.
Think about it: the GeForce4 Ti4600 only needs one GPU chip to achieve its amazing 3-D performance; why bother with the engineering and chip cooling hassles of a dual-GPU setup?
If people think Intel has won the CPU war, they've kind of deluding themselves.
Remember, the AthlonXP 2200+ is essentially a shrunk-down CPU core based on the current Palimino core design. That means it still has the same 256 KB of L2 cache. What happens when AMD's new Barton CPU core with the 512 KB L2 cache arrives later this year? I think AMD CPU performance will take a major jump once that happens, and will become competitive with the Intel Northwood-core Pentium 4's with their 512 KB L2 cache.
Is it small wonder why Intel is spending large amounts of money to develop the Prescott core Pentium 4 on the 0.09-micron process and 1024 KB L2 cache? At 1024 KB L2 cache, that's reaching Xeon-class server CPU territory.
Despite what people think about the other parts of an ATI graphics card chipset, you have to admit that ATI almost single-handedly killed off the need for a dedicated decoder card in terms of DVD playback for computers with AGP ports. Their support for both hardware motion compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT) starting with the Rage 128 chipset meant you saved some 35-40% of CPU cycles decoding DVD's compared to an all-software solution using WinDVD or PowerDVD.
And everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon, too. Note that the nVidia's GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti chipsets and the new Matrox Parhelia chipset have at least HWMC and iDCT support for DVD decoding.
I'm not sure if a distributed computing solution is going to work against a machine along the lines of Deep Blue and is descendants.
You must remember Deep Blue is computer running several thousand processors in massively-parallel fashion to compute chess moves--and all of it closely-coupled to reduce computing times. You try computing chess moves over a distributed network and by the time you get the solution over the distributed network (even if it's the faster Internet2) a Deep Blue class machine would have computed the equivalent of 2-4 moves already.
Actually, there are a few other advantages to running biodiesel fuel:
1. Because of its purity, biodiesel fuel has no issues of sulfur dioxide emissions or particulate emissions. That means with a relatively low-cost catalytic converter a biodiesel-powered vehicle could easily meet the current ULEV and possibly even the SULEV standard for exhaust emissions.
2. Diesel engines by nature if properly implemented can actually offer the same power output of a gasoline engine but consume way less fuel for that same output. For example, GM's amazing Duramax engine for the large pickup trucks has easily as much pulling power as their top-end gasoline engine for that truck, but instead of getting 9 mpg pulling a 9,000 lb. trailer you get 18 mpg!!
3. People forget that when Rudolf Diesel first developed this engine design the primary fuel he used was peanut oil, of all things. That means he knew that using oil extracted from any high-carbohydrate plant it could fuel this car.
In short, with the right policy in place we could take huge tracts of farmland here in the USA and grow any high-carbohydrate crop (corn, wheat, sorghum, alfalfa, sugar beets, sugar cane, sunflower, and rice) and turn a large fraction of the production surplus into the distillate needed for biodiesel fuel. Even a diesel fuel with a 30% biodiesel and 70% mineral diesel fuel mix that has sulfur particles reduced to 80 parts per million could result in cars and light trucks getting 35-45% better fuel mileage, given diesel's natural efficiency.
I wouldn't say not serious, but let's just say the base design of the flat-panel iMacs remind me too much of the type of furniture you get at an IKEA store (someone once called the new iMac iKEA), and I tend to agree).
I was hoping that the base of the new iMac would be more squarish in design so it better blends in on a standard office desk.
Basicly China and India CAN'T reduce their CO2 exhaust.
But China and India have other VERY serious pollution problems that is not addressed by the Kyoto Protocols.
I have relatives who have visited China in the last few years and they tell me the smokestack and vehicle exhaust pollution problems in Chinese cities make Los Angeles at a Stage II smog alert seem like a minor problem in comparison. And China has never really developed effective means to combat water pollution, with effluents from their major cities going straight out into the rivers and oceans with what amounts to no sewage treatment.
Like I said in another message, I won't support the Kyoto Protocol because it does nothing to reduce Third World pollution problems.
The reason why we're finally seeing the Nokia 9290 and the Handspring Treo shipping in the USA is the fact both AT&T Wireless and Cingular Wireless are doing large-scale rollouts of GSM digital cellular systems here in the USA, and the 9290 and Treo were designed for GSM operation.
Given that AT&T and Cingular are huge cellular companies, that at once provides a large enough user base for these types of advanced cellphones here in the USA. That means the USA could be riding the wave of 3GSM third-generation cellphones almost as fast as folks in Europe and Japan, since everyone will be using roughly the same digital cellular standard.
I'm not sure if this is even a good idea.
It might work for continuity purposes (in George Lucas' mind), but frankly, most Star Wars fans prefer Episodes IV-VI to be as unchanged as possible even after Episode III is released. Lucas will be accused to overtinkering with the first Star Wars trilogy, and that won't win him friends among old-time Star Wars fandom, that's to be sure.
It's because HP patented their ink-jet cartridge designs.
However, HP runs the very risk of being sued in a manner similar to the famous U.S. v. United Shoe Corporation case (1941), where the courts ruled that a company cannot use its patents to eliminate competition. It's the same problem that will now pester Rambus with the SDRAM patents.
It's cases like these half-filled ink cartridges that may result pretty soon in a major investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over policies in regards to ink cartridges for inkjet printers.
This may result in companies like Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark being sued for violating the Clayton Antitrust Act due to tying issues (e.g., customer is forced to buy replacement part only from one manufacturer). We may end up seeing all four companies being forced to license inkjet cartridge production to approved third parties, which will drastically reduce the cost of replacement cartridges.
(By the way, in regards to the razors, a number of third parties have been making razor refill blades that fit razors built by both Gillette and Schick for some years.)
That does it. No more posting on Slashdot until AFTER I finish my first cup of coffee. :-)
Given that a manned trip to Mars will be a multinational mission, we would probably see the following flags planted on that planet once we land:
1. United States
2. European Union
3. Russian Republic
4. Canada
5. Japan
6. United Nations
The first five flags are listed because the countries listed plus the countries of the European Union will provide the technical expertise needed to build the spaceship and the lander systems. The UN flag will be included because this mission will truly be going for all mankind.
I agree with your sentiments despite your pejorative header. :-)
Look, the technology is mostly in place to attempt the so-called Mars Direct mission that has been espoused for a number of years.
We really need to bring back the spirit that brought Apollo to the Moon; imagine the possibility with the right funding that we could have a manned mission to Mars and it will be done in time to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence (2016).
Besides the obvious boon of what we'll learn once we get manned missions there, what science we learn developing the spacecraft and landing systems for the Mars Direct mission could have huge benefits here on Earth; after all, the technology developed for the Apollo program is a major reason why I can type this message on Slashdot.org. ^_^
In typing class, you are taught to hold your hands in a certain way, to never cross your hands and to keep them bent at an unnatural angle. Holding your hands in the same position as what typing teachers drill into their students increases the chance that you will do damage.
Now you know why Microsoft developed that split keyboard design for the Natural series of keyboards. What these Microsoft keyboards do is force the wrists back to their natural straight position when you type, which frequently reduces the stresses on the wrist when typing for long periods of time.
They do take some getting used to initially but after typing on a Natural keyboard for a few months, when you type on a regular-layout keyboard the regular units feels very cramped and uncomfortable.
Question: how much do you have to pay to get the Kinesis keyboard you're using? The Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard is usually under US$40 (you can sometimes get the OEM versions at computer shows for just over US$20).
The old IBM 101's had great feel when typing on the keys but the fact you have to angle both wrists to use the keyboard (a big problem with standard layout keyboards in general) makes them not comfortable to use for long periods of time.
I like the Micorsoft Natural keyboards (despite the fact they do take some getting used to initially) because you keep your wrists straight when typing on this keyboard, which means you can type for long periods of time comfortably.