The touch buttons only work if you touch them with you're skin
Is the scroll wheel also this way? On the touch wheel iPod I have, it's not, so they must have redesigned it. Anyway, on my revision of the hardware, the only thing that prevents the touch wheel from being "jostled" is the fact that it is surrounded by a rim of mechanical, somewhat press-resistant buttons.
Another advantage to the old-style 4-corners buttons is that I can reach in my pocket and by only knowing the orientation of the iPod (which I know because the headphones only come out of the top) I can hit any of the 4 buttons without fail. Want to pause? I reach for the far bottom and work up until I find the button. Want to skip forward a track? I reach for the right side and work left, hitting the first button I find.
The small row of buttons offers none of these affordances. There's less produdance to feel, and no horizontal-vertical orientation to the buttons to rely on... only horizontal.
I mean, you can say it's not really that bad, but what affordances do the touch buttons give you besides a slightly thinner form factor?
(I guess I'll find out soon enough... my friend got one of the new ones and says I can have a review session.:-))
The radial menu of the iPod is really efficient, but evidentally Apple doesn't know/care. The latest revision of the iPod does away with the buttons laid out around the edge of the wheel, replacing them with 4 similarly-labeled buttons above the wheel. (And they're "touch" buttons, rather than mechanical ones, allowing for easier accidental pushing than the mechanical ones, besides the fact they no longer guard the touch wheel... all in all, meaning you had better have the thing locked when it's in your pocket.)
It seems like they're willing to throw away good design to get upgrades.
I reread the article and near the end the writer mentions this functionality. Sounds like a good phone to me... now the next question is, does the user interface suck like most Nokia phones?
Bluetooth & the sound meter
on
Nokia 5100 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Informative
And yet there is no Bluetooth capabilites. Is the cell phone market getting so desperate that companies are adding everything including the kitchen sink to sell these phones? Why would you want a sound meter or a calorie tracking application in a cell phone?
Bluetooth is just another one of these features.
Now, the decibel level hardware were able to adjust the phone's ring/speaker volume to be appropriate for the conditions, I'd say that would be more useful than Bluetooth. I'm willing to bet it does and the reviewer just didn't notice. The sound meter app is probably just because-we-can-ware.
I find it hard to believe that this is how adults react in such a situation?
Do you live on the same planet I do? Here on Terra the reaction of adults is wholely unpredictable. Myself included. Of course a database and a browser are the same. Let us send our nasty Terran rage mail in peace please.
So it does. I was thinking of NT VGA Mode, which is somewhat the equivalent of XP Safe Mode (of which this VGA Mode you pointed out seems to be now a subsetting?)
But if you really need help, could you please explain your problem? Did you press F8 repeatedly and it just didn't enter the safe mode menu? Did you see the menu, choose an option, and it booted into non-safe mode anyway? What did you do? "No safe mode" is about the equivalent of "XP doesn't have a VGA mode" if you'd like to compare apples to apples or inane comments to inane comments.;-)
XP doesn't have a VGA mode... and in XP the normal behavior on an abnormal restart (like one caused by a bluescreen) *usually* results in XP's safe-mode menu showing up automatically without you having to do anything. You might have pointed that out rather than saying something vague. Your comment didn't indicate to me that you knew these things so I thought I'd offer a few hints to how I solved my issue. I suppose you just charged 2 hours more labor reinstalling the OS one more time?...:)
Re:Other ways the market should be working
on
LCD Price Fixing?
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· Score: 1
Most definitely said while knocking on wood, I have a 23-inch LCD with no dead pixels for much less than $3000. (www.apple.com) I was told and read under my extended warranty plan that with any dead pixels (even a single one) over the period of 2 years I could take it back for a replacement... including if when I powered it up for the first time it had one.
You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?
I believe F8 gets you there if the menu's not shown. Switch to it and you'll boot fine without crashes. Then turn off the "instant reboot" on bluescreens (somewhere in My Computer->Properties maybe?) and give it a reboot into normal mode. This will let you see the bluescreen that's kicking your computer's ass every time it hits the desktop and the component involved (which you're probably going to find is a DLL from your video driver, or possibly your NIC driver.)
I think this thing's pretty cool except for the fact that it would use a touchscreen keyboard in landscape mode. That would be terrible. I don't see any reason that the second panel couldn't have a normal mechanical keyboard on its backside, though.
I did exactly the same, except in landscaping. I could have driven to work at an internship but for what? A small amount more to cover my college expenses? It's not all about money. The tan, muscle, and comradery I built working outside with my hands was worth at least twice what I could have made doing QA for some random company. Excellent comment and story.
... unfortunately for your feelings one of my henchmen said he broke into your place last night and single-user-moded your 30 digit password out of existance.
Your arguement may be simple but it's irrelevant. Even with a maximum of 6 letters of extension there are ~1,600,000,000 possible extensions. 300,000,000 or so if you exclude numbers, and of that I bet at least 1,000,000 are "meaningful"/"speakable"/what ever it takes to make a good extension (erm, that's for English-speaking people anyway.)
"Windows users" are not the ones creating and using assemblies... developers are. ".netasm" would have worked fine and would have at least been considerate.
Thank you for pointing this out. There've been other good comments around the board about DLLs and how sharing should work, but you're evidentally the only one who's read the article and understands the technology.
The feature was present in.NET 1.0 as well.
I've always wondered, though... why did MS choose to keep the extension ".DLL" for.NET assemblies? That choice alone has caused more issues than I have ever seen (name conflicts between a COM DLL and a corresponding.NET interop assembly DLL, people trying to register a.NET assembly DLL with regsvr, VB6 allowing you to attempt to use a.NET DLL as a component when it doesn't work, etc. etc. etc.) While they may be "dynamic link libraries" in a traditional sense, they're not ".DLLs." Chalk the reporter up as one more of the confused.
I would definetly be in the market for this, as its one less @#$#$#@ box under my desk. I don't need more than a ~1Ghz Pentium III pc (or two). A dual Centrino on a PCI card would be a bonus. Yes I would like to bring it up as a window under os X or X (or optionally full screen cheap but decent 2d-accelerated video out the back of the card)
Why don't you just put the boxes in a closet somewhere, get it on your home network, and use some kind of network-based video? (VNC, Terminal Services, X Windows, etc.)
Aren't those considered class 1 explosives as well? I've definitely seen fireworks with more propellant potential than an Estes rocket (just not the aerodynamics.)
Or are all these wussy shipping corporations who would rather piss customers off then deal with a regulation even touching fireworks in the first place? (It's not like they're made in the US, so I assume they get shipped to the netherregions of the US somehow...)
Your missing the "gyro" bit, move your hand (with the PDA in) not write on a screen/point & click on icons.
No I didn't. I just didn't think the gyro part was a good idea for PDAs, especially since he/she didn't list any specific application. For phones it might be OK... for example, you could hold a button on the side of the phone and shake it 5 times to dial your 5th autodial number automatically.
... but mouse surfers can get all the same functionality that gestures usually provide for a browser with a right click menu or a context menu. Unless of course your mouse fingers are also holding a cup of coffee (which I have had be the case.) If you're doing that, though, you should seriously consider your mouse's safety... what if you were to spill coffee on it and it were damaged? Then you would be back to the old keyboard... the horrors!
And Opera, and Mozilla, and Konqueror, and Galeon, and Links, and Dillo, and Lynx, and Netscape 7, and Phoenix, and Skipstone, and W3m, and Emacs, and IE... well, you got the picture.
I use the first six.
It's always good to have lots of browsers. If you make the N gesture incorrectly odds are good that it will launch a browser anyway.
That's probably an urban legend... I don't see why it would be worse than any other mouse use. It's just as repetitive to move your mouse from a home position to the back button as it is to move your mouse from right to left on the webpage.
... have you ever used a PDA? The entire interfaces are driven by pen-based gestures. They don't usually have keyboards, and those that need them for normal operation aren't PDA's anyway, they're mini-laptops with crappy keyboards.
1) It standardises the position of "OK". There are significantly more boxes that only have a single "OK" gadget than there are only having a single "Cancel" gadget.
Eh? I've heard this arguement both ways and, no offense, but I really hate with the "Cancel OK" order and see no merit to that arguement.
In a dialog with a single button and no closing confirmation the button serves neither an acceptance or a denial function... it means "get this dialog out of my way." All changes made on a single-button dialog are implicitly (or are they?) saved the minute you make them, and it doesn't matter what the button is called.
If you think about that for a little bit, you might wonder why there are ANY dialogs with only a single button. Doesn't that seem restrictive? If all dialogs had an acceptance and denial button then there'd not only be positional standardization but numerical and functional standardization. Note I'm not talking about popup-message type dialogs... they are often significantly different in shape and size to put them in another category altogether.
Assuming all larger dialogs have an acceptance and denial state I think natural reading order makes most sense for button order... right-to-left in my case, so "OK Cancel." (OK being first because it's often more reversable than redoing all your work.. your milage my vary there.)
Even if people do tend to leave the mouse in the bottom right corner they don't read in a mouse-dialog direction... and that offsets any advantage that an 80 pixel mouse distance delta might give you with "Cancel OK" (assuming most people want to hit OK rather than cancel for the reversability reason I mentioned.)
1024 nodes makes a perfect 10 dimension hypercube. Hypercubes can have major advantages for speeding communications within sub-cubes, which can speed certain types of parallelized applications. Also with this architecture you can avoid a central switch system.
However, you would have to buy 10 ethernet cards per machine, which would be hard to pull off with blades, and I can't think of a way off the top of my head why a hypercube would help with frame rendering, It might be a data server locality thing... but either way, they have their reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
The touch buttons only work if you touch them with you're skin
:-))
Is the scroll wheel also this way? On the touch wheel iPod I have, it's not, so they must have redesigned it. Anyway, on my revision of the hardware, the only thing that prevents the touch wheel from being "jostled" is the fact that it is surrounded by a rim of mechanical, somewhat press-resistant buttons.
Another advantage to the old-style 4-corners buttons is that I can reach in my pocket and by only knowing the orientation of the iPod (which I know because the headphones only come out of the top) I can hit any of the 4 buttons without fail. Want to pause? I reach for the far bottom and work up until I find the button. Want to skip forward a track? I reach for the right side and work left, hitting the first button I find.
The small row of buttons offers none of these affordances. There's less produdance to feel, and no horizontal-vertical orientation to the buttons to rely on... only horizontal.
I mean, you can say it's not really that bad, but what affordances do the touch buttons give you besides a slightly thinner form factor?
(I guess I'll find out soon enough... my friend got one of the new ones and says I can have a review session.
The radial menu of the iPod is really efficient, but evidentally Apple doesn't know/care. The latest revision of the iPod does away with the buttons laid out around the edge of the wheel, replacing them with 4 similarly-labeled buttons above the wheel. (And they're "touch" buttons, rather than mechanical ones, allowing for easier accidental pushing than the mechanical ones, besides the fact they no longer guard the touch wheel... all in all, meaning you had better have the thing locked when it's in your pocket.)
It seems like they're willing to throw away good design to get upgrades.
I reread the article and near the end the writer mentions this functionality. Sounds like a good phone to me... now the next question is, does the user interface suck like most Nokia phones?
And yet there is no Bluetooth capabilites. Is the cell phone market getting so desperate that companies are adding everything including the kitchen sink to sell these phones? Why would you want a sound meter or a calorie tracking application in a cell phone?
Bluetooth is just another one of these features.
Now, the decibel level hardware were able to adjust the phone's ring/speaker volume to be appropriate for the conditions, I'd say that would be more useful than Bluetooth. I'm willing to bet it does and the reviewer just didn't notice. The sound meter app is probably just because-we-can-ware.
I find it hard to believe that this is how adults react in such a situation?
Do you live on the same planet I do? Here on Terra the reaction of adults is wholely unpredictable. Myself included. Of course a database and a browser are the same. Let us send our nasty Terran rage mail in peace please.
So what you're saying is I have all the Macs in Idaho? That's what I always though.
So it does. I was thinking of NT VGA Mode, which is somewhat the equivalent of XP Safe Mode (of which this VGA Mode you pointed out seems to be now a subsetting?)
;-)
But if you really need help, could you please explain your problem? Did you press F8 repeatedly and it just didn't enter the safe mode menu? Did you see the menu, choose an option, and it booted into non-safe mode anyway? What did you do? "No safe mode" is about the equivalent of "XP doesn't have a VGA mode" if you'd like to compare apples to apples or inane comments to inane comments.
XP doesn't have a VGA mode... and in XP the normal behavior on an abnormal restart (like one caused by a bluescreen) *usually* results in XP's safe-mode menu showing up automatically without you having to do anything. You might have pointed that out rather than saying something vague. Your comment didn't indicate to me that you knew these things so I thought I'd offer a few hints to how I solved my issue. I suppose you just charged 2 hours more labor reinstalling the OS one more time?... :)
Most definitely said while knocking on wood, I have a 23-inch LCD with no dead pixels for much less than $3000. (www.apple.com) I was told and read under my extended warranty plan that with any dead pixels (even a single one) over the period of 2 years I could take it back for a replacement... including if when I powered it up for the first time it had one.
You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?
I believe F8 gets you there if the menu's not shown. Switch to it and you'll boot fine without crashes. Then turn off the "instant reboot" on bluescreens (somewhere in My Computer->Properties maybe?) and give it a reboot into normal mode. This will let you see the bluescreen that's kicking your computer's ass every time it hits the desktop and the component involved (which you're probably going to find is a DLL from your video driver, or possibly your NIC driver.)
I think this thing's pretty cool except for the fact that it would use a touchscreen keyboard in landscape mode. That would be terrible. I don't see any reason that the second panel couldn't have a normal mechanical keyboard on its backside, though.
I did exactly the same, except in landscaping. I could have driven to work at an internship but for what? A small amount more to cover my college expenses? It's not all about money. The tan, muscle, and comradery I built working outside with my hands was worth at least twice what I could have made doing QA for some random company. Excellent comment and story.
... unfortunately for your feelings one of my henchmen said he broke into your place last night and single-user-moded your 30 digit password out of existance.
Your arguement may be simple but it's irrelevant. Even with a maximum of 6 letters of extension there are ~1,600,000,000 possible extensions. 300,000,000 or so if you exclude numbers, and of that I bet at least 1,000,000 are "meaningful"/"speakable"/what ever it takes to make a good extension (erm, that's for English-speaking people anyway.)
"Windows users" are not the ones creating and using assemblies... developers are. ".netasm" would have worked fine and would have at least been considerate.
Thank you for pointing this out. There've been other good comments around the board about DLLs and how sharing should work, but you're evidentally the only one who's read the article and understands the technology.
.NET 1.0 as well.
.NET assemblies? That choice alone has caused more issues than I have ever seen (name conflicts between a COM DLL and a corresponding .NET interop assembly DLL, people trying to register a .NET assembly DLL with regsvr, VB6 allowing you to attempt to use a .NET DLL as a component when it doesn't work, etc. etc. etc.) While they may be "dynamic link libraries" in a traditional sense, they're not ".DLLs." Chalk the reporter up as one more of the confused.
The feature was present in
I've always wondered, though... why did MS choose to keep the extension ".DLL" for
I would definetly be in the market for this, as its one less @#$#$#@ box under my desk. I don't need more than a ~1Ghz Pentium III pc (or two). A dual Centrino on a PCI card would be a bonus. Yes I would like to bring it up as a window under os X or X (or optionally full screen cheap but decent 2d-accelerated video out the back of the card)
Why don't you just put the boxes in a closet somewhere, get it on your home network, and use some kind of network-based video? (VNC, Terminal Services, X Windows, etc.)
Aren't those considered class 1 explosives as well? I've definitely seen fireworks with more propellant potential than an Estes rocket (just not the aerodynamics.)
Or are all these wussy shipping corporations who would rather piss customers off then deal with a regulation even touching fireworks in the first place? (It's not like they're made in the US, so I assume they get shipped to the netherregions of the US somehow...)
Your missing the "gyro" bit, move your hand (with the PDA in) not write on a screen/point & click on icons.
No I didn't. I just didn't think the gyro part was a good idea for PDAs, especially since he/she didn't list any specific application. For phones it might be OK... for example, you could hold a button on the side of the phone and shake it 5 times to dial your 5th autodial number automatically.
... but mouse surfers can get all the same functionality that gestures usually provide for a browser with a right click menu or a context menu. Unless of course your mouse fingers are also holding a cup of coffee (which I have had be the case.) If you're doing that, though, you should seriously consider your mouse's safety... what if you were to spill coffee on it and it were damaged? Then you would be back to the old keyboard... the horrors!
Oh, yes, we do use Netscape 4.x.
And Opera, and Mozilla, and Konqueror, and Galeon, and Links, and Dillo, and Lynx, and Netscape 7, and Phoenix, and Skipstone, and W3m, and Emacs, and IE... well, you got the picture.
I use the first six.
It's always good to have lots of browsers. If you make the N gesture incorrectly odds are good that it will launch a browser anyway.
That's probably an urban legend... I don't see why it would be worse than any other mouse use. It's just as repetitive to move your mouse from a home position to the back button as it is to move your mouse from right to left on the webpage.
... have you ever used a PDA? The entire interfaces are driven by pen-based gestures. They don't usually have keyboards, and those that need them for normal operation aren't PDA's anyway, they're mini-laptops with crappy keyboards.
1) It standardises the position of "OK". There are significantly more boxes that only have a single "OK" gadget than there are only having a single "Cancel" gadget.
Eh? I've heard this arguement both ways and, no offense, but I really hate with the "Cancel OK" order and see no merit to that arguement.
In a dialog with a single button and no closing confirmation the button serves neither an acceptance or a denial function... it means "get this dialog out of my way." All changes made on a single-button dialog are implicitly (or are they?) saved the minute you make them, and it doesn't matter what the button is called.
If you think about that for a little bit, you might wonder why there are ANY dialogs with only a single button. Doesn't that seem restrictive? If all dialogs had an acceptance and denial button then there'd not only be positional standardization but numerical and functional standardization. Note I'm not talking about popup-message type dialogs... they are often significantly different in shape and size to put them in another category altogether.
Assuming all larger dialogs have an acceptance and denial state I think natural reading order makes most sense for button order... right-to-left in my case, so "OK Cancel." (OK being first because it's often more reversable than redoing all your work.. your milage my vary there.)
Even if people do tend to leave the mouse in the bottom right corner they don't read in a mouse-dialog direction... and that offsets any advantage that an 80 pixel mouse distance delta might give you with "Cancel OK" (assuming most people want to hit OK rather than cancel for the reversability reason I mentioned.)
Ignore my comment about 10 ethernet cards per machine... you could avoid that and still build a hypercube.
Why the hell 1024 procesors?? Why not 1000??
1024 nodes makes a perfect 10 dimension hypercube. Hypercubes can have major advantages for speeding communications within sub-cubes, which can speed certain types of parallelized applications. Also with this architecture you can avoid a central switch system.
However, you would have to buy 10 ethernet cards per machine, which would be hard to pull off with blades, and I can't think of a way off the top of my head why a hypercube would help with frame rendering, It might be a data server locality thing... but either way, they have their reasons.