What this research really proves is that a neutral network needs only double the bandwidth to replace a tiered one. Doubling the bandwidth is a lot cheaper, faster rollout, and more manageable than a tiered network. And it's more scalable than a complex tiered network. Plus, it has twice the bandwidth. And it doesn't have the flexibility and openness of a neutral network.
These Net Doublecharge crooks will say anything to get their extortion money. I expect they will, because they don't care about us, just their money and political power. But why does Slashdot have to publish it? Slashdot, a big website, is a target for Net Doublecharge, which will blackmail Slashdot's servers to carry its traffic to nerd consumers.
Let's not only pay them to give us the Internet that we built for them with our taxes and scientists, and created demand for with our content and services, and also peddle their lies that are stealing the whole thing from us.
What do you know about a 5-100KW turbine installable in a river, or a long (>30Km), wide (>1Km), shallow (<25m) fjord with strong, predictable tidal currents? I am looking into such a device to power a home, or perhaps one or two dozen homes on the banks near the mouth of a river (estuary) like that.
Blu-Ray is just as proprietary as is MemoryStick's MagicGate. There are many times more MemorySticks out there than BDs, probably thousands of times as many.
The iBook (or whatever it's called) I have here in my office doesn't let me tap the touchpad to click like my Linux Dell does. It's annoying - I have to use my thumb to click.
I almost bought a new Powerbook a couple of months ago, instead of its HP equivalent. The Mac was the exact same specs, but with a single mouse button. I was going to dual boot mainly Ubuntu, and occasionally OSX. But then I realized how much I'd have to use some other key or whatever is the hack for Ubuntu on a Mac mouse. Probably a real pain when "middle clicking", like pasting from the X clipboard.
Since a touchscreen would have no buttons, so the gestures used the entire screen as "buttons", all these notebooks could use the same HW, and they'd all go down in price at least a little bit - maybe more than any increase from the touchscreen tech.
Just surveillance of police. They are public servants, on public property. They have special power, which history proves they often abuse. Their every work act is already a matter of public record, and subject to additional scrutiny by their "Internal Affairs Office" or whatever their department calls that office. And though surveillance might make some people nervous, police acting without surveillance undeniably makes too many police so arrogant that people are routinely killed, hurt, otherwise damaged, and their rights often infringed.
BTW, I didn't say the police should be monitored by the public, but rather monitored by other police and independent government oversight. Though vetted (by documented due process) police recordings should be available to the public, like any public records.
It's not ironic, because the police are different from just "employees".
For example, is it OK for all the police to go on strike?
No, I never said it was trivial, or any degree of difficulty or ease. I merely asked if it had been done, since the prohibition from proprietary source does not stop it.
You are projecting your inferences on what I said. Projecting a binary worldview, where coding is only either "impossible" or "trivial". All I said was it's not impossible, and wondered if anyone had done it.
Do you know how relational algebra and propositional calculus are implemented? There are many logic "ifs" and other evaluations in the code path to accommodate optional features. It's one reason why caching queries and results is so efficient. Those computations wouldn't even have to be run on uncached logic if the optional features were stripped out. It's not a matter of extra code stored in RAM, but more complex code paths.
And again with the Java/SQL integration: the extra layers to return from a Java scope, then jump the CPU to the SQL code, is inefficient. In tight loops, the least context switching shows real efficiency gains. Any simplification, even reducing handles to pointers for CPU address calculation, can improve performance. If the task is simple. Which is what most Web DB/object transactions are.
DB performance is a very tough game. Tiny gains result in many more sales. PostgreSQL is not as popular as others partly because there haven't been good performance metrics, so there hasn't been a big investment in performance metrics, so it stays relatively unpopular. But if it were tailored for the simplicity of most Web apps, it might have not only good performance, but the kind of marketable gains that Oracle and others will not revise themselves to produce.
I explicitly said that there are cases for delaying and even entirely censoring the webcams. Criminals wouldn't get any advantage. Besides, it's the public, so criminals can video it anyway, even from a "lookout" with their mobile cameraphone already.
As for the cops, I'm talking about recording everything they're doing, not necessarily live. Though I like the idea of live supervisors. Honest cops who want immediate backup in their dangerous jobs will probably like it too. But even just the recordings are good for them. They can complete "reports" with just fast-forward voiceover sessions narrating the videos. They can exchange them with each other to collaborate. They can get better pix of people they're chasing, even let them go when the chase gets too dangerous, better able to ID and catch them later. They can send the video to court instead of showing up most of the time, and use the video to increase confidence of "the cop's word", rather than the steady erosion that their sole eyewitness testimony, with all the history of police abuse (on top of normal human fallibility) has accumulated. They could even get a "greatest hits" reel once a year as part of their review.
And of course the video can catch the cops doing all kinds of wrong. Honest cops will welcome it. And practically all cops are currently in the position to watch all of us in public, with the power to arrest or shoot us, to say nothing of the blackmail that frequently happens without direct supervision.
If cops train to be recorded, and grow their careers working with its benefits, while the recordings are regulated to protect cops from abuse and micromanagement, it will be good for everyone. And will also help the public accept that the cops are videoing us all whenever we're in public - which will also make cops' jobs easier.
Has anyone used the PostgreSQL open source to refactor the DB to support just a subset of SQL and features (the most popular stuff that eg. "LAMP" uses), then benchmarked it vs the default distro, to show higher performance?
For that matter, has anyone merged any open source Java server container with PostgreSQL for higher performance of that use case, in an integrated architecture without network and other overhead for messages, and more atomic transactions?
Bloomberg wants to run against Giuliani. Giuliani lied about his crime decrease record: how it was done, what the real stats were, and how it compares nationally. But Bloomberg is in league with Giuliani as a Republican (despite publicly switching parties last month, Bloomberg is still donating to, and "caucusing" with, the NY state Republican Party, after years leading national fundraising records).
So the way Bloomberg will do it is to further reduce NYC crime rate, especially in the next 2 years. He can run as "better than Rudy", and Giuliani can run as "I did the hard part, Bloomberg is stealing my success story". And of course NYC residents (and visitors) will not complain about further lowering the crime rate (though of course the criminals will complain - it's New York!:).
The sleazy(ier) part is that Bloomberg is jerking everyone's "terrorism" chain again. These videos are really part of Bloomberg's lockdown of lower Manhattan. Because that's where all the banking is done, which is Bloomberg's bread & butter. I'm sure he wants video of financial world people as they travel around between business meetings, white collar crimes, secret (even if legit) deals, their mistresses, favorite restaurants, late for a meeting, the whole megillah. Which, again, is why the public should have the same access as the cops and Bloomberg, with exceptions carved out by due process for real security requirements.
As an example, Giuliani conned NY'ers into accepting the EZ-Pass monitoring of all traffic in/out of the toll bridges/tunnels/roads that connects most of NYC to most of itself and the rest of the world (we're really a bunch of big islands and a Bronx peninsula). He told us publicly that all EZ-Pass records would be confidential unless a judge signed a court order requested with standard 4th Amendment compliant due process on probable cause, identified police/lawyers, physical evidence, etc. But then it turned out that anyone with $50 to the right City police precinct could get anyone's transaction log. But they unveiled that "feature" in a divorce case, in the NY Post, so people were psyched to spy on their neighbors, though of course they went into the crosshairs, too. I expect that the subsequent mild controversy just means that only if you use the "right" lawyer or City official can you spy on anyone's EZ-Pass.
I pay NYC taxes. I think these investments are good ones. Especially if the City treats the infrastructure as investment. Sells the data, vetted as I've described, to publishers for a onetime license fee. It could pay for itself, and many of the other security costs (combing thru all the many videos) could be paid by private people consuming the data. NYC could get paid to be more secure. It also promotes the City-owned asset of all our public pole tops. We're already leasing them to WiFi and other radio/network corporations. The whole operation could be affordable to startups, profit the City, and deliver a lot more services.
But if we just let Bloomberg do whatever he wants, he'll just suck up all the value, and the public will get shafted. But you knew that already.
This system would make a lot more sense if the public could tune into the complete records of the webcams. These cameras are looking at public places, and are being operated by public safety, claimed to be in the public interest. The public should be able to hit these webcams if not in realtime, to give police a jump on criminals, then at latest the following day. Which would give police time to convince a judge on the record that the occasional segment from a camera needs to be censored. Perhaps even ongoing random deletions to hide patterns of "cameras of interest" which could clue criminals which cameras caught something being used against them.
But of course we should start from the premise that these cameras belong to the public, that their data belongs to the public. Then reasonable demands of justice and legitimate police process can be met within our existing system of warrants.
In fact, we should go further. All the police, their vehicles, and buildings should have webcams monitoring all their activity all the time. It should be available for anyone in the public to go through. That will not only keep police more honest, but also harness the millions of voyeurs to look for public evidence of crimes, and notify police when they see something in public. And of course there's huge potential for people to make our own "reality show" material, with the world's most exciting background sets and extras.
On TWC RoadRunner here in Brooklyn, I get 10Mbps downloads, and something like 0.5Mbps uploads for my $50:mo. They keep increasing the speeds without any announcements. It's kinda weird. But I hear that OptimiumOnline in the Bronx gets 20Mbps/2-3Mbps, paying something like $30:mo.
If Google can get the photos, then every country (and corporation, and rich guy) can get the photos. There is absolutely no reason why the general public shouldn't get these images via Google when those privileged people can get them. In fact, since those privileged people start all the wars that the rest of us fight for them, the general public is much more trustworthy a viewer of those military locations.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" by Roger Waters
Moderation -2
100% Offtopic
Looks like the privileged TrollMods with something to hide think they can hide my post with absurd moderations.
What can you do with a mouse that you can't do with ("fat") fingers on a touchscreen? A mouse can merely indicate a pixel. and show click, doubleclick, hold, and drag from that point to another. At most it has 2, or rarely 3, buttons for those gestures. Fingers can do all of those, and more - multiple points, for example, and more fingers than buttons.
What can a mouse do that fingers on a touchscreen can't, as you claim is the case?
If Google can get the photos, then every country (and corporation, and rich guy) can get the photos. There is absolutely no reason why the general public shouldn't get these images via Google when those privileged people can get them. In fact, since those privileged people start all the wars that the rest of us fight for them, the general public is much more trustworthy a viewer of those military locations.
You have a natural tendency To squeeze off a shot You're good fun at parties You wear the right masks You're old but you still Like a laugh in the locker room You can't abide change You're at home on the range You opened your suitcase Behind the old workings To show off the magnum You deafened the canyon A comfort a friend Only upstaged in the end By the Uzi machine gun Does the recoil remind you Remind you of sex Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next I looked over Jordan and what did I see Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris I swam in your pools And lay under your palm trees I looked in the eyes of the Indian Who lay on the Federal Building steps And through the range finder over the hill I saw the front line boys popping their pills Sick of the mess they find On their desert stage And the bravery of being out of range Yeah the question is vexed Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next Hey bartender over here Two more shots And two more beers Sir turn up the TV sound The war has started on the ground Just love those laser guided bombs They're really great For righting wrongs You hit the target And win the game From bars 3,000 miles away 3,000 miles away We play the game With the bravery of being out of range We zap and maim With the bravery of being out of range We strafe the train With the bravery of being out of range We gain terrain With the bravery of being out of range With the bravery of being out of range We play the game With the bravery of being out of range
Everything I said was merely to establish the maximum possible facility of a touchscreen, all much larger than the "8 ways" with a current mouse that someone claimed was superior.
Most of your complaints can be overcome with user calibration, once, that can be transferred as a "preference".
All of which is a much more expressive interface than a mouse.
The ball rides on a few tiny rounded points that do not accumulate anything in my office. The sensor window seems to have a little bit of gunk flakes sitting on its bottom ridge, but it works just fine.
My four fingers can click in 16 different combos. My thumb makes it 32. Moving from binary to click, doubleclick, hold, (nothing) quaternary, that's something like 256-1024. Even if only the index and middle fingers have quaternary gestures, that's 16, with 2-3 other binary combos on the remaining fingers for 64-128 simple gestures.
Then there's the huge range of other gestures. Like tracing two independent points with the index and middle fingers. Dragging with one finger while clicking (or quaternary gesture) with the other(s). Then there's the huge range offered by the other hand on the same screen.
Face it, a mouse has just a 2D + 2 (clumsily) quaternary buttons (or one, on a Mac). A touchscreen has the combination of all of its pixels, each manipulable into several different states, by 10 fingers, maybe a palm. All those "mouse gestures" Firefox launched but which never really became popular could finally become the really intuitive, expressive interface we want.
When I have to plug a pointing device into a PC, I use a trackball. The Logitech "marble mouse" I use doesn't collect dirt against the sensors, but rather it falls through a hole onto the desk. I haven't had to clean it in several years of use, compared to several times a year for an actual mouse whose moving parts I never touch with my fingers.
I said I prefer the trackpad. And I like the "display on desk" routine: it was great for centuries, millennia, without ever hearing about "carpal tunnel syndrome" or other repetitive stress.
But I also like looking straight at a screen. So probably the real ergonomic innovation here is a support for the forearm that takes the least space, obstructs motion and view the least, and lets me keep my hand raised effortlessly.
Or we can get really smart and invent the 90 minute workday, with several 30 minute breaks;).
Besides, this tech will really get going with mobile devices. A 4x5" screen with active, invisible bumps defining dynamic ridges and active areas on a handheld GUI ("GTFUI": Graphical Touch and Feel UI). Apple, what's that up your sleeve?
I hate the mouse, except as a children's/newbie's teaching tool. If I've got desk space for a mousepad, I want to use that for my display. And why do all that (carpal tunnel inviting) work to move a virtual pointer?
I prefer the trackpad. But why don't I have a touchscreen with stability and accuracy already? There's no reason for a "pointer metaphor" device when I can just move the actual pointer.
Give me a touchscreen and maybe a little rubber pointer fingercap, if I'm freaked out by smudges, or need to see the pointed pixel under my fingertip. Or give me an antiglare screen that doesn't collect smudges, and put a rock-solid pointer just above my fingertip. Put some bumpy, but invisible, texture on the screen, and we've finally graduated from Xerox PARC into the 20th Century.
Hey Apple, can you finally redeem us from the nightmarish little box you cursed us with when you tempted us out of the terminal?
Slashdot Mirror
What this research really proves is that a neutral network needs only double the bandwidth to replace a tiered one . Doubling the bandwidth is a lot cheaper, faster rollout, and more manageable than a tiered network. And it's more scalable than a complex tiered network. Plus, it has twice the bandwidth. And it doesn't have the flexibility and openness of a neutral network.
These Net Doublecharge crooks will say anything to get their extortion money. I expect they will, because they don't care about us, just their money and political power. But why does Slashdot have to publish it? Slashdot, a big website, is a target for Net Doublecharge, which will blackmail Slashdot's servers to carry its traffic to nerd consumers.
Let's not only pay them to give us the Internet that we built for them with our taxes and scientists, and created demand for with our content and services, and also peddle their lies that are stealing the whole thing from us.
I was not aware. Does that work under Linux (eg Ubuntu)? Can I config it myself, so I get 5 buttons, including the HW button?
What do you know about a 5-100KW turbine installable in a river, or a long (>30Km), wide (>1Km), shallow (<25m) fjord with strong, predictable tidal currents? I am looking into such a device to power a home, or perhaps one or two dozen homes on the banks near the mouth of a river (estuary) like that.
Blu-Ray is just as proprietary as is MemoryStick's MagicGate. There are many times more MemorySticks out there than BDs, probably thousands of times as many.
And I'd bet that BD DRM is related to MagicGate.
Those are good reasons someone would care to.
I dunno, has anyone cracked Magic Gate, the Sony DRM built into every MemoryStick since 1999? It's been 8 years for that one.
The iBook (or whatever it's called) I have here in my office doesn't let me tap the touchpad to click like my Linux Dell does. It's annoying - I have to use my thumb to click.
I almost bought a new Powerbook a couple of months ago, instead of its HP equivalent. The Mac was the exact same specs, but with a single mouse button. I was going to dual boot mainly Ubuntu, and occasionally OSX. But then I realized how much I'd have to use some other key or whatever is the hack for Ubuntu on a Mac mouse. Probably a real pain when "middle clicking", like pasting from the X clipboard.
Since a touchscreen would have no buttons, so the gestures used the entire screen as "buttons", all these notebooks could use the same HW, and they'd all go down in price at least a little bit - maybe more than any increase from the touchscreen tech.
Just surveillance of police. They are public servants, on public property. They have special power, which history proves they often abuse. Their every work act is already a matter of public record, and subject to additional scrutiny by their "Internal Affairs Office" or whatever their department calls that office. And though surveillance might make some people nervous, police acting without surveillance undeniably makes too many police so arrogant that people are routinely killed, hurt, otherwise damaged, and their rights often infringed.
BTW, I didn't say the police should be monitored by the public, but rather monitored by other police and independent government oversight. Though vetted (by documented due process) police recordings should be available to the public, like any public records.
It's not ironic, because the police are different from just "employees".
For example, is it OK for all the police to go on strike?
No, I never said it was trivial, or any degree of difficulty or ease. I merely asked if it had been done, since the prohibition from proprietary source does not stop it.
You are projecting your inferences on what I said. Projecting a binary worldview, where coding is only either "impossible" or "trivial". All I said was it's not impossible, and wondered if anyone had done it.
Do you know how relational algebra and propositional calculus are implemented? There are many logic "ifs" and other evaluations in the code path to accommodate optional features. It's one reason why caching queries and results is so efficient. Those computations wouldn't even have to be run on uncached logic if the optional features were stripped out. It's not a matter of extra code stored in RAM, but more complex code paths.
And again with the Java/SQL integration: the extra layers to return from a Java scope, then jump the CPU to the SQL code, is inefficient. In tight loops, the least context switching shows real efficiency gains. Any simplification, even reducing handles to pointers for CPU address calculation, can improve performance. If the task is simple. Which is what most Web DB/object transactions are.
DB performance is a very tough game. Tiny gains result in many more sales. PostgreSQL is not as popular as others partly because there haven't been good performance metrics, so there hasn't been a big investment in performance metrics, so it stays relatively unpopular. But if it were tailored for the simplicity of most Web apps, it might have not only good performance, but the kind of marketable gains that Oracle and others will not revise themselves to produce.
I explicitly said that there are cases for delaying and even entirely censoring the webcams. Criminals wouldn't get any advantage. Besides, it's the public, so criminals can video it anyway, even from a "lookout" with their mobile cameraphone already.
As for the cops, I'm talking about recording everything they're doing, not necessarily live. Though I like the idea of live supervisors. Honest cops who want immediate backup in their dangerous jobs will probably like it too. But even just the recordings are good for them. They can complete "reports" with just fast-forward voiceover sessions narrating the videos. They can exchange them with each other to collaborate. They can get better pix of people they're chasing, even let them go when the chase gets too dangerous, better able to ID and catch them later. They can send the video to court instead of showing up most of the time, and use the video to increase confidence of "the cop's word", rather than the steady erosion that their sole eyewitness testimony, with all the history of police abuse (on top of normal human fallibility) has accumulated. They could even get a "greatest hits" reel once a year as part of their review.
And of course the video can catch the cops doing all kinds of wrong. Honest cops will welcome it. And practically all cops are currently in the position to watch all of us in public, with the power to arrest or shoot us, to say nothing of the blackmail that frequently happens without direct supervision.
If cops train to be recorded, and grow their careers working with its benefits, while the recordings are regulated to protect cops from abuse and micromanagement, it will be good for everyone. And will also help the public accept that the cops are videoing us all whenever we're in public - which will also make cops' jobs easier.
Has anyone used the PostgreSQL open source to refactor the DB to support just a subset of SQL and features (the most popular stuff that eg. "LAMP" uses), then benchmarked it vs the default distro, to show higher performance?
For that matter, has anyone merged any open source Java server container with PostgreSQL for higher performance of that use case, in an integrated architecture without network and other overhead for messages, and more atomic transactions?
How does that equal "No"?
Bloomberg wants to run against Giuliani. Giuliani lied about his crime decrease record: how it was done, what the real stats were, and how it compares nationally. But Bloomberg is in league with Giuliani as a Republican (despite publicly switching parties last month, Bloomberg is still donating to, and "caucusing" with, the NY state Republican Party, after years leading national fundraising records).
:).
So the way Bloomberg will do it is to further reduce NYC crime rate, especially in the next 2 years. He can run as "better than Rudy", and Giuliani can run as "I did the hard part, Bloomberg is stealing my success story". And of course NYC residents (and visitors) will not complain about further lowering the crime rate (though of course the criminals will complain - it's New York!
The sleazy(ier) part is that Bloomberg is jerking everyone's "terrorism" chain again. These videos are really part of Bloomberg's lockdown of lower Manhattan. Because that's where all the banking is done, which is Bloomberg's bread & butter. I'm sure he wants video of financial world people as they travel around between business meetings, white collar crimes, secret (even if legit) deals, their mistresses, favorite restaurants, late for a meeting, the whole megillah. Which, again, is why the public should have the same access as the cops and Bloomberg, with exceptions carved out by due process for real security requirements.
As an example, Giuliani conned NY'ers into accepting the EZ-Pass monitoring of all traffic in/out of the toll bridges/tunnels/roads that connects most of NYC to most of itself and the rest of the world (we're really a bunch of big islands and a Bronx peninsula). He told us publicly that all EZ-Pass records would be confidential unless a judge signed a court order requested with standard 4th Amendment compliant due process on probable cause, identified police/lawyers, physical evidence, etc. But then it turned out that anyone with $50 to the right City police precinct could get anyone's transaction log. But they unveiled that "feature" in a divorce case, in the NY Post, so people were psyched to spy on their neighbors, though of course they went into the crosshairs, too. I expect that the subsequent mild controversy just means that only if you use the "right" lawyer or City official can you spy on anyone's EZ-Pass.
I pay NYC taxes. I think these investments are good ones. Especially if the City treats the infrastructure as investment. Sells the data, vetted as I've described, to publishers for a onetime license fee. It could pay for itself, and many of the other security costs (combing thru all the many videos) could be paid by private people consuming the data. NYC could get paid to be more secure. It also promotes the City-owned asset of all our public pole tops. We're already leasing them to WiFi and other radio/network corporations. The whole operation could be affordable to startups, profit the City, and deliver a lot more services.
But if we just let Bloomberg do whatever he wants, he'll just suck up all the value, and the public will get shafted. But you knew that already.
This system would make a lot more sense if the public could tune into the complete records of the webcams. These cameras are looking at public places, and are being operated by public safety, claimed to be in the public interest. The public should be able to hit these webcams if not in realtime, to give police a jump on criminals, then at latest the following day. Which would give police time to convince a judge on the record that the occasional segment from a camera needs to be censored. Perhaps even ongoing random deletions to hide patterns of "cameras of interest" which could clue criminals which cameras caught something being used against them.
But of course we should start from the premise that these cameras belong to the public, that their data belongs to the public. Then reasonable demands of justice and legitimate police process can be met within our existing system of warrants.
In fact, we should go further. All the police, their vehicles, and buildings should have webcams monitoring all their activity all the time. It should be available for anyone in the public to go through. That will not only keep police more honest, but also harness the millions of voyeurs to look for public evidence of crimes, and notify police when they see something in public. And of course there's huge potential for people to make our own "reality show" material, with the world's most exciting background sets and extras.
I omitted the lyrics to the song whose title and author I included, all relevant to both the story and my reply, though it was TrollModded "Offtopic".
Your snotty apology for them shows the caliber of people who don't like facing the facts on this story.
On TWC RoadRunner here in Brooklyn, I get 10Mbps downloads, and something like 0.5Mbps uploads for my $50:mo. They keep increasing the speeds without any announcements. It's kinda weird. But I hear that OptimiumOnline in the Bronx gets 20Mbps/2-3Mbps, paying something like $30:mo.
Looks like the privileged TrollMods with something to hide think they can hide my post with absurd moderations.
What can you do with a mouse that you can't do with ("fat") fingers on a touchscreen? A mouse can merely indicate a pixel. and show click, doubleclick, hold, and drag from that point to another. At most it has 2, or rarely 3, buttons for those gestures. Fingers can do all of those, and more - multiple points, for example, and more fingers than buttons.
What can a mouse do that fingers on a touchscreen can't, as you claim is the case?
Everything I said was merely to establish the maximum possible facility of a touchscreen, all much larger than the "8 ways" with a current mouse that someone claimed was superior.
Most of your complaints can be overcome with user calibration, once, that can be transferred as a "preference".
All of which is a much more expressive interface than a mouse.
Well, that's why I'm pointing my suggestions at Apple.
Is there some kind of link you were trying to include in that last post?
The ball rides on a few tiny rounded points that do not accumulate anything in my office. The sensor window seems to have a little bit of gunk flakes sitting on its bottom ridge, but it works just fine.
My four fingers can click in 16 different combos. My thumb makes it 32. Moving from binary to click, doubleclick, hold, (nothing) quaternary, that's something like 256-1024. Even if only the index and middle fingers have quaternary gestures, that's 16, with 2-3 other binary combos on the remaining fingers for 64-128 simple gestures.
Then there's the huge range of other gestures. Like tracing two independent points with the index and middle fingers. Dragging with one finger while clicking (or quaternary gesture) with the other(s). Then there's the huge range offered by the other hand on the same screen.
Face it, a mouse has just a 2D + 2 (clumsily) quaternary buttons (or one, on a Mac). A touchscreen has the combination of all of its pixels, each manipulable into several different states, by 10 fingers, maybe a palm. All those "mouse gestures" Firefox launched but which never really became popular could finally become the really intuitive, expressive interface we want.
When I have to plug a pointing device into a PC, I use a trackball. The Logitech "marble mouse" I use doesn't collect dirt against the sensors, but rather it falls through a hole onto the desk. I haven't had to clean it in several years of use, compared to several times a year for an actual mouse whose moving parts I never touch with my fingers.
;).
I said I prefer the trackpad. And I like the "display on desk" routine: it was great for centuries, millennia, without ever hearing about "carpal tunnel syndrome" or other repetitive stress.
But I also like looking straight at a screen. So probably the real ergonomic innovation here is a support for the forearm that takes the least space, obstructs motion and view the least, and lets me keep my hand raised effortlessly.
Or we can get really smart and invent the 90 minute workday, with several 30 minute breaks
Besides, this tech will really get going with mobile devices. A 4x5" screen with active, invisible bumps defining dynamic ridges and active areas on a handheld GUI ("GTFUI": Graphical Touch and Feel UI). Apple, what's that up your sleeve?
I hate the mouse, except as a children's/newbie's teaching tool. If I've got desk space for a mousepad, I want to use that for my display. And why do all that (carpal tunnel inviting) work to move a virtual pointer?
I prefer the trackpad. But why don't I have a touchscreen with stability and accuracy already? There's no reason for a "pointer metaphor" device when I can just move the actual pointer.
Give me a touchscreen and maybe a little rubber pointer fingercap, if I'm freaked out by smudges, or need to see the pointed pixel under my fingertip. Or give me an antiglare screen that doesn't collect smudges, and put a rock-solid pointer just above my fingertip. Put some bumpy, but invisible, texture on the screen, and we've finally graduated from Xerox PARC into the 20th Century.
Hey Apple, can you finally redeem us from the nightmarish little box you cursed us with when you tempted us out of the terminal?