Re:It wasn't all roses.
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
The capacitive sensor means that any contact with the left side of the mouse is interpreted as a left-click, so I have to actively lift my index finger rather than simply not apply pressure with it to get a right-click. The pivoting design means that I have to actually move my hand or apply significant force with my fingertips to get a click at all.
The result is that instead of being able to rest my fingertips on the buttons and apply a slight additional pressure with one finger to click, I have to use two fingers for a click, and for a right click I have to move them in opposite directions. This causes enough additional strain to trigger an RSI incident within only a few minutes.
Re:It wasn't all roses.
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
I have to give props to the puck. I hold the mouse with the tips of my fingersL/i>
So do I.
Look at your palm and curl your fingers slightly inward. What shape does that create? Right...a circle.
For me it creates an irregular polygon. The ring and little fingers of my hand naturally move together and the back third of a typical mouse is easily held between them and my thumb, with the middle and index fingers resting lightly on the front of the mouse, and the palm and heel of my hand not touching the mouse at all. This puts the positional controller of the mouse slightly forward of the tip of my thumb. With the "puck" mouse I have to hold the mouse at the midpoint, which moves the positional control back and reduces my accuracy because I can't make fine movements by pivoting the mouse with my fingers... I have to move my whole hand. In addition, I have to curl my "button" fingers more which causes more strain.
With Apple's pivoting mice I again have to hold the mouse closer to the midpoint, which reduces my accuracy.
With the "Mighty Mouse" I can't rest my fingers on the front of the mouse.
Microsoft's $10.00-$15.00 "Basic Optical Mouse" is the best two-button mouse I have found.
Re:It wasn't all roses.
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 1
I like the Apple Pro mouse (for a one-button mouse); it doesn't feel that different from the old ADB mouse.
It sure does for me. Any of the pivoting mice are painful to use. I mean that literally: it causes me extreme pain in my right wrist and three outer fingers.
My only complaint about the Mighty Mouse is that because the left and right buttons aren't separate buttons, if I try to right-click without first lifting my left finger off the button, it'll register as a left-click.
Even discounting the pain I suffer using the pivoting mice, or the fact that you have to be a trained card-sharp to lift the mouse while holding the button, that would already be a "one strike and you're out". I'm not giving them two, let alone the three they want to take.
It wasn't all roses.
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At the time, both the lack of a floppy and the inclusion of USB were much criticized. In hindsight, these moves are now considered forward thinking.
On the other hand the hockey-puck mouse was a disaster, and its descendants (down to and including the Mighty Mouse) are still ergonomic nightmares. The iMac keyboard was also pretty but unpleasant to use compared to the ADB keyboards, and Apple still hasn't really recovered. Luckily PC USB keyboards and Mice work well with the Mac, and I'm using a Microsoft keyboard and Microsoft mouse on mine.
The source code is shipped with every binary and in selected models you get a complete self-hosted build environment at no extra charge. The user interface is a bit rough, and compile time is pretty high, but it definitely complies with the GPL.
There have been a number of incidents of trojans and viruses being distributed in commercial shrinkwrapped software. Firefox was slack, like commercial distributors have now and then been slack. You get caught by surprise, fix the process, and keep going, and keep it from happening again.
If they don't address the process that caused the problem, then start worrying.
I assume Microsoft is trying to convince the movie industry that they're better off backing the Zune than the iPod.
We said [...] None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. -- Steve Jobs, 3 Dec 2003
And the result?
Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos.
Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC's pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright "cop" to be installed on its devices. -- J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal
Sounds like Apple is still stubbornly refusing to tell NBC that they can beat the laws of physics, but Microsoft was prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear.
For the people ragging on NASA about the capacity of the drive:
Edwards said the Seagate hard drive -- which was about eight years old in 2003 -- featured much greater fault tolerance and durability than current hard drives of similar capacity.
That would be the original shuttle "E", Enterprise? They replaced with a mock-up after it disappeared while they were testing an electromagnetic reentry shield over Philadelphia.
Don't forget that the lead time on space experiments can be years, and you need to use equipment that was rated for space use when you specced it out... not when it went up... which adds even more lead time. Read up on the shuttle computers some time to get an idea of how conservative they are.
And in this care it was a damn good thing: the higher the information density on the drive, the lower the chance of recovering the data... and they were right on the edge of the possible as it was.
And imagine that you run the risk that if you post something that the moderator doesn't agree with you lose $10.
To be precise, you lose the ability to post to that particular forum with that particular account on that particular proxy again. The moderator isn't telling the proxy "block this account", he's telling his webserver "block this UUID". It's if you want to post anonymously on that forum *again*, after being banned, that you start losing money.
People won't sign up for that service. They'll just go back to yelling at the TV.
No, seriously, there used to be a couple of general comment systems like that. They tended to get little interest, unless they started off with a big burst of publicity in which case they got denounced by pundits who didn't want people seeing markup under, over, inline with, or hovering about their words (depending on how the particular scheme was implemented). But even then, after a burst of interest, they tended to die out... too much popularity made them a bottleneck, or too little made them pointless (or both, in fairly obvious stages).
An alternative that I've seen versions of now and then are plugins that look up references to the page you're viewing in Google and the like, and let you know that someone is linking there. I haven't seen one of them for a while, I suspect they mostly attracted spam.
Then of course there's trackback schemes, but they require cooperation from the site.
Feedback and commentary on the Internet remains a complex dance of posts talking about posts, on the popular technology of the day... bulletin boards, groups, forums, blogs, whatever the next big thing is... and you still have to look for counterpoints yourself.
What Jim Brady is really looking for is not an end to anonymity, it's for an end to unaccountability. It's not that posting to WashingtonPost.com is anonymous, it's that it's anonymous and the posters have nothing at stake.
There are any number of schemes that can combine anonymity and accountability... with accountability limited to the cost of creating the anonymous pseudonym you're using to post. I'm sure readers of slashdot can think of any number of schemes that would fulfill his requirements.
Simply requiring a repliable mail address creates a small cost for anonymity... possibly not enough for Jim, but enough to deter many "reflex" posters.
But imagine an anonymizing proxy that costs $9.95 to get an account on. When you post through it, it passes some token to the webserver (possibly via HTTP headers) that contains a consistent random UUID associated with your account on the proxy, and the server can block postings by UUID. Then each time you anonymously post scatological material to WP, it'll cost you almost ten bucks, but as far as the WP is concerned you're still as anonymous as if you were posting from the public library.
I think that's MORE than enough accountability for the likes of a public bulletin board, no?
Did you read the article? It explicitly points out the same point that you're making and says that courts have found that for this specific provision the license is not the determining factor.
what is interesting about that SPECIFIC example? frank abagnale made specific powerful technological innovations.
Pretend you're talking to someone who doesn't watch every pop movie that goes by on the idiot box, but who has (a) been involved in real life situations where someone supposedly came up with really clever new tricks but turned out to be just another script kiddy, and (b) has personally watched reporters (let alone people making docudramas) screw up fundamental facts like this.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to (a) support your characterization of this fella, and (b) demonstrate that this kind of case is common enough to be used as the basis for policy.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
The best way to do that is to cost them a lot of money (or threaten to) or earn them (or save them) a lot of money. The easiest way is to cost them a lot of money. Pity it's unethical.
A valuable skill in any manager's job is learning to listen to the people working for you. I've had the pleasant experience of having managers with that skill, and I've saved them a fair amount of money as a result.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
Like, say, by taking the piss from people who think you're a twit for not bothering with ordinary punctuation?
(oh, didn't I mention, I didn't lose my job to a crooked ex-con... this isn't about me, you'll have to try harder to piss me off)
Moist Lipwig is a character in a book, not a real person. Characters in books are frequently more charismatic, capable, and paradoxically honorable than the people they represent in real life.
But you've also taken a job away from someone who may or may not be good enough and given it to someone who definitely is good enough.
That's a bold assertion, but is it true? Or have you taken a job from a competent guy who has been trying to get his boss to pay attention to a problem for several years and given it to someone who is less competent, but less ethical and more personable?
If you could come up with a good and simple way to do that for, say, a drug dealer, or a murderer, then I'd support it
Get rid of the war on drugs, and so reduce the number of drug dealers and murderers and free up resources that can be better spent on real crimes?
the crooks in question here are doing jobs no one else is doing.
Are they, or are the people who are doing the jobs not getting listened to?
discovering a technological exploit no one else is doing IS interesting and useful to society, however badly implented by the crook.
The crooks who I've dealt with have mostly been good at social engineering... getting listened to... not discovering technical holes. Just like a good chunk of the other half million nlokes in jail. Getting society to listen to the people who are pointing out the holes, often for years before the crooks decided to use them, is a better way to solve that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The capacitive sensor means that any contact with the left side of the mouse is interpreted as a left-click, so I have to actively lift my index finger rather than simply not apply pressure with it to get a right-click. The pivoting design means that I have to actually move my hand or apply significant force with my fingertips to get a click at all.
The result is that instead of being able to rest my fingertips on the buttons and apply a slight additional pressure with one finger to click, I have to use two fingers for a click, and for a right click I have to move them in opposite directions. This causes enough additional strain to trigger an RSI incident within only a few minutes.
I have to give props to the puck. I hold the mouse with the tips of my fingersL/i>
So do I.
Look at your palm and curl your fingers slightly inward. What shape does that create? Right...a circle.
For me it creates an irregular polygon. The ring and little fingers of my hand naturally move together and the back third of a typical mouse is easily held between them and my thumb, with the middle and index fingers resting lightly on the front of the mouse, and the palm and heel of my hand not touching the mouse at all. This puts the positional controller of the mouse slightly forward of the tip of my thumb. With the "puck" mouse I have to hold the mouse at the midpoint, which moves the positional control back and reduces my accuracy because I can't make fine movements by pivoting the mouse with my fingers... I have to move my whole hand. In addition, I have to curl my "button" fingers more which causes more strain.
With Apple's pivoting mice I again have to hold the mouse closer to the midpoint, which reduces my accuracy.
With the "Mighty Mouse" I can't rest my fingers on the front of the mouse.
Microsoft's $10.00-$15.00 "Basic Optical Mouse" is the best two-button mouse I have found.
I like the Apple Pro mouse (for a one-button mouse); it doesn't feel that different from the old ADB mouse.
It sure does for me. Any of the pivoting mice are painful to use. I mean that literally: it causes me extreme pain in my right wrist and three outer fingers.
My only complaint about the Mighty Mouse is that because the left and right buttons aren't separate buttons, if I try to right-click without first lifting my left finger off the button, it'll register as a left-click.
Even discounting the pain I suffer using the pivoting mice, or the fact that you have to be a trained card-sharp to lift the mouse while holding the button, that would already be a "one strike and you're out". I'm not giving them two, let alone the three they want to take.
At the time, both the lack of a floppy and the inclusion of USB were much criticized. In hindsight, these moves are now considered forward thinking.
On the other hand the hockey-puck mouse was a disaster, and its descendants (down to and including the Mighty Mouse) are still ergonomic nightmares. The iMac keyboard was also pretty but unpleasant to use compared to the ADB keyboards, and Apple still hasn't really recovered. Luckily PC USB keyboards and Mice work well with the Mac, and I'm using a Microsoft keyboard and Microsoft mouse on mine.
My son had one until a couple months ago, now a friend of his is running Jaguar on it.
The source code is shipped with every binary and in selected models you get a complete self-hosted build environment at no extra charge. The user interface is a bit rough, and compile time is pretty high, but it definitely complies with the GPL.
There have been a number of incidents of trojans and viruses being distributed in commercial shrinkwrapped software. Firefox was slack, like commercial distributors have now and then been slack. You get caught by surprise, fix the process, and keep going, and keep it from happening again.
If they don't address the process that caused the problem, then start worrying.
If Linux is better than MS window then surely you won't mind paying more to get it?
Red herring. This isn't about us, it's about Microsoft buying market share.
Similar or better then, nitpicker.
I assume Microsoft is trying to convince the movie industry that they're better off backing the Zune than the iPod.And the result?Sounds like Apple is still stubbornly refusing to tell NBC that they can beat the laws of physics, but Microsoft was prepared to tell them what they wanted to hear.
That would be the original shuttle "E", Enterprise? They replaced with a mock-up after it disappeared while they were testing an electromagnetic reentry shield over Philadelphia.
Don't forget that the lead time on space experiments can be years, and you need to use equipment that was rated for space use when you specced it out... not when it went up... which adds even more lead time. Read up on the shuttle computers some time to get an idea of how conservative they are.
And in this care it was a damn good thing: the higher the information density on the drive, the lower the chance of recovering the data... and they were right on the edge of the possible as it was.
And imagine that you run the risk that if you post something that the moderator doesn't agree with you lose $10.
To be precise, you lose the ability to post to that particular forum with that particular account on that particular proxy again. The moderator isn't telling the proxy "block this account", he's telling his webserver "block this UUID". It's if you want to post anonymously on that forum *again*, after being banned, that you start losing money.
People won't sign up for that service. They'll just go back to yelling at the TV.
And the downside of this is what?
No, seriously, there used to be a couple of general comment systems like that. They tended to get little interest, unless they started off with a big burst of publicity in which case they got denounced by pundits who didn't want people seeing markup under, over, inline with, or hovering about their words (depending on how the particular scheme was implemented). But even then, after a burst of interest, they tended to die out... too much popularity made them a bottleneck, or too little made them pointless (or both, in fairly obvious stages).
An alternative that I've seen versions of now and then are plugins that look up references to the page you're viewing in Google and the like, and let you know that someone is linking there. I haven't seen one of them for a while, I suspect they mostly attracted spam.
Then of course there's trackback schemes, but they require cooperation from the site.
Feedback and commentary on the Internet remains a complex dance of posts talking about posts, on the popular technology of the day... bulletin boards, groups, forums, blogs, whatever the next big thing is... and you still have to look for counterpoints yourself.
What Jim Brady is really looking for is not an end to anonymity, it's for an end to unaccountability. It's not that posting to WashingtonPost.com is anonymous, it's that it's anonymous and the posters have nothing at stake.
There are any number of schemes that can combine anonymity and accountability... with accountability limited to the cost of creating the anonymous pseudonym you're using to post. I'm sure readers of slashdot can think of any number of schemes that would fulfill his requirements.
Simply requiring a repliable mail address creates a small cost for anonymity... possibly not enough for Jim, but enough to deter many "reflex" posters.
But imagine an anonymizing proxy that costs $9.95 to get an account on. When you post through it, it passes some token to the webserver (possibly via HTTP headers) that contains a consistent random UUID associated with your account on the proxy, and the server can block postings by UUID. Then each time you anonymously post scatological material to WP, it'll cost you almost ten bucks, but as far as the WP is concerned you're still as anonymous as if you were posting from the public library.
I think that's MORE than enough accountability for the likes of a public bulletin board, no?
i think i am pissing you off
Thanks. You made my point for me.
Sory, Ceiling Cat wuz napping. duz you wants cheezburger?
Sounds more like a windowbox than a farm.
Did you read the article? It explicitly points out the same point that you're making and says that courts have found that for this specific provision the license is not the determining factor.
what is interesting about that SPECIFIC example? frank abagnale made specific powerful technological innovations.
Pretend you're talking to someone who doesn't watch every pop movie that goes by on the idiot box, but who has (a) been involved in real life situations where someone supposedly came up with really clever new tricks but turned out to be just another script kiddy, and (b) has personally watched reporters (let alone people making docudramas) screw up fundamental facts like this.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to (a) support your characterization of this fella, and (b) demonstrate that this kind of case is common enough to be used as the basis for policy.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
The best way to do that is to cost them a lot of money (or threaten to) or earn them (or save them) a lot of money. The easiest way is to cost them a lot of money. Pity it's unethical.
A valuable skill in any manager's job is learning to listen to the people working for you. I've had the pleasant experience of having managers with that skill, and I've saved them a fair amount of money as a result.
a valuable social skill in life in ANY job is getting people to listen to you
Like, say, by taking the piss from people who think you're a twit for not bothering with ordinary punctuation?
(oh, didn't I mention, I didn't lose my job to a crooked ex-con... this isn't about me, you'll have to try harder to piss me off)
Moist Lipwig is a character in a book, not a real person. Characters in books are frequently more charismatic, capable, and paradoxically honorable than the people they represent in real life.
But you've also taken a job away from someone who may or may not be good enough and given it to someone who definitely is good enough.
That's a bold assertion, but is it true? Or have you taken a job from a competent guy who has been trying to get his boss to pay attention to a problem for several years and given it to someone who is less competent, but less ethical and more personable?
If you could come up with a good and simple way to do that for, say, a drug dealer, or a murderer, then I'd support it
Get rid of the war on drugs, and so reduce the number of drug dealers and murderers and free up resources that can be better spent on real crimes?
What honest man has that intimate of knowledge of how check fraud is done?
The ones already doing the job of catching the crooks, for one.
the crooks in question here are doing jobs no one else is doing.
Are they, or are the people who are doing the jobs not getting listened to?
discovering a technological exploit no one else is doing IS interesting and useful to society, however badly implented by the crook.
The crooks who I've dealt with have mostly been good at social engineering... getting listened to... not discovering technical holes. Just like a good chunk of the other half million nlokes in jail. Getting society to listen to the people who are pointing out the holes, often for years before the crooks decided to use them, is a better way to solve that problem.