Their selection of gestures seems likely to cause problems. The gesture for double-click is three fingers... but for dragging you tap-and-hold with three fingers.
And you really don't want to mix up dragging and double-clicking.
Wheel tilts for side-to-side scrolling, Cruise Control(TM) rocker for speed-scrolling up and down, and zoom with a click of the wheel
They've put four buttons around the wheel like a Nintendo Gamepad. Great idea, but then... who needs the wheel? Give me one of those without the wheel (or with a trackpoint controller that works the same way).
Ironically, Logitech did a half-assed implementation of a better way to scroll with the mouse. They had a program that let you use the middle button in their three button mouse as a grabber. When you clicked the button it put a distinctive icon on the page, and when you dragged the mouse it scrolled up and down.
Now if you just left off the icon (because it tended to clutter things up and interacted poorly with many programs), and let you scroll sideways with the middle button... your simple three-button mouse would work better than the latest pivot-rocker-scroll-wheel-thumb-button monster.
I just don't understand why there seem to be a bazillion mice (most of which are pretty much the same anyway) for each model of trackball that's out there.
That's OK, I can't understand why every time I get to the store there's a bunch of different kinds of trackballs and half a dozen variants of the Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse and *zero* three-button mice. No, a wheel mouse that lets you click the wheel isn't a three button mouse... it's a two-button mouse with a wheel.
What I really want is a mouse with an IBM trackpoint widget that acts like a "hat controller" and lets me scroll in both directions. IBM made a mouse with a trackpoint widget, but for some BIZARRE reason it didn't support left-right motion. Now why didn't it succeed?
Now Microsoft's come out with a mouse with a wheel you can pivot left and right.
Christ. Talk about a Heath-Robinson (Rube-Goldberg for you yanks) solution to the problem...
But, anyway, I don't see any shortage of trackballs. Quite the opposite.:)
Every person that I've ever convinced to switch to a trackball has said that they'll never go back to mice again.
I've tried half a dozen trackballs and I've always gone back to a mouse.
Trackballs hurt me... they require more precision than I'm easily capable of. They don't seem to want to stay put, so I'm forever chasing the pointer around the screen.
DEC (or rather, by the time the decision was made, Compaq) had the resources to do it. They had the team working on the next generation when they pulled a 180 and sold the team, lock stock and blueprint, to Intel.
As for what Intel lifted from Alpha... all they got was implementation. The core technologies of the Alpha are the instruction set and architecture. The only way to "steal" those would be to replace the Pentium instruction set with the Alpha instruction set.
And the software running on the Alpha includes not only Linux (being an AMD fan, I assume that's your UNIX of choice) but the best and most advanced commercial UNIX... the only one built on a modern BSD kernel.
HP tried to do the same trick that you think Intel did, to lift the core technology from Tru64 and install it in HPUX. They couldn't do that either... it's a shame they killed the donor before they called off the surgery.
While you're talking about HP and Lucent... don't forget, she was instrumental in killing the last great product from DEC as well. Oh, Compaq swore that dumping it was their idea, but it was right before the takeover that they switched from "We'll stand behind Alpha come hell or high water" to "Look at this shiny new Itanium!"
You're basing your idea of what it takes to innovate on Drexler's dreams of nanotech? You're basing your idea of what it takes to develop software on the Microsoft model... in 2005, with Microsoft's products looking pale and dowdy next to the bronzed and hearty open-source products?
Not meaning to defend Carly, but Lord you could have picked your examples better.
Who do you suppose will buy whatever IP assets they have remaining? Oh, to be sure, there's serious questions about what those might be... but they did buy some kind of rights from Novell. Will they go to someone even slimier, or someone who will place them in some open domain?
Apple has a right to find out who in their company is both breaking the law and lieing to them.
They have a right to try, yes.
The courts shouldn't have granted them their request. That's where the real problem lies.
I'm not letting Apple off the hook here, though. They should have been able to follow the same reasoning and decide not to proceed because the court case would be a lose-lose proposition for them. If they win, they get more bad press than the leak was worth. If they lose, they've spent money to no benefit.
and supports rendering with both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser engines
I guess I'll have to add Netscape to my list of banned applications, along with IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player, and Realplayer... basically, any application that uses the MS HTML control to render outside-sourced documents.
After seven years of exploits and failed fixes, why does anyone outside Microsoft still use this "Typhoid Mary" of the software world?
I don't think these kinds of "phishing exploits" should be classified with security vulnerabilities. They make it easier to fool a naive user... but they're not at all necessary... the existing phishing attacks will continue to succeed as long as companies keep asking people to do stupid things.
I really have recieved real, legitimate mail from Microsoft asking me to download and apply a patch... and nobody at Microsoft I spoke to saw anything strange about it... and the IT people where I work have done the same kind of thing even after I asked them not to and they agreed they wouldn't.
The term "Security vulnerabilities" needs to be restricted to things like remote execution attacks, watering it down doesn't help anyone.
I hate MDI, I much prefer organizing my work by virtual desktop, so I'll have one desktop per task and the all the windows associated with that task go in that desktop. MDI makes this impossible.
If your workflow is arranged around applications I can see MDI having a benefit, but that just feels unnatural to me.
From the title I thought this was actually going to solve the puzzle, not just do a lookup in a database. I was expecting something like a primitive version of the software Hiro used to reconstruct the tablet in Snow Crash.
The Shuffle is not really in the same product family. It's a little flash player, not a full-blown iPod.
Personally I prefer that design. I just gave my iPod to my daughter and ordered a Shuffle.
I'm also a happy Mac mini user... 256M isn't enough, but 256M is Apple's standard entry level on *all* their computers, mini, midi, or maxi: they'll bump it to 512M on the mini when they bump it to 512M on the 'books and iMac.
I've never understood what the point is of a docking station.
So you can slot it one-handed, and don't have to fumble for the charging cable. Whether the dock is horizontal, vertical, or at an angle is a secondary consideration.
As for the travel cable... some devices need a travel cable, some are better designed and use teh same connector on the dock and teh device, so your "special travel cable" is just the cable between the dock and the computer. The iPod is like that.
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I tend to agree that this is a problem with form-fit mice... me, I hold the mouse with my fingertips and thumb anyway... but...
You might try the Perfit mouse, it comes in 7 different sizes...
Their selection of gestures seems likely to cause problems. The gesture for double-click is three fingers... but for dragging you tap-and-hold with three fingers.
And you really don't want to mix up dragging and double-clicking.
more weird mice!
AUGH. From the page you linked...
Wheel tilts for side-to-side scrolling, Cruise Control(TM) rocker for speed-scrolling up and down, and zoom with a click of the wheel
They've put four buttons around the wheel like a Nintendo Gamepad. Great idea, but then... who needs the wheel? Give me one of those without the wheel (or with a trackpoint controller that works the same way).
Ironically, Logitech did a half-assed implementation of a better way to scroll with the mouse. They had a program that let you use the middle button in their three button mouse as a grabber. When you clicked the button it put a distinctive icon on the page, and when you dragged the mouse it scrolled up and down.
Now if you just left off the icon (because it tended to clutter things up and interacted poorly with many programs), and let you scroll sideways with the middle button... your simple three-button mouse would work better than the latest pivot-rocker-scroll-wheel-thumb-button monster.
*sigh*
I just don't understand why there seem to be a bazillion mice (most of which are pretty much the same anyway) for each model of trackball that's out there.
:)
That's OK, I can't understand why every time I get to the store there's a bunch of different kinds of trackballs and half a dozen variants of the Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse and *zero* three-button mice. No, a wheel mouse that lets you click the wheel isn't a three button mouse... it's a two-button mouse with a wheel.
What I really want is a mouse with an IBM trackpoint widget that acts like a "hat controller" and lets me scroll in both directions. IBM made a mouse with a trackpoint widget, but for some BIZARRE reason it didn't support left-right motion. Now why didn't it succeed?
Now Microsoft's come out with a mouse with a wheel you can pivot left and right.
Christ. Talk about a Heath-Robinson (Rube-Goldberg for you yanks) solution to the problem...
But, anyway, I don't see any shortage of trackballs. Quite the opposite.
Every person that I've ever convinced to switch to a trackball has said that they'll never go back to mice again.
I've tried half a dozen trackballs and I've always gone back to a mouse.
Trackballs hurt me... they require more precision than I'm easily capable of. They don't seem to want to stay put, so I'm forever chasing the pointer around the screen.
that already happened !
DEC (or rather, by the time the decision was made, Compaq) had the resources to do it. They had the team working on the next generation when they pulled a 180 and sold the team, lock stock and blueprint, to Intel.
As for what Intel lifted from Alpha... all they got was implementation. The core technologies of the Alpha are the instruction set and architecture. The only way to "steal" those would be to replace the Pentium instruction set with the Alpha instruction set.
And the software running on the Alpha includes not only Linux (being an AMD fan, I assume that's your UNIX of choice) but the best and most advanced commercial UNIX... the only one built on a modern BSD kernel.
HP tried to do the same trick that you think Intel did, to lift the core technology from Tru64 and install it in HPUX. They couldn't do that either... it's a shame they killed the donor before they called off the surgery.
While you're talking about HP and Lucent... don't forget, she was instrumental in killing the last great product from DEC as well. Oh, Compaq swore that dumping it was their idea, but it was right before the takeover that they switched from "We'll stand behind Alpha come hell or high water" to "Look at this shiny new Itanium!"
You're basing your idea of what it takes to innovate on Drexler's dreams of nanotech? You're basing your idea of what it takes to develop software on the Microsoft model... in 2005, with Microsoft's products looking pale and dowdy next to the bronzed and hearty open-source products?
Not meaning to defend Carly, but Lord you could have picked your examples better.
Who do you suppose will buy whatever IP assets they have remaining? Oh, to be sure, there's serious questions about what those might be... but they did buy some kind of rights from Novell. Will they go to someone even slimier, or someone who will place them in some open domain?
Maybe it's time to set up a fund to bid on them?
Theres no point in having people sign an NDA if you're not going to bother enforcing it.
It's a matter of picking your battles. I think this was a poor choice of ground for Apple to choose to defend.
Microsoft's DRM is OS level, not application level.
Apple has a right to find out who in their company is both breaking the law and lieing to them.
They have a right to try, yes.
The courts shouldn't have granted them their request. That's where the real problem lies.
I'm not letting Apple off the hook here, though. They should have been able to follow the same reasoning and decide not to proceed because the court case would be a lose-lose proposition for them. If they win, they get more bad press than the leak was worth. If they lose, they've spent money to no benefit.
I hope the ashes of victory taste good.
Um, yeh, didn't you read the bit where they said the cluster**** edition would be crippled to avoid people using it for things like webservers?
and supports rendering with both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser engines
I guess I'll have to add Netscape to my list of banned applications, along with IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player, and Realplayer... basically, any application that uses the MS HTML control to render outside-sourced documents.
After seven years of exploits and failed fixes, why does anyone outside Microsoft still use this "Typhoid Mary" of the software world?
I don't think these kinds of "phishing exploits" should be classified with security vulnerabilities. They make it easier to fool a naive user... but they're not at all necessary... the existing phishing attacks will continue to succeed as long as companies keep asking people to do stupid things.
I really have recieved real, legitimate mail from Microsoft asking me to download and apply a patch... and nobody at Microsoft I spoke to saw anything strange about it... and the IT people where I work have done the same kind of thing even after I asked them not to and they agreed they wouldn't.
The term "Security vulnerabilities" needs to be restricted to things like remote execution attacks, watering it down doesn't help anyone.
Recompiling the kernel with the latest patches is something that happens at lunch time. Daily.
After a few years this gets real old.
There's no accounting for taste.
I hate MDI, I much prefer organizing my work by virtual desktop, so I'll have one desktop per task and the all the windows associated with that task go in that desktop. MDI makes this impossible.
If your workflow is arranged around applications I can see MDI having a benefit, but that just feels unnatural to me.
Although I love being able to alt-tab through the individual windows of an open app under XP (requires F10 on the Mac, still drives me nuts),
Install Peter Maurer's Witch and you'll have your alt-tab back again.
From the title I thought this was actually going to solve the puzzle, not just do a lookup in a database. I was expecting something like a primitive version of the software Hiro used to reconstruct the tablet in Snow Crash.
The USB dock is the same as the Firewire dock.
though only mini's and larger even have Firewire
The Shuffle is not really in the same product family. It's a little flash player, not a full-blown iPod.
Personally I prefer that design. I just gave my iPod to my daughter and ordered a Shuffle.
I'm also a happy Mac mini user... 256M isn't enough, but 256M is Apple's standard entry level on *all* their computers, mini, midi, or maxi: they'll bump it to 512M on the mini when they bump it to 512M on the 'books and iMac.
I've never understood what the point is of a docking station.
So you can slot it one-handed, and don't have to fumble for the charging cable. Whether the dock is horizontal, vertical, or at an angle is a secondary consideration.
As for the travel cable... some devices need a travel cable, some are better designed and use teh same connector on the dock and teh device, so your "special travel cable" is just the cable between the dock and the computer. The iPod is like that.
Not likely, but a WiFi iPod that did the Airtunes thing would be conceivable. You'd still have a dock, though, as a charging station if nothing else.
The only iPod-branded device lacking firewire is the iPod Shuffle. The new Minis have firewire, they just aren't bundled with a firewire cable.