Two fingers for two-dimensional scrolling, horizontally as well as vertically, without any strain from fine-motor pointing.
Three fingers left or right for back and forward navigation.
In the Good Old Days of the Fingerworks keyboard, a host of other gestures for cut, copy, paste, left-button-drag/right-button-drag, double-click (without the additional strain inherent in a quick repeated motion) -- all 100% programmable, not only by what key combination they generated, but by dimensions and speed of the gesture to accommodate different hand sizes and movement patterns.
Glad to see someone's already covered Fingerworks. I'm still sore at Apple, though, for shutting them down and sitting on so much of their gestural vocabulary. My TouchStream keyboard let my wrist RSI heal, and I still miss it (it eventually failed after a number of years). If I could buy another, with support, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I see a lot of people here complaining that "trackpads suck" and "gestures suck" and "tapping sucks", because (apparently) their trackpads suck. I'm totally happy with my Macbook Pro's trackpad, with one push-to-click surface, which I only use for dragging; taps for everything else. But, yes, using the trackpad on an HP laptop was physically painful.
Fingerworks did a remarkable job of getting gestural and zero-force input right. Apple didn't completely ruin it when they bought out the technology. It would take a lot to independently engineer a system that works as well, but if anybody has the resources to do it, it's probably Microsoft.
Perhaps you missed last week's reports of exploding washing machines. Entirely unrelated to the phone-battery problem, of course, but the last thing a large consumer-goods manufacturer needs is another reason for people to post dumb jokes about them on social media...
Well, this would certainly be new take on that popular business practice.
From a game-theory POV, I suppose this is the best move; if you're convinced AI is going to make your "profession" obsolete, position yourself at the forefront of the transition, so you can cash out on your company's success before all your peers lose their jobs.
On the other hand, streaming back video would be greatly simplified. You wouldn't even need to stream it, really -- just display a solid white field. Or, for that matter, just have the user look at a white card, which will faithfully represent the drone's POV in the tiny fraction of a second before the drone, the card, and the user are vaporized.
The technique was pioneered in the late 1990s, but then the US FDA said "please cut it out", and as far as we know everyone did.
So, yes, the future looks bright for this new baby, given that several dozen other beneficiaries of this technique seem to be doing quite well in their teenage years...
You can buy 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 from Apple for I think USD20 each.
You can download El Cap from your Purchased Items list if you've previously "purchased" it; that's what I ended up doing.
As of this moment (10:13 PDT on 22 Sep 2016, two days after Sierra's release), Apple's own page on "older versions of OS X" says, and I quote directly, "The most recent version of OS X is El Capitan (10.11)." If you click on the relevant link, though, you go to the Sierra page. 10.9 or 10.10? It's as though they never existed, at least on this page.
You can apparently download some earlier versions from Apple's developer site if you buy into their developer program. Maybe they're available at the free level, or maybe they aren't available any more at all; if I can dredge up my old developer credentials, I'll look into it.
You can also Google up a bunch of purported download links from non-Apple sites. Please feel free to use one of those if it strikes you as a good idea; none for me, thanks.
When I started using Macs, I was happy to spend hours digging around in printed documentation, Usenet postings, and MacsBug to figure out how to make something work. It was a hobby, and one I enjoyed. Today, I want to spend my time using the machines to do stuff, not trying to find corners that Apple hasn't finished sweeping clean.
I've been trying to get around to installing 10.11 (El Capitan) on my daughter's hand-me-down early-2008 Macbook Pro. (It's been on 10.6 to support some older software.) What with family emergencies, it's taken me a while to get everything cloned onto a new SSD and ready for the upgrade.
Last night, I finally got everything put together, and went off to the App Store to pull down the El Cap upgrade.
Nope.
Since Sierra was released yesterday, El Capitan no longer existed, at least as far as App Store searches were concerned.
"Well," I thought to myself, "I didn't really want to pull Sierra yet, since it's brand-new and unproven. But I guess we could give it a try."
Again, nope. Sierra quite reasonably has dropped support for this eight-plus-year-old machine. It's not an option.
So, not only can I not install the newest OS release on this machine -- I can't even get to the most recent release that IS supported on this machine. It's as though it never existed.
Fortunately, I found a workaround -- I'd "bought" El Cap for another machine, and so it was still available in my "purchased items" on my own App Store account. By using that account, I was able to pull down the full image.
I've gotta tell you, though -- finding out that I'd missed the El Cap availability by a few hours, and that as far as Apple was concerned I could rot on 10.6 forever, did NOT give me warm fuzzies about the company. I've been a Mac user for over 30 years (!), but on days like this, I find that as much embarrassing as anything else.
And besides, even back in the days before mobile phones -- okay, I know many readers here don't believe there was ever such a time, so let's say "back in the days before LTE/4G" -- there were still plenty of deaths caused by drivers who were drunk, or dozing off, or reaching over to "turn the dial" on the "radio".
It's not natural for a human to pay undivided attention to a single task for an extended period, unless that task is directed at an immediate critical need or desire. Even if the task is directed at an immediate critical need or desire (like "not dying in a fiery crash"), it's natural for a human mind to habituate to the stress/motivation, and as a result to become less attentive.
A human is a terrible agent for controlling a high-energy, life-critical process in real time. If you need an adrenaline fix, go bungee-jumping, or take a strut through the bad part of town late at night. Don't make me and mine into NPCs in your GTA LARP.
Reread the summary, please, and think about how much 4K and 8K video you shot during that cross-country hike.
I remember when I could fit days of photos on a 256 megabyte card -- at a couple of hundred kilobytes per photo. Increasing resolution, raw capture, HDR, high-frame-rate video -- there are lots of reasons to want even more than a terabyte. There are quite a few things that I'd love to shoot in 4K at 1000fps or faster. The sensor and readout/storage technology to support that is too expensive right now, but it's only going to get cheaper.
Yes, why are we paying attention to arguments from people who rarely post, instead of turning to the true authorities on vehicle automation: people who spend all day on Slashdot?
So all I need is 3 old GMC vans (one in front and two on the sides) to stop you dead on the road and rob you for all you have.
Unless the human driver cannot override the automatic slow down and stop then that system is pointless and I don't want it in my car.
And this is different from the present in what way, except that the entire incident will be recorded and logged with high-resolution video showing the perpetrators?
Not to mention all the pranks that some kids will do stinging cardboard across the road.
And this is different from the present in what way, except that the entire incident will be recorded and logged with high-resolution video showing the perpetrators?
All the accident avoidance systems should be easily overridden by the driver with a brief kickdown of the accelerator and audio confirmation. This is to avoid somebody panicking and pressing and holding the accelerator rather than the breaks.
I have a feeling that the accidents, injuries and deaths caused by improperly overriding the automated systems would far outnumber those due to the automated systems themselves. Of course, that's just a feeling; the systems in question aren't completed yet, and even when they are, the idea of being "in complete control" is far more important to many drivers than actual safety.
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if you're drunk or stoned.
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if you have a history of vehicular violence (although one fault of our current system is that habitual offenders still physically can get in a vehicle and kill again even after you've taken their license and their car).
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if what you want is to travel from California to Washington, D.C. in 24 hours (which would entail an average speed of 125mph/200kph), even though we all know you're an expert driver who can safely handle speeds far beyond the limits posted by short-sighted legislators and local revenue-seekers.
Your freedom to swing your fist stops at my nose. Your freedom to swing a 3000-pound vehicle should also be subject to reasonable limits.
Sorry for not posting a trigger warning, anonymous snowflake.
I only mentioned my family because it's something I find important and worth protecting. Perhaps you would be more receptive if I said "protect me and my property from other drivers who would initiate force against me through their negligent behind-the-wheel behavior."
...to save me and my family from all the "excellent drivers" who are busy on their phones while speeding down the freeway. Some of them, no doubt, posting diatribes about Big Government taking away their right to maintain complete and perfect control over their vehicle's performance.
Your 'bad choices' might very well lead to an extiction-level event for humanity.
As might yours. More explicitly, failing to explore genetic manipulation now can leave us more vulnerable when we finally draw the unlucky hand of, oh, say, a virus combining high communicability, long latency, and a really nasty punch -- perhaps inducing pediatric cancer in nearly 100% of offspring conceived after parental infection, or causing sudden-onset frontal disinhibition only after you've spent several years carrying the virus and passing it around. Or just causing permanent sterility in 100% of affected children, and capable of remaining virulent for several days after being left on a toy, doorknob, or shopping cart.
[citation needed] -- not that that one throwaway phrase about wolves is especially central to my point, but it looks to me like you're simply wrong, and I imagine you're even more thoroughly wrong about the ages before humans "meddled with nature" enough to make wolves fear us.
I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh.
It seems to work well enough for the human visual system, which takes input from two "cameras" at about 17mm focal length and f/8 (outdoors on a sunny day), separated by about 65mm, and synthesizes it into the equivalent of a single 17mm f/0.25 image path -- not for total light-gathering capacity or resolution, but for depth-of-field control and the ability to "see around" extreme foreground objects.
I don't care about "3D cameras" that take viewmaster-style image pairs. I want the kind of image processing that our brains do. It'll be interesting to see how close Apple comes to getting it right. What I've read so far looks promising.
On the plus side, after you drive under a turning semi-trailer, your almost-dead phone battery is less likely to start a secondary fire and further char your corpse.
Slashdot Mirror
Two fingers for two-dimensional scrolling, horizontally as well as vertically, without any strain from fine-motor pointing.
Three fingers left or right for back and forward navigation.
In the Good Old Days of the Fingerworks keyboard, a host of other gestures for cut, copy, paste, left-button-drag/right-button-drag, double-click (without the additional strain inherent in a quick repeated motion) -- all 100% programmable, not only by what key combination they generated, but by dimensions and speed of the gesture to accommodate different hand sizes and movement patterns.
I really, really miss that keyboard.
Glad to see someone's already covered Fingerworks. I'm still sore at Apple, though, for shutting them down and sitting on so much of their gestural vocabulary. My TouchStream keyboard let my wrist RSI heal, and I still miss it (it eventually failed after a number of years). If I could buy another, with support, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I see a lot of people here complaining that "trackpads suck" and "gestures suck" and "tapping sucks", because (apparently) their trackpads suck. I'm totally happy with my Macbook Pro's trackpad, with one push-to-click surface, which I only use for dragging; taps for everything else. But, yes, using the trackpad on an HP laptop was physically painful.
Fingerworks did a remarkable job of getting gestural and zero-force input right. Apple didn't completely ruin it when they bought out the technology. It would take a lot to independently engineer a system that works as well, but if anybody has the resources to do it, it's probably Microsoft.
Perhaps you missed last week's reports of exploding washing machines. Entirely unrelated to the phone-battery problem, of course, but the last thing a large consumer-goods manufacturer needs is another reason for people to post dumb jokes about them on social media...
I think they're waiting to see some more solid demand shape up in the "exploding headgear" market space.
Well, this would certainly be new take on that popular business practice.
From a game-theory POV, I suppose this is the best move; if you're convinced AI is going to make your "profession" obsolete, position yourself at the forefront of the transition, so you can cash out on your company's success before all your peers lose their jobs.
On the other hand, streaming back video would be greatly simplified. You wouldn't even need to stream it, really -- just display a solid white field. Or, for that matter, just have the user look at a white card, which will faithfully represent the drone's POV in the tiny fraction of a second before the drone, the card, and the user are vaporized.
Okay, this may be the world's first baby, but there are apparently 30-50 teenagers with three parents.
The girl with three biological parents
The technique was pioneered in the late 1990s, but then the US FDA said "please cut it out", and as far as we know everyone did.
So, yes, the future looks bright for this new baby, given that several dozen other beneficiaries of this technique seem to be doing quite well in their teenage years...
my credit rating is around 875
That's quite an achievement, considering that FICO tops out at 850. I guess that means you're in the 100th percentile. Bravo!
Sigh...
You can buy 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 from Apple for I think USD20 each.
You can download El Cap from your Purchased Items list if you've previously "purchased" it; that's what I ended up doing.
As of this moment (10:13 PDT on 22 Sep 2016, two days after Sierra's release), Apple's own page on "older versions of OS X" says, and I quote directly, "The most recent version of OS X is El Capitan (10.11)." If you click on the relevant link, though, you go to the Sierra page. 10.9 or 10.10? It's as though they never existed, at least on this page.
You can apparently download some earlier versions from Apple's developer site if you buy into their developer program. Maybe they're available at the free level, or maybe they aren't available any more at all; if I can dredge up my old developer credentials, I'll look into it.
You can also Google up a bunch of purported download links from non-Apple sites. Please feel free to use one of those if it strikes you as a good idea; none for me, thanks.
When I started using Macs, I was happy to spend hours digging around in printed documentation, Usenet postings, and MacsBug to figure out how to make something work. It was a hobby, and one I enjoyed. Today, I want to spend my time using the machines to do stuff, not trying to find corners that Apple hasn't finished sweeping clean.
I've been trying to get around to installing 10.11 (El Capitan) on my daughter's hand-me-down early-2008 Macbook Pro. (It's been on 10.6 to support some older software.) What with family emergencies, it's taken me a while to get everything cloned onto a new SSD and ready for the upgrade.
Last night, I finally got everything put together, and went off to the App Store to pull down the El Cap upgrade.
Nope.
Since Sierra was released yesterday, El Capitan no longer existed, at least as far as App Store searches were concerned.
"Well," I thought to myself, "I didn't really want to pull Sierra yet, since it's brand-new and unproven. But I guess we could give it a try."
Again, nope. Sierra quite reasonably has dropped support for this eight-plus-year-old machine. It's not an option.
So, not only can I not install the newest OS release on this machine -- I can't even get to the most recent release that IS supported on this machine. It's as though it never existed.
Fortunately, I found a workaround -- I'd "bought" El Cap for another machine, and so it was still available in my "purchased items" on my own App Store account. By using that account, I was able to pull down the full image.
I've gotta tell you, though -- finding out that I'd missed the El Cap availability by a few hours, and that as far as Apple was concerned I could rot on 10.6 forever, did NOT give me warm fuzzies about the company. I've been a Mac user for over 30 years (!), but on days like this, I find that as much embarrassing as anything else.
Ding ding ding.
And besides, even back in the days before mobile phones -- okay, I know many readers here don't believe there was ever such a time, so let's say "back in the days before LTE/4G" -- there were still plenty of deaths caused by drivers who were drunk, or dozing off, or reaching over to "turn the dial" on the "radio".
It's not natural for a human to pay undivided attention to a single task for an extended period, unless that task is directed at an immediate critical need or desire. Even if the task is directed at an immediate critical need or desire (like "not dying in a fiery crash"), it's natural for a human mind to habituate to the stress/motivation, and as a result to become less attentive.
A human is a terrible agent for controlling a high-energy, life-critical process in real time. If you need an adrenaline fix, go bungee-jumping, or take a strut through the bad part of town late at night. Don't make me and mine into NPCs in your GTA LARP.
And now, because I've been running my mouth elsewhere in the thread, I can't apply mod points where they're so richly deserved.
Nope, it says here you're a caterpillar. That's the way it's going to be.
Reread the summary, please, and think about how much 4K and 8K video you shot during that cross-country hike.
I remember when I could fit days of photos on a 256 megabyte card -- at a couple of hundred kilobytes per photo. Increasing resolution, raw capture, HDR, high-frame-rate video -- there are lots of reasons to want even more than a terabyte. There are quite a few things that I'd love to shoot in 4K at 1000fps or faster. The sensor and readout/storage technology to support that is too expensive right now, but it's only going to get cheaper.
Where are you posting from, and why are all the electronics advertisements there several years old?
Yes, why are we paying attention to arguments from people who rarely post, instead of turning to the true authorities on vehicle automation: people who spend all day on Slashdot?
So all I need is 3 old GMC vans (one in front and two on the sides) to stop you dead on the road and rob you for all you have. Unless the human driver cannot override the automatic slow down and stop then that system is pointless and I don't want it in my car.
And this is different from the present in what way, except that the entire incident will be recorded and logged with high-resolution video showing the perpetrators?
Not to mention all the pranks that some kids will do stinging cardboard across the road.
And this is different from the present in what way, except that the entire incident will be recorded and logged with high-resolution video showing the perpetrators?
All the accident avoidance systems should be easily overridden by the driver with a brief kickdown of the accelerator and audio confirmation. This is to avoid somebody panicking and pressing and holding the accelerator rather than the breaks.
I have a feeling that the accidents, injuries and deaths caused by improperly overriding the automated systems would far outnumber those due to the automated systems themselves. Of course, that's just a feeling; the systems in question aren't completed yet, and even when they are, the idea of being "in complete control" is far more important to many drivers than actual safety.
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if you're drunk or stoned.
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if you have a history of vehicular violence (although one fault of our current system is that habitual offenders still physically can get in a vehicle and kill again even after you've taken their license and their car).
You don't get to drive where you want, when you want, if what you want is to travel from California to Washington, D.C. in 24 hours (which would entail an average speed of 125mph/200kph), even though we all know you're an expert driver who can safely handle speeds far beyond the limits posted by short-sighted legislators and local revenue-seekers.
Your freedom to swing your fist stops at my nose. Your freedom to swing a 3000-pound vehicle should also be subject to reasonable limits.
Sorry for not posting a trigger warning, anonymous snowflake.
I only mentioned my family because it's something I find important and worth protecting. Perhaps you would be more receptive if I said "protect me and my property from other drivers who would initiate force against me through their negligent behind-the-wheel behavior."
...to save me and my family from all the "excellent drivers" who are busy on their phones while speeding down the freeway. Some of them, no doubt, posting diatribes about Big Government taking away their right to maintain complete and perfect control over their vehicle's performance.
It requires different techniques. Putting down newspapers under it while housebreaking doesn't work very well, either.
Your 'bad choices' might very well lead to an extiction-level event for humanity.
As might yours. More explicitly, failing to explore genetic manipulation now can leave us more vulnerable when we finally draw the unlucky hand of, oh, say, a virus combining high communicability, long latency, and a really nasty punch -- perhaps inducing pediatric cancer in nearly 100% of offspring conceived after parental infection, or causing sudden-onset frontal disinhibition only after you've spent several years carrying the virus and passing it around. Or just causing permanent sterility in 100% of affected children, and capable of remaining virulent for several days after being left on a toy, doorknob, or shopping cart.
[citation needed] -- not that that one throwaway phrase about wolves is especially central to my point, but it looks to me like you're simply wrong, and I imagine you're even more thoroughly wrong about the ages before humans "meddled with nature" enough to make wolves fear us.
I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh.
It seems to work well enough for the human visual system, which takes input from two "cameras" at about 17mm focal length and f/8 (outdoors on a sunny day), separated by about 65mm, and synthesizes it into the equivalent of a single 17mm f/0.25 image path -- not for total light-gathering capacity or resolution, but for depth-of-field control and the ability to "see around" extreme foreground objects.
I don't care about "3D cameras" that take viewmaster-style image pairs. I want the kind of image processing that our brains do. It'll be interesting to see how close Apple comes to getting it right. What I've read so far looks promising.
On the plus side, after you drive under a turning semi-trailer, your almost-dead phone battery is less likely to start a secondary fire and further char your corpse.