The joystick mouse "Anir" has been out for a while. It's overpriced and badly made. I bought one for a friend with RSI wrist problems and it turned out that yes, it relieves the pain but it's very slow and heavy to use. Instead of using your fingers, you use your whole arm. After a year or so, the mouse stopped working properly, just as if the X roller was clogged, but it never started working properly no matter how much I cleaned it. I even took it apart and cleaned all moving pieces. AFAIK, the Anir is now resting in peace in a wardrobe somewhere.
The only thing that worries me, is that Legos don't seem to encourage social interaction. Out of all my fond childhood memories involving Legos, I can't seem to remember any involving other kids. Maybe that's why so many of today's generation of geeks are lacking in basic social skills.
Naah. Don't blame yourself for the lack of social skills in geeks...;-)
Of COURSE several people can build on the same Lego project. You just specify the general size and looks of the thing and then you build it together. Kind of like programming, but you can be more social and creative and even your old grandma will appreciate the result (or at least she'll pretend to).
To me, it was very disturbing to see W2K win round 2, Interface. The UI introduced by Win95 and continued in W2K is a serious rip-off of Mac OS 7, with enough details changed to avoid being sued by Apple. (OK, so Apple sued anyway, but lost.) Unfortunately, in the attempt to change the details, Microsoft destroyed most of the features that make the Mac UI so nice.
For example, for right-hand users the mouse and cursor will naturally gravitate to the top left of the screen, and this is where Apple decided to put the Apple, File and Edit menus. Flicking your mouse to the upper left is an incredibly easy movement, and then - twack! you hit the corner and the menu is there, just under your mouse button. Microsoft decided to put the Start button in the lower left, requiring the user to cramp his/her hand. And the corner pixel is inactive, so you actually have to stop the mouse movement just before the cursor hits the corner -- or go on and hit the corner and then navigate back a few pixels. And then you can click, with your hand in an incredibly unergonomic position. The Win95 UI is full of this kind of design errors.
Essentially, Microsoft has taken the (old) Mac OS UI, removed all the nice usability details, spread the result onto 90% of the desktops of the world, and now even CNet says that it's better than the new-and-revamped Mac OS interface! I think this is disturbing and sad.
For anyone interested in UI design, Bruce Tognazzini has written lots of articles on his website www.asktog.com. Tog was closely involved in designing the Mac user interface, and has a cartload of UI design knowledge as well as a good pen hand.
Remember the fun of typing DISKCOPY A: B: on a DOS system that only had one floppy drive? Same deal.
It would only be the "same deal" if the way you ejected a disk in DOS would be to type "del a:*.*". Face it, the Macintosh required you do something not just unituitive, but totally antithetical to your instincts that are screaming "if you do this, it will delete all your files!".
Well, in my opinion "file" and "disk" are two different things. Your perception of reality may of course differ.
On the Mac, all mounted disks will have a corresponding icon on the desktop. Insert a disk, and an icon appears. Remove the icon, and the disk will be ejected. Where's the inconsistency in this?
You forgot about the "Close gadget that might mean close, or it might mean 'hide this application so I can't find it again'" [...] Turns out that when you "close" IE or Netscape, it doesn't really close [...] The Mac is anything BUT intuitive..
Well, my dear friend, you're not in Kansas anymore.
The Mac OS is not intuitive, but it's d*mned f*cking 100% consistent. On the Mac you CLOSE windows and QUIT applications. Every time, all the time. There's no way you can quit a normal modeless application by closing all the windows.
This fact is stated in no uncertain terms in the "getting started" manual. As is the infamous ejecting-disks-by-dragging-them-to-the-trash idiosyncrasy.
I understand that you're scared of the thought that you might have chosen a less consistent OS for your workstation, but hey, you can always bitch about it and spread FUD on Slashdot.
Hey, Bluetooth has been in the making for several years but it's definitely not outdated! On the contrary, it's just on time.
The speed of Bluetooth (up to 115kbps) is enough for most uses.
Power requirements are LOW (milliwatts) making the chips very embeddable.
No line-of-sight required! This will create a new breed of interconnected devices -- lots of small specialized gadgets that live in your coat pocket or your bag and don't do very much on their own -- but what little they do, they do extremely well. (Compare to the Unix way, with hundreds of specialized command line utilities.)
Authentication and encryption -- only you can connect to your mobile phone.
Bluetooth is reputedly a sturdier protocol than WLAN, meaning that it won't suffer as much from clashes. (OK, the microwave oven is the clear winner here...)
The first Bluetooth-enabled devices are appearing on the market NOW.
Of course it would be neat-o to have networked jukeboxes, but I don't see what you are trying to accomplish that you can't do with either OpenNap or simple file sharing. Granted, hiding OpenNap into a jukebox would be quite cool. Put a tune on your wish list, and the local napster daemon downloads it for you within the hour.:-)
Cooking rice is easy. Just measure the right amount of water and salt and let it boil (under a cover). Add the rice, wait for a minute and stir it a little so it doesn't get cloggy. Then turn off the stove and go do something else. Within 30 minutes, the rice will be ready.
You can also do this in a large frying pan. Then you can start by frying some base ingredient, e.g. chicken or vegetables (chili is a vegetable, right?). Then add the water and rice, cover the pan and let it be on a low temperature until the rice is done. Add seasoning. Easy, fast and a minimum of washing up.
There are plenty of 'silicon valley's in France and that budge-o website you just farted makes me think that sophia-antipopulupolipos is probably not at the top of the list.
Well, regardless of the astonishing shittiness of the website, Sophia Antipolis is at the top of the French list. It even manages to be mentioned on the European TOP-80 list, along with about two other French sites, and this says quite a lot about how far behind the French are in the technology field.
If I was moving from the US to Europe, and looking for a hi-tech job, I would probably not choose France. Scandinavia, the Netherlands and even Germany are much better options.
"Palm is trying to enhance its OS to maintain its lead over Microsoft in the handheld market by selectively adding more features"
WinCE has had 16 bit color and USB support for over a year now.
Well, USB-syncing is cool but 16-bit colors in a PDA is the most stupid idea I've ever heard of.
3 diagonal inches is not enough for a postcard. (But you could store the top 100 items from your stamp collection!)
16 bits is not enough to give you photographic color quality. (Unless of course your PDA spends some 200 kB of memory on maintaining a 24-bit color map. Which it doesn't.)
Do you even have 65535 pixels on the screen? (320x200 is almost there.)
Power consumption and battery life. (Some people think that content and service availability is more important than the packaging.)
Sorry, you got this the wrong way. The given fact is that the guys will triple their market value, and the question is how the company will be keeping these guys.
How they achieve this triplification of market value is another thing entirely. In my experience, people who know and use Unix are worth more than Window drones, mostly because you have to know what you're doing in order to use Unix to any larger degree.
Additionally, you are offending a lot of people by underestimating the unixishness of MacOS X.
The touch-sensitive layer in the Palm screen contains some kind of small balls floating in gel. The balls conduct electricity when put under pressure. Now if you write a lot in a certain area, the balls and gel will get thinner there and that spot needs less pressure to conduct electricity. So when you tap somewhere in the writing area, chances are that the "bald spot" will connect first, and the balls directly under the pen will connect only when you press harder or move the pen around. So you get an initial spike from the bald spot to wherever your pen is and this spike will confuse the Graffiti recognizer. Typical indications are that I will be recognized as a T, and N will become a W. You can see this phenomenon clearly using e.g. TealEcho.
The solution is to use a microfiber cloth to gently massage the screen starting from the top and working downwards, in order to spread the gel more evenly. You can also use ScreenWrite (?) or Jot or something similar that allows you to write elsewhere on the touch screen.
There is no clear winner or loser. Each interface has its advantages and disadvantages. Windows doesn't have a bad interface -- and it shouldn't, because Microsoft has put millions upon millions of dollars into making sure Whistler isn't the next "Bob." Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
Woo-hoo! Let's translate this final verdict into clearspeak. "MS Win-duh is nice because they've spent megabucks on UI design, while Gnome/KDE are nice although they didn't. And they should all steal even more from MacOS."
I hate to say it, but this article belongs to the from-the-bulls-ass department. The reviewer has no clue about user interfaces, and no background in CS whatsoever. Can we please get an ignorance filter for Slashdot?
To clarify this before people start to flame me: user interfaces need to be logical. This is a danged FACT! People can learn to use anything, as long as it's systematic. The Linux/Unix core is systematic. Gnome/KDE is not. Windows is a mess, but it's the monopoly so who cares. MacOS is logical, but it's disregarded as a toy. This reviewer doesn't even know what the word "logical" means!
The reviewer should read some of the stuff from Bruce Tognazzini.
No, don't use white noise. It isn't good for your ears and your hearing will degrade, although it may take several years before it becomes noticeable.
I personally find that instrumental classical music is best if I need to concentrate. Bach, Beethoven, Fauré, Mahler, 17th century brass music. YMMV. Find an internet radio channel which provides music that doesn't require brain activity.
Maybe you could use active hearing protection? That's essentially a headset with sound-cancelling circuitry. It emits sound waves with the opposite amplitude of the incoming sound wave. You can also get desktop adornments with this circuitry, muffling sound within a very small distance from the box. You could actually use your computer for this.:-) Put a mic in the Relationship Consultant's room, then FFT the signal and invert the amplitude. With a little tweaking and suitable placing of speakers you could probably create a sphere of silence just in front of your monitor.:-)
Presidential elections in the US I find an absolute insult to human intelligence, I think it's obvious that you will NOT be voted in as president unless you:
A) Have support from either the Democrats or Republicans
B) Are filthy, stinking rich
Yup. This has of course to do with the fact that in the US, people think of money as a measurement of success. If you're rich, then you must've done something right. If you do voluntary work for a cause (i.e. no pay or very low pay), then you must be plain off stupid.
Another thing is that you have to get the attention of people. You do that by advertising. Advertising costs money. And where do you get that money? Right, either you're funded by one of the two parties, or you must be rich enough to fund your campaign yourself.
As for burning the app into the ROM, that isn't feasible becasue the way our program works is that all updates are place on the server and when a client connects, it passes new information upstream, and recieves new updates downstream.
We-ell, I fail to see how this would stop you from placing the application (binary) in ROM... You aren't going to modify your code on the fly, are you?
The data, which you obviously need read-write access to, would still reside in RAM.
PalmOS also uses C to program it, if I am not mistaken (and I might be) So the turn around time for this would be huge.
C and C++ are the two big languages, and there's a choice of two compilers: Metrowerks CodeWarrior and GCC. If you just must use BASIC (*shudder*), there are several variants available. Browse the Development category on www.palmgear.com or see Wademan's slightly outdated Palm Programming FAQ.
Slashdot Mirror
--Bud
Naah. Don't blame yourself for the lack of social skills in geeks... ;-)
Of COURSE several people can build on the same Lego project. You just specify the general size and looks of the thing and then you build it together. Kind of like programming, but you can be more social and creative and even your old grandma will appreciate the result (or at least she'll pretend to).
Just my 2-stud piece of plastic.
--Bud
Just make sure you upgrade to the 2.4 kernel because the 2.2 kernel apparently doesn't support power management very well. --Bud
For example, for right-hand users the mouse and cursor will naturally gravitate to the top left of the screen, and this is where Apple decided to put the Apple, File and Edit menus. Flicking your mouse to the upper left is an incredibly easy movement, and then - twack! you hit the corner and the menu is there, just under your mouse button. Microsoft decided to put the Start button in the lower left, requiring the user to cramp his/her hand. And the corner pixel is inactive, so you actually have to stop the mouse movement just before the cursor hits the corner -- or go on and hit the corner and then navigate back a few pixels. And then you can click, with your hand in an incredibly unergonomic position. The Win95 UI is full of this kind of design errors.
Essentially, Microsoft has taken the (old) Mac OS UI, removed all the nice usability details, spread the result onto 90% of the desktops of the world, and now even CNet says that it's better than the new-and-revamped Mac OS interface! I think this is disturbing and sad.
For anyone interested in UI design, Bruce Tognazzini has written lots of articles on his website www.asktog.com. Tog was closely involved in designing the Mac user interface, and has a cartload of UI design knowledge as well as a good pen hand.
--Bud
--Bud
It's a file. It's even a file on Macs nowadays.
That one refers to the disk DRIVE and is in no way indicative of the DISK or the FILES on it.
-Bud
Well, in my opinion "file" and "disk" are two different things. Your perception of reality may of course differ.
On the Mac, all mounted disks will have a corresponding icon on the desktop. Insert a disk, and an icon appears. Remove the icon, and the disk will be ejected. Where's the inconsistency in this?
--Bud
Well, my dear friend, you're not in Kansas anymore.
The Mac OS is not intuitive, but it's d*mned f*cking 100% consistent. On the Mac you CLOSE windows and QUIT applications. Every time, all the time. There's no way you can quit a normal modeless application by closing all the windows.
This fact is stated in no uncertain terms in the "getting started" manual. As is the infamous ejecting-disks-by-dragging-them-to-the-trash idiosyncrasy.
I understand that you're scared of the thought that you might have chosen a less consistent OS for your workstation, but hey, you can always bitch about it and spread FUD on Slashdot.
--Bud
Bluetooth is going to be a winner.
--Bud
Well, are you smart enough to spell "British English"?
Of course it would be neat-o to have networked jukeboxes, but I don't see what you are trying to accomplish that you can't do with either OpenNap or simple file sharing. Granted, hiding OpenNap into a jukebox would be quite cool. Put a tune on your wish list, and the local napster daemon downloads it for you within the hour. :-)
--Bud
Cooking rice is easy. Just measure the right amount of water and salt and let it boil (under a cover). Add the rice, wait for a minute and stir it a little so it doesn't get cloggy. Then turn off the stove and go do something else. Within 30 minutes, the rice will be ready.
You can also do this in a large frying pan. Then you can start by frying some base ingredient, e.g. chicken or vegetables (chili is a vegetable, right?). Then add the water and rice, cover the pan and let it be on a low temperature until the rice is done. Add seasoning. Easy, fast and a minimum of washing up.
--Bud
Well, regardless of the astonishing shittiness of the website, Sophia Antipolis is at the top of the French list. It even manages to be mentioned on the European TOP-80 list, along with about two other French sites, and this says quite a lot about how far behind the French are in the technology field.
If I was moving from the US to Europe, and looking for a hi-tech job, I would probably not choose France. Scandinavia, the Netherlands and even Germany are much better options.
--Bud
WinCE has had 16 bit color and USB support for over a year now.
Well, USB-syncing is cool but 16-bit colors in a PDA is the most stupid idea I've ever heard of.
--Bud
The French version of Silicon Valley is called Sophia Antipolis.
--Bud
How they achieve this triplification of market value is another thing entirely. In my experience, people who know and use Unix are worth more than Window drones, mostly because you have to know what you're doing in order to use Unix to any larger degree.
Additionally, you are offending a lot of people by underestimating the unixishness of MacOS X.
--Bud
By posting MP3:s on Half-Price, you are violating their rules.
Very well, then post Ogg Vorbis files instead.
--Bud
It'll take *months* before a Palm gets a bald spot.
--Bud
The solution is to use a microfiber cloth to gently massage the screen starting from the top and working downwards, in order to spread the gel more evenly. You can also use ScreenWrite (?) or Jot or something similar that allows you to write elsewhere on the touch screen.
--Bud
Woo-hoo! Let's translate this final verdict into clearspeak. "MS Win-duh is nice because they've spent megabucks on UI design, while Gnome/KDE are nice although they didn't. And they should all steal even more from MacOS."
I hate to say it, but this article belongs to the from-the-bulls-ass department. The reviewer has no clue about user interfaces, and no background in CS whatsoever. Can we please get an ignorance filter for Slashdot?
To clarify this before people start to flame me: user interfaces need to be logical. This is a danged FACT! People can learn to use anything, as long as it's systematic. The Linux/Unix core is systematic. Gnome/KDE is not. Windows is a mess, but it's the monopoly so who cares. MacOS is logical, but it's disregarded as a toy. This reviewer doesn't even know what the word "logical" means!
The reviewer should read some of the stuff from Bruce Tognazzini.
--Bud
Oh yeah, I get it: and allow you to save your work before it crashes! That feature *alone* would be worth the subscription fee!
--Bud
I personally find that instrumental classical music is best if I need to concentrate. Bach, Beethoven, Fauré, Mahler, 17th century brass music. YMMV. Find an internet radio channel which provides music that doesn't require brain activity.
Maybe you could use active hearing protection? That's essentially a headset with sound-cancelling circuitry. It emits sound waves with the opposite amplitude of the incoming sound wave. You can also get desktop adornments with this circuitry, muffling sound within a very small distance from the box. You could actually use your computer for this. :-) Put a mic in the Relationship Consultant's room, then FFT the signal and invert the amplitude. With a little tweaking and suitable placing of speakers you could probably create a sphere of silence just in front of your monitor. :-)
--Bud
--Bud
A) Have support from either the Democrats or Republicans
B) Are filthy, stinking rich
Yup. This has of course to do with the fact that in the US, people think of money as a measurement of success. If you're rich, then you must've done something right. If you do voluntary work for a cause (i.e. no pay or very low pay), then you must be plain off stupid.
Another thing is that you have to get the attention of people. You do that by advertising. Advertising costs money. And where do you get that money? Right, either you're funded by one of the two parties, or you must be rich enough to fund your campaign yourself.
Sorry for relating the obvious. :-)
--Bud
We-ell, I fail to see how this would stop you from placing the application (binary) in ROM... You aren't going to modify your code on the fly, are you? The data, which you obviously need read-write access to, would still reside in RAM.
PalmOS also uses C to program it, if I am not mistaken (and I might be) So the turn around time for this would be huge.
C and C++ are the two big languages, and there's a choice of two compilers: Metrowerks CodeWarrior and GCC. If you just must use BASIC (*shudder*), there are several variants available. Browse the Development category on www.palmgear.com or see Wademan's slightly outdated Palm Programming FAQ.
--Bud