There's no functional difference. The number of physical switches doesn't enter into it.
Sure it does. A physical switch is activated by pressing. A capacitive sensor is activated by touching.
I notice you're ignoring the 2 side buttons and the scrollball.
What part of "The two buttons that matter for normal use are left-click and right-click." did you fail to see? You clearly disagree with me on the relative importance of these operations, but claiming I'm ignoring them is intellectual dishonesty.
Or maybe you've got some problems with a preconceived notion that every button can only have one specific mechanism to make it work.
It doesn't matter whether a button uses a microswitch, or a buckling-spring mechanism, or a mercury tilt switch, or a dome contact, or a pair of leaf contacts, these can all provide the functionality of a button... some are more reliable or durable than others, but they all provide the same functionality. This is a different functionality than a capacitive sensor. One involves an active process (pressing the left or right side of the mouse) the other is passive (the mouse senses the location of fingers when the mouse is tilted forward).
A couple of times I've had someone "correct" me pointing to Wikipedia, where the article that they're pointing to is one I'd contributed to. Sometimes the article has become self-contradictory under the influence of multiple editors, other times the article is being more actively edited by someone who he happens to agree with. Either way, I "know" at least as much about the subject as Wikipedia does.
You really can't tell what a Wikipedia entry really means without reading the discussion page. In fact, that's often more informative than the article itself.
Read the fine followups before posting more insinuendo.
The two buttons that matter for normal use are left-click and right-click. The rest of the buttons are lagniappes. The Mighty Mouse uses a single button plus a capacitance sensor to fake right-click by clicking without anything touching the left side of the mouse. If you use the index finger for both left and right click that works fine, but if you normally rest both the index and middle fingers on the mouse and click one or the other it's completely useless.
I've had a "mighty mouse" and it drove me "batfink".
Apple only ships single-button pointing devices, with a variety of subterfuges to simulate the right button. There is no ignorance or deception on my part, the only deception is the pretense that subsidiary buttons or stupid tricks with touch sensors are an adequate replacement for two standard buttons.
Ironically, it led to the 960, which is probably the most conventional processor Intel ever designed. Straightforward RISC with decent performance... unfortunately the MMU was owned by Seimens so they ended up having to release it without an MMU as an embedded processor, while their next disaster (the i860) got all their attention.
No, but it would defeat the purpose of their UI design rules.
You mean "guidelines". The ones they blithely violate themselves, in new and exciting ways in every new release of the OS?
It'd give developers an excuse to be lazy with their design decisions and make the second button required instead of an optional method of access.
If Apple provided a proper input manager and API so that you just got a "context menu" event from the OS instead of having to take three different event sequences (right click, click and hold, and control click) and merge them into "context menu" that wouldn't be a problem.
The result? I've found plenty of programs on the Mac that miss at least one of the three mechanisms, including a few from Apple.
Not only that, but a proper input manager would let them rationalize all the magic hotkey hacks that programs use into a single control panel.
Go buy a seperate mouse if you have a dire need for a second mouse button (I did.)
That's the first line of defense for the hardcore Mac fanboys, isn't it. Anyone who doesn't love every feature of the Mac or Mac OS, no matter how bad, must be some Windows nutjob who's never actually used a Mac.
My first Mac was the original Mac 128k. The one that was simply "Macintosh" not "Macintosh something". I've also had an SE/30, Performa 475, Powermac 7200, Powermac 7600 (upgraded to a G3), and a real beige G3 I upgraded to a G4/533, I upgraded to a G4 Mac mini as soon as it came out, and I've had a Macbook Pro since THAT first came out.
That "using Macs" enough for you, fanboy?
The Mighty Mouse does NOT have two buttons... it uses a variant of the double-finger-tap technique... but using a capacitance sensor that can't distinguish between a two-finger click and a left-click, so I have to lift my index finger when I want to right-click.
Control-click is uncomfortable, on a keyboard that already causes me physical pain to use extensively. Two-finger-tap on the trackpad tends to lead to my mouse pointer skittering off the target when I right-click.
Apple doesn't need to keep up their idiot fight against the rest of the world. Putting two real buttons won't make people hate them.
Who else does backlit keyboards?
My Thinkpad T23 had an LED installed over the screen that comes on in low-light conditions that provides better illumination of the keyboard than Apple's backlit keyboard does.
XP was Windows 2000 with a new theme and some bundled software. Even now about the only software I run into that has trouble on Windows 2000 is software that specifically checks for the OS it's running on and refuses to run on anything less than XP.
It was NT4.0 where Microsoft really worked over NT, culling subsystems and doing things like putting GDI in the kernel to let it run games at the cost of stability.
100% of the 240-volt countries I'm familiar with have switched outlets. Yes, it's a sample size of two, but if Australia and Great Britain do it the rest must be merely statistical error.
as a recent immigrant, I notice many wall sockets here in the U.K. have a switch right on them, rather than needing to unplug a device to stop it from drawing power.
You're on 220-240 volts now, babe, it's got a lot more bite than the USA's 110 domestic power. You turn the power OFF when you're not using the outlet.
Or have they redefined "hibernation"? Hibernation used to mean "you save all the system state to disk, and cut power". You should be able to use the big toggle switch on the back and drop AC completely.
You shouldn't need to keep a "trickle" going unless you want to use something like "wake on lan".
The only reason any hardware manufacturer would care is if they intend to keep the source closed and be the only maintainers of the driver.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
See, most hardware manufacturers don't REALLY care about the source to their drivers... but they DO need to be able to ship updated drivers to patch firmware problems, and ship drivers in the box with a new product without telling potential users they need to update to an experimental kernel to use it. So whether they ship source or not they need stable APIs.
The only reason to want a linux OS desktop over the other OSes is for the openness,
You're selling Linux short. I'm not even a big fan of Linux... I'm one of the guys who was already working on the other free UNIX before there was such a thing as Linux out there... and even I think it's got a lot of potential that people making a political statement about *one* of the kinds of openness are unfairly limiting.
Oh yes, there's 30 extensions to fix every problem with Firefox, and by the time you're done fixing them all it's locking up every five minutes. Been there, done that, decided that NOT using extensions was the "slim" way forward.
How about making the default minimal, and leaving the spam for the spam fans?
The Thinkpad has pretty much always had the best keyboard in a laptop, ever since Toshiba quit putting full-sized keys in their Satellites. Apple's keyboards have never been great, but they peaked with the Extended II keyboard just before Jobs came back and since the iMac and blue-and-white G3 Apple's keyboards have been downright horrible, to the point where I have to use an external keyboard with my Macbook Pro to avoid physical pain.
And Apple's passive-aggressive refusal to just put two goddam buttons on their mice and trackpads is worth about a million points against them.
Microsoft's been pushing this new and previously unknown use of the term. And it's annoying.
For years the "Mac Tax" has been the roughly 40% price premium that you generally pay to get Apple typically anemic hardware. It's what goes to pay for the operating system and other software that's the real value for Mac users... the hardware is pretty but not really all that good.
Now Microsoft's started pushing this new and poisonous meaning. Screw them and the horse they rode in on.
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There's no functional difference. The number of physical switches doesn't enter into it.
Sure it does. A physical switch is activated by pressing. A capacitive sensor is activated by touching.
I notice you're ignoring the 2 side buttons and the scrollball.
What part of "The two buttons that matter for normal use are left-click and right-click." did you fail to see? You clearly disagree with me on the relative importance of these operations, but claiming I'm ignoring them is intellectual dishonesty.
Or maybe you've got some problems with a preconceived notion that every button can only have one specific mechanism to make it work.
It doesn't matter whether a button uses a microswitch, or a buckling-spring mechanism, or a mercury tilt switch, or a dome contact, or a pair of leaf contacts, these can all provide the functionality of a button... some are more reliable or durable than others, but they all provide the same functionality. This is a different functionality than a capacitive sensor. One involves an active process (pressing the left or right side of the mouse) the other is passive (the mouse senses the location of fingers when the mouse is tilted forward).
Fanboy enough?
You tell me. You're the one who assumed that someone who doesn't like one-button mice never used a Mac.
You're also blindly ignoring the fact that that's just personal preference
If it was something you could personalize, that would be something to keep in mind, yes.
and you're more than welcome to plug-in any two button mouse you like and it will work.
What, in the trackpad slot?
A couple of times I've had someone "correct" me pointing to Wikipedia, where the article that they're pointing to is one I'd contributed to. Sometimes the article has become self-contradictory under the influence of multiple editors, other times the article is being more actively edited by someone who he happens to agree with. Either way, I "know" at least as much about the subject as Wikipedia does.
You really can't tell what a Wikipedia entry really means without reading the discussion page. In fact, that's often more informative than the article itself.
Hmmm. Seems to be an anglicization of amortiguar. Verbogeny in action.
Read the fine followups before posting more insinuendo.
The two buttons that matter for normal use are left-click and right-click. The rest of the buttons are lagniappes. The Mighty Mouse uses a single button plus a capacitance sensor to fake right-click by clicking without anything touching the left side of the mouse. If you use the index finger for both left and right click that works fine, but if you normally rest both the index and middle fingers on the mouse and click one or the other it's completely useless.
I've had a "mighty mouse" and it drove me "batfink".
Apple only ships single-button pointing devices, with a variety of subterfuges to simulate the right button. There is no ignorance or deception on my part, the only deception is the pretense that subsidiary buttons or stupid tricks with touch sensors are an adequate replacement for two standard buttons.
Ironically, it led to the 960, which is probably the most conventional processor Intel ever designed. Straightforward RISC with decent performance ... unfortunately the MMU was owned by Seimens so they ended up having to release it without an MMU as an embedded processor, while their next disaster (the i860) got all their attention.
No, but it would defeat the purpose of their UI design rules.
You mean "guidelines". The ones they blithely violate themselves, in new and exciting ways in every new release of the OS?
It'd give developers an excuse to be lazy with their design decisions and make the second button required instead of an optional method of access.
If Apple provided a proper input manager and API so that you just got a "context menu" event from the OS instead of having to take three different event sequences (right click, click and hold, and control click) and merge them into "context menu" that wouldn't be a problem.
The result? I've found plenty of programs on the Mac that miss at least one of the three mechanisms, including a few from Apple.
Not only that, but a proper input manager would let them rationalize all the magic hotkey hacks that programs use into a single control panel.
Go buy a seperate mouse if you have a dire need for a second mouse button (I did.)
How do you upgrade the trackpad on a laptop?
That's not just dust on Intel's sword, that's blood. Alpha was stabbed in the back.
Why yes, I *am* still bitter about it.
Another reason pirates prefer XP to Vista: people are actually willing to pay money for XP.
Even if they already HAVE Vista.
If Microsoft's idea of innovation is shipping an OS that people still don't want forced on them, then I'm all for limiting innovation.
Not interested. If I want one of Intel's car-wreck processor designs I'll get an iApx432. At least that one's historically interesting.
You don't use Mac's do you?
That's the first line of defense for the hardcore Mac fanboys, isn't it. Anyone who doesn't love every feature of the Mac or Mac OS, no matter how bad, must be some Windows nutjob who's never actually used a Mac.
My first Mac was the original Mac 128k. The one that was simply "Macintosh" not "Macintosh something". I've also had an SE/30, Performa 475, Powermac 7200, Powermac 7600 (upgraded to a G3), and a real beige G3 I upgraded to a G4/533, I upgraded to a G4 Mac mini as soon as it came out, and I've had a Macbook Pro since THAT first came out.
That "using Macs" enough for you, fanboy?
The Mighty Mouse does NOT have two buttons... it uses a variant of the double-finger-tap technique... but using a capacitance sensor that can't distinguish between a two-finger click and a left-click, so I have to lift my index finger when I want to right-click.
Control-click is uncomfortable, on a keyboard that already causes me physical pain to use extensively. Two-finger-tap on the trackpad tends to lead to my mouse pointer skittering off the target when I right-click.
Apple doesn't need to keep up their idiot fight against the rest of the world. Putting two real buttons won't make people hate them.
Who else does backlit keyboards?
My Thinkpad T23 had an LED installed over the screen that comes on in low-light conditions that provides better illumination of the keyboard than Apple's backlit keyboard does.
XP was Windows 2000 with a new theme and some bundled software. Even now about the only software I run into that has trouble on Windows 2000 is software that specifically checks for the OS it's running on and refuses to run on anything less than XP.
It was NT4.0 where Microsoft really worked over NT, culling subsystems and doing things like putting GDI in the kernel to let it run games at the cost of stability.
Netherlands, Germany, France and anywhere else I have been (two dozen countries at least in total) don't have this arrangement.
Oh, well, they're sloppy on the Continent.
Doesn't everyone generalize from a single example? I know I do!
100% of the 240-volt countries I'm familiar with have switched outlets. Yes, it's a sample size of two, but if Australia and Great Britain do it the rest must be merely statistical error.
Google shows about 26 hits for the word, but no definition or etymology.
as a recent immigrant, I notice many wall sockets here in the U.K. have a switch right on them, rather than needing to unplug a device to stop it from drawing power.
You're on 220-240 volts now, babe, it's got a lot more bite than the USA's 110 domestic power. You turn the power OFF when you're not using the outlet.
Or have they redefined "hibernation"? Hibernation used to mean "you save all the system state to disk, and cut power". You should be able to use the big toggle switch on the back and drop AC completely.
You shouldn't need to keep a "trickle" going unless you want to use something like "wake on lan".
The only reason any hardware manufacturer would care is if they intend to keep the source closed and be the only maintainers of the driver.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
See, most hardware manufacturers don't REALLY care about the source to their drivers... but they DO need to be able to ship updated drivers to patch firmware problems, and ship drivers in the box with a new product without telling potential users they need to update to an experimental kernel to use it. So whether they ship source or not they need stable APIs.
The only reason to want a linux OS desktop over the other OSes is for the openness,
You're selling Linux short. I'm not even a big fan of Linux... I'm one of the guys who was already working on the other free UNIX before there was such a thing as Linux out there... and even I think it's got a lot of potential that people making a political statement about *one* of the kinds of openness are unfairly limiting.
Have a problem? FF addons are to the rescue!
Oh yes, there's 30 extensions to fix every problem with Firefox, and by the time you're done fixing them all it's locking up every five minutes. Been there, done that, decided that NOT using extensions was the "slim" way forward.
How about making the default minimal, and leaving the spam for the spam fans?
I have to say, I heard the term "Mac tax" years ago. It's been around for a long time, I'm afraid.
Um, yes, that's what I said:
On top of that you can get a Thinkpad that's as good match with the Macbook than the one they picked... and still stay under $1000.
That doesn't mean Macs are overpriced. It just means that Apple's charging a hidden premium for OS X.
Whether that premium is worth it is up to you. But don't pretend it's not there.
The Thinkpad has pretty much always had the best keyboard in a laptop, ever since Toshiba quit putting full-sized keys in their Satellites. Apple's keyboards have never been great, but they peaked with the Extended II keyboard just before Jobs came back and since the iMac and blue-and-white G3 Apple's keyboards have been downright horrible, to the point where I have to use an external keyboard with my Macbook Pro to avoid physical pain.
And Apple's passive-aggressive refusal to just put two goddam buttons on their mice and trackpads is worth about a million points against them.
Advantage Lenovo.
Microsoft's been pushing this new and previously unknown use of the term. And it's annoying.
For years the "Mac Tax" has been the roughly 40% price premium that you generally pay to get Apple typically anemic hardware. It's what goes to pay for the operating system and other software that's the real value for Mac users... the hardware is pretty but not really all that good.
Now Microsoft's started pushing this new and poisonous meaning. Screw them and the horse they rode in on.
Peer and Kate read, "Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin."