When putting the pointing device on the Left-side of the keyboard, you lose the easy utility of modifier keys (Ctrl/Alt) on some keyboards when doing modified mouse button chords. Think: Ctrl-Button2 in an xterm.
I realize that some (full-size) keboards have redundant Ctrl/Alt/Windows keys on the right side, but that's not a guarantee. It does improve posture, since you're not sitting with your arms bent to the left all day long, and your wrist in a strange position to compensate.
I blame the whole thing on IBM producing Typist/Secretarial keyboards instead of Engineer/Computer keyboards like on the PC/XT's original 83-key keyboard, when Ctrl was to the left ot he A key, where God intended it to be.
The only place for Caps Lock on a modern keyboard is on the underside, in my opinion, to keep it out of harm's way. The ONLY reason Caps Lock was implemented ABOVE the left shift was because historially on old mechanical typewriters, it was a mechanical latching key, and it was simplest to implement directly above (and tied to) one of the shift keys. My mother's old Smith Corona typewriter has a latching Shift Lock key, and that only got used when typing up card catalog entries, or when making a long line of underscores, since it took oomph to hold down the shift key, and your pinky got tired after a few seconds.
They say: "Enter" key is big in size and nearly square in form.
I say: It had better be, since it is in a completely different zipcode from the home row keys. What's up with the extra 2 keys on the home row between JKL; and Enter? It's impossible to hit their Enter key without moving your right hand off the home row.
Industrial designers are like Architects: they design something idiotic, then let an Engineer figure out how to make it work in a useful way.
If all keys are visually remappable, then they really need fewer keys. I'm still disappointed at all the junk (arrow cluster, numeric pad) on the right side of the home row between me and my mouse.
If this came in a "Happy Hacker" footprint, then they may get my attention. Right now, it's too many colorful, expensive, redundant, unnecessary buttons.
What I've found pleasant in the meantime is a laptop-style keyboard with a marble-mouse beside it. From the mouse, I can reach the PgUp/PgDn keys on the small-footprint keyboard with my thumb, like getting two extra buttons for free.
I find it more likely that Apple will define their own computer architecture using Intel chips... Let's not forget that much of PC legacy crap is software as well as hardware.
Gosh, I sure hope so. Jettison all of the legacy crap, and let's get on with our collective lives. Then, the next article will be a rumor about Microsoft porting Windows to it.
More importantly, since I won't be able to (cheaply) make a back-up copy of this single-disc behemoth, I can't let my friend borrow season 1 while I watch season 4.
And, for a trilogy, even LOTR, I need to get off my butt and stretch my legs about every 2 hours, which is where current double-layer DVDs get me.
That's a perfect opportunity to change out the discs.
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
Bill Gates, no matter how much money he gives away, even if he donated 99.9% of his net worth to charity, would still not ever worry about whether he's going to be able to buy food that day.
I'm sure Bill doesn't even think about the buying of food... he just eats--anything and anywhere he wants.
A person hovering near the poverty line has a genuine *sacrifice* to make regarding charity, food, medicine, shelter, etc.
Not all of your hours are billable hours. Find something you like to do, and don't pretend you're losing money by spending time doing it.
The above argument is when people who stopped at ECO101 try to make opportunity cost statements about living life. When I die, I'm sure I won't be wishing I'd spent more time billing people for the various uses of my hours, but instead wishing I'd had more fun with those hours in general.
I have a HTPC. I enjoyed setting it up, and it requires almost no maintenance. From my point of view it is now an "appliance," and I derive great satisfaction from knowing that I've got a mostly commercial-free TV viewing experience that lets me optimize how I spend my time in front of the boob tube.
I've never seen a dialog automatically resize itself.
I have an application, Secure Global Desktop (formerly Tarantella), which resizes a "connection status" dialog and shrinks-to-fit the window around the size of the text being displayed. When it changes from one message to another, the width of the window gets smaller just enough to make the "X" close button sit where the "_" minimize button used to be.
But any window which changes its own size without and explicit request to do so would suffer the same "who moved my cheese" problem, since the window controls are on the edge of the window that will be moving.
The "genie effect" is bad UI design because it makes the "clickable hotspot" for doing something change shape/size and move depending on how you found it.
For instance: on the toolbar, if you start from the left side, and mouse over the growing/shrinking icons, then move *straight up* off the toolbar, you will have left a certain large icon. When it shrinks, you may no longer be directly above that same icon any more, so if you move *straight down* again, you'll land on a different icon.
This is precisely why Apple's "stoplight" maximize/minimize/close buttons appear on the upper-left side of the window title-bar, so if the window resizes while you're getting ready to click one of them, they don't move out from under your feet.
Countelss Windows applications have done this to me, where a dialog box auto-resizes just enough to place the close button where the minimize button used to be. Even Nero used to replace a "Next>" button with a "Close" button in the same spot in their interface, just to make things dicey.
Sure, it's fancy eye-candy, but having deterministic GUI clickable elements I believe is more important.
Every TV show I watch gets filtered through BeyondTV on a HTPC.
I pay handsomly for "Extended Basic" cable just to watch a few television shows. My goal as a consumer is to find a LEGAL method of paying for television episodes on-demand without paying a flat rate for a whole bunch of junk I'll never watch. And, it must be reasonably less than the flat rate itself.
So, for instance, if I pay $50US/mo for "all-you-can-eat" access to TV programming, I'd expect my pay-per-episode costs for the shows I *actually* watch to come in at less than half of that.
As a comparison, I signed up for the Hollywood Video MVP plan, and I can watch as many movies as I can stomach for $10US/mo. I've been watching a *lot* of movies since then, and the relative quality of my entertainment has gone way up.
TV content providers are now competing with web content providers, and with flat-rate movie rental plans (NetFlix, Hollywood MVP, etc.). I can also catch up on shows that I never got a chance to watch, since they are now for rent on DVD.
So, content is working its way into other channels, and I think the "primetime" TV schedule will go the way of the high-end video card: for those who want to pay a lot more to be "early adopters" of content.
There are very few TV shows that one would consider "water cooler" shows, that get talked about in social settings and you'd feel left out not following in a timely manner. Once I can pay a fair price for "timely TV" that doesn't make me feel fleeced, I'm ditching Cable/Sattelite and strictly getting downloadable entertainment.
Perhaps you should look into using Pierce-Nez instead. You'll never drop your glasses again. Or, if you do, you'll have bigger issues than which pins got soldered incorrectly.
Wish is dead, long live Perl::Tk
on
Wish Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
I can't believe I just typed that Subject.
Please don't start a language flamewar. It's just a joke, and a bad one at that.
I hate to be the one to correct myself, but it just seems like yesterday this was announced. I double-checked my own facts, and it was September 2001 that Motorola demonstrated the capability to implement GaAs on SiO2 wafers, for RF, laser, and other purposes.
The fact that silicon and III-V materials do not share common chemical and crystalline properties, as implied by their different positions on the periodic table, is detrimental. The mismatch in their crystalline structure makes the monolithic integration of tiny laser emitters on top of silicon chips, impossible.
I call BS. Last September, Motorola Labs (a part of Motorola, Inc., now Freescale Semiconductor) announced their ability to grow GaAs on top of traditional Si wafers to implement devices like "laser-on-a-chip."
...found that most times I needed the keyboard nearby, too. With my home media computer in the living room, a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) was a must, and she thought the mouse was usable, even kinda "neat."
However, it uses NiMH batteries, and discharges itself almost every other day, so must be re-cradled nightly to avoid going kaput in the middle of the evening. Also, my experience was that the range of the keyboard was as advertised, but the mouse range was lacking.
We settled, instead, for the Versapoint RF keyboard, which has a touchpoint mouse, no third button, no media keys, but works as advertised and the batteries have lasted 6+ months now without needing replacement. That's because it doesn't need to keep "seeking" for a surface across which it is being dragged, and it takes much less smarts to figure out where it's being pointed/nudged.
The Gyration has a higher geek factor, but is more annoying on a daily basis.
The Versapoint is less sexy, but more utilitarian as a living room device.
If the spatial edge detection were saved (highly compressed) as a companion image, and there were a way to describe this feature in EXIF, then manipulation of the captured image in digital cameras would be that much easier.
Imagine: You take a picture of someone/something, and want to cut out just the subject... like chromakey, but with an arbitrary background... the camera saves the spatial boundaries, and all you'd need to do is indicate which "blob" you're interested in preserving.
That would be sweet.
However, for deep-field images where the shadows may not show up (too far away), this is still a little lacking.
My guess is that using 3 CCDs, arranged in a triangle, and figuring out based on image correlation where the foreground/background borders are located, would be better. This would also remove the need for specially timed, artificial light sources.
they have not even looked at what happens to a model of a few-meter wide ribbon in the atmosphere.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was known as "Galloping Girdie." I nominate "Whiplash Willy" for this thing until they can get the atmospheric effects nailed down.
I'm also curious what kind of electrostatic effects will traverse the length of the carbon nanotubes. Space shuttle experiments have demonstrated a lot of potential difference in a significantly smaller conductor tethered out from the orbiter in LEO. This one's much longer, and grounded(?) at one end.
Many thanks to those who have pointed out my deliberate spelling mistakes in my post. Also thanks to those who believe they should be moderated up. Quite curious.
<rant> * Older audiophiles think analog sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up. * Newer audiophiles think digital sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up. * Slashdot posters think they shouldn't loose any points on they're college board exams because that's the way they typed there grammer in blogs and IM when they were growing up. Woot! </rant>
Last week I found a simple speling error in the entry for Rosh Hashanah. After fixing that, I searched for pages with the same word mispelled the same way, and fixed four more.
It really was a brain-dead speling mistake, too, and a simple check presenting a list of possibly mispelled words before confirming a check-in would be a big help.
What would happen if we treated IP protection rights the same way Texas treats a landowner's water rights?
In Texas, almost anyone with a river running through their property, or with groundwater underneath it, is entitled to suck any amount (even all) of the water out of the river (or ground) as they wish, damned be the next person/farm/town downstream, or sharing the same aquifer.
You speak about the "diversion" of wealth. This is exactly what happens with real property (water) here in this state, and nobody wants to mess with it.
Now, if I "divert" all of your potential income from an IP patent, do you have no recourse? What if I "divert" all of your drinking water away from the stream/aquifer on your property?
It seems like currently, corporations have bought themselves much better IP protection laws than the citizens of Texas have with REAL groundwater and aquifer protections.
Making software look like a real piece of hardware is only useful if you normally walk up to your CD player and press its buttons with the backside of your mouse.
They should stick with interfaces which are easy to manipulate with today's common computer input devices, instead of pretending you really had a touch-responsive dataglove on at all times.
"No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better." --Alan Cooper
Two consenting same-sex adults enter a windowless room (no A/C) with a Linux box, smartcard programmer, DVD burner, XBOX mod chip, copy of DeCSS, a DSL connection, a black Sharpie marker, and a copy of LOTR:ROTK.
They exit the room four hours later, flushed and smiling.
Slashdot Mirror
When putting the pointing device on the Left-side of the keyboard, you lose the easy utility of modifier keys (Ctrl/Alt) on some keyboards when doing modified mouse button chords. Think: Ctrl-Button2 in an xterm.
I realize that some (full-size) keboards have redundant Ctrl/Alt/Windows keys on the right side, but that's not a guarantee. It does improve posture, since you're not sitting with your arms bent to the left all day long, and your wrist in a strange position to compensate.
I blame the whole thing on IBM producing Typist/Secretarial keyboards instead of Engineer/Computer keyboards like on the PC/XT's original 83-key keyboard, when Ctrl was to the left ot he A key, where God intended it to be.
The only place for Caps Lock on a modern keyboard is on the underside, in my opinion, to keep it out of harm's way. The ONLY reason Caps Lock was implemented ABOVE the left shift was because historially on old mechanical typewriters, it was a mechanical latching key, and it was simplest to implement directly above (and tied to) one of the shift keys. My mother's old Smith Corona typewriter has a latching Shift Lock key, and that only got used when typing up card catalog entries, or when making a long line of underscores, since it took oomph to hold down the shift key, and your pinky got tired after a few seconds.
They say: "Enter" key is big in size and nearly square in form.
I say: It had better be, since it is in a completely different zipcode from the home row keys. What's up with the extra 2 keys on the home row between JKL; and Enter? It's impossible to hit their Enter key without moving your right hand off the home row.
Industrial designers are like Architects: they design something idiotic, then let an Engineer figure out how to make it work in a useful way.
If all keys are visually remappable, then they really need fewer keys. I'm still disappointed at all the junk (arrow cluster, numeric pad) on the right side of the home row between me and my mouse.
If this came in a "Happy Hacker" footprint, then they may get my attention. Right now, it's too many colorful, expensive, redundant, unnecessary buttons.
What I've found pleasant in the meantime is a laptop-style keyboard with a marble-mouse beside it. From the mouse, I can reach the PgUp/PgDn keys on the small-footprint keyboard with my thumb, like getting two extra buttons for free.
"If you're going to do something to excess, you might as well go overboard." --Too Much Coffee Man, http://www.tmcm.com/
In describing a "limitation" of Quicktime, Apple has this to say:
"Because of the nature of spacetime, chapter lists do not work with live streaming movies."
I find it more likely that Apple will define their own computer architecture using Intel chips... Let's not forget that much of PC legacy crap is software as well as hardware.
Gosh, I sure hope so. Jettison all of the legacy crap, and let's get on with our collective lives. Then, the next article will be a rumor about Microsoft porting Windows to it.
More importantly, since I won't be able to (cheaply) make a back-up copy of this single-disc behemoth, I can't let my friend borrow season 1 while I watch season 4.
And, for a trilogy, even LOTR, I need to get off my butt and stretch my legs about every 2 hours, which is where current double-layer DVDs get me.
That's a perfect opportunity to change out the discs.
The RIAA and Dolly Parton have huge lobbyists in DC who got buy-in that it would just be cheaper to change DST instead of mess with the working hours.
Their analogy was to the failed attempt at going metric in the 70s, and what an embarrasment that was.
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and (apparently) 10,000 barrels of oil a day richer.
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
Bill Gates, no matter how much money he gives away, even if he donated 99.9% of his net worth to charity, would still not ever worry about whether he's going to be able to buy food that day.
I'm sure Bill doesn't even think about the buying of food... he just eats--anything and anywhere he wants.
A person hovering near the poverty line has a genuine *sacrifice* to make regarding charity, food, medicine, shelter, etc.
Bill does not, and that's the real point.
Not all of your hours are billable hours. Find something you like to do, and don't pretend you're losing money by spending time doing it.
The above argument is when people who stopped at ECO101 try to make opportunity cost statements about living life. When I die, I'm sure I won't be wishing I'd spent more time billing people for the various uses of my hours, but instead wishing I'd had more fun with those hours in general.
I have a HTPC. I enjoyed setting it up, and it requires almost no maintenance. From my point of view it is now an "appliance," and I derive great satisfaction from knowing that I've got a mostly commercial-free TV viewing experience that lets me optimize how I spend my time in front of the boob tube.
What price would I put on that?
I have an application, Secure Global Desktop (formerly Tarantella), which resizes a "connection status" dialog and shrinks-to-fit the window around the size of the text being displayed. When it changes from one message to another, the width of the window gets smaller just enough to make the "X" close button sit where the "_" minimize button used to be.
But any window which changes its own size without and explicit request to do so would suffer the same "who moved my cheese" problem, since the window controls are on the edge of the window that will be moving.
The "genie effect" is bad UI design because it makes the "clickable hotspot" for doing something change shape/size and move depending on how you found it.
For instance: on the toolbar, if you start from the left side, and mouse over the growing/shrinking icons, then move *straight up* off the toolbar, you will have left a certain large icon. When it shrinks, you may no longer be directly above that same icon any more, so if you move *straight down* again, you'll land on a different icon.
This is precisely why Apple's "stoplight" maximize/minimize/close buttons appear on the upper-left side of the window title-bar, so if the window resizes while you're getting ready to click one of them, they don't move out from under your feet.
Countelss Windows applications have done this to me, where a dialog box auto-resizes just enough to place the close button where the minimize button used to be. Even Nero used to replace a "Next>" button with a "Close" button in the same spot in their interface, just to make things dicey.
Sure, it's fancy eye-candy, but having deterministic GUI clickable elements I believe is more important.
Every TV show I watch gets filtered through BeyondTV on a HTPC.
I pay handsomly for "Extended Basic" cable just to watch a few television shows. My goal as a consumer is to find a LEGAL method of paying for television episodes on-demand without paying a flat rate for a whole bunch of junk I'll never watch. And, it must be reasonably less than the flat rate itself.
So, for instance, if I pay $50US/mo for "all-you-can-eat" access to TV programming, I'd expect my pay-per-episode costs for the shows I *actually* watch to come in at less than half of that.
As a comparison, I signed up for the Hollywood Video MVP plan, and I can watch as many movies as I can stomach for $10US/mo. I've been watching a *lot* of movies since then, and the relative quality of my entertainment has gone way up.
TV content providers are now competing with web content providers, and with flat-rate movie rental plans (NetFlix, Hollywood MVP, etc.). I can also catch up on shows that I never got a chance to watch, since they are now for rent on DVD.
So, content is working its way into other channels, and I think the "primetime" TV schedule will go the way of the high-end video card: for those who want to pay a lot more to be "early adopters" of content.
There are very few TV shows that one would consider "water cooler" shows, that get talked about in social settings and you'd feel left out not following in a timely manner. Once I can pay a fair price for "timely TV" that doesn't make me feel fleeced, I'm ditching Cable/Sattelite and strictly getting downloadable entertainment.
Perhaps you should look into using Pierce-Nez instead. You'll never drop your glasses again. Or, if you do, you'll have bigger issues than which pins got soldered incorrectly.
I can't believe I just typed that Subject.
Please don't start a language flamewar. It's just a joke, and a bad one at that.
I hate to be the one to correct myself, but it just seems like yesterday this was announced. I double-checked my own facts, and it was September 2001 that Motorola demonstrated the capability to implement GaAs on SiO2 wafers, for RF, laser, and other purposes.
The fact that silicon and III-V materials do not share common chemical and crystalline properties, as implied by their different positions on the periodic table, is detrimental. The mismatch in their crystalline structure makes the monolithic integration of tiny laser emitters on top of silicon chips, impossible.
I call BS. Last September, Motorola Labs (a part of Motorola, Inc., now Freescale Semiconductor) announced their ability to grow GaAs on top of traditional Si wafers to implement devices like "laser-on-a-chip."
Verify this for yourself.
...found that most times I needed the keyboard nearby, too. With my home media computer in the living room, a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) was a must, and she thought the mouse was usable, even kinda "neat."
However, it uses NiMH batteries, and discharges itself almost every other day, so must be re-cradled nightly to avoid going kaput in the middle of the evening. Also, my experience was that the range of the keyboard was as advertised, but the mouse range was lacking.
We settled, instead, for the Versapoint RF keyboard, which has a touchpoint mouse, no third button, no media keys, but works as advertised and the batteries have lasted 6+ months now without needing replacement. That's because it doesn't need to keep "seeking" for a surface across which it is being dragged, and it takes much less smarts to figure out where it's being pointed/nudged.
The Gyration has a higher geek factor, but is more annoying on a daily basis.
The Versapoint is less sexy, but more utilitarian as a living room device.
If the spatial edge detection were saved (highly compressed) as a companion image, and there were a way to describe this feature in EXIF, then manipulation of the captured image in digital cameras would be that much easier.
Imagine: You take a picture of someone/something, and want to cut out just the subject... like chromakey, but with an arbitrary background... the camera saves the spatial boundaries, and all you'd need to do is indicate which "blob" you're interested in preserving.
That would be sweet.
However, for deep-field images where the shadows may not show up (too far away), this is still a little lacking.
My guess is that using 3 CCDs, arranged in a triangle, and figuring out based on image correlation where the foreground/background borders are located, would be better. This would also remove the need for specially timed, artificial light sources.
they have not even looked at what happens to a model of a few-meter wide ribbon in the atmosphere.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was known as "Galloping Girdie." I nominate "Whiplash Willy" for this thing until they can get the atmospheric effects nailed down.
I'm also curious what kind of electrostatic effects will traverse the length of the carbon nanotubes. Space shuttle experiments have demonstrated a lot of potential difference in a significantly smaller conductor tethered out from the orbiter in LEO. This one's much longer, and grounded(?) at one end.
Many thanks to those who have pointed out my deliberate spelling mistakes in my post. Also thanks to those who believe they should be moderated up. Quite curious.
<rant>
* Older audiophiles think analog sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up.
* Newer audiophiles think digital sounds better because that's the way they trained their ears when they were growing up.
* Slashdot posters think they shouldn't loose any points on they're college board exams because that's the way they typed there grammer in blogs and IM when they were growing up. Woot!
</rant>
If Slashdot had spell-check? (Score:-1, Obvious)
Last week I found a simple speling error in the entry for Rosh Hashanah. After fixing that, I searched for pages with the same word mispelled the same way, and fixed four more.
It really was a brain-dead speling mistake, too, and a simple check presenting a list of possibly mispelled words before confirming a check-in would be a big help.
If you don't restrict your base, all your base are belong to us. Take off every Omega function!! For great roots!
I'm so ashamed of myself.
What would happen if we treated IP protection rights the same way Texas treats a landowner's water rights?
In Texas, almost anyone with a river running through their property, or with groundwater underneath it, is entitled to suck any amount (even all) of the water out of the river (or ground) as they wish, damned be the next person/farm/town downstream, or sharing the same aquifer.
You speak about the "diversion" of wealth. This is exactly what happens with real property (water) here in this state, and nobody wants to mess with it.
Now, if I "divert" all of your potential income from an IP patent, do you have no recourse? What if I "divert" all of your drinking water away from the stream/aquifer on your property?
It seems like currently, corporations have bought themselves much better IP protection laws than the citizens of Texas have with REAL groundwater and aquifer protections.
Making software look like a real piece of hardware is only useful if you normally walk up to your CD player and press its buttons with the backside of your mouse.
They should stick with interfaces which are easy to manipulate with today's common computer input devices, instead of pretending you really had a touch-responsive dataglove on at all times.
"No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better." --Alan Cooper
Two consenting same-sex adults enter a windowless room (no A/C) with a Linux box, smartcard programmer, DVD burner, XBOX mod chip, copy of DeCSS, a DSL connection, a black Sharpie marker, and a copy of LOTR:ROTK.
They exit the room four hours later, flushed and smiling.
How many different crimes have been committed?