Ahhh. I was confused because I couldn't understand how the wheel could tell where it was being touched, but I think I see now. Can the solid state wheel on the iPod do this? I suppose it must be able to.
I'm not sure you can fix it with command line options, and that's not a matter of coding skill but GUI design. I suppose it's possible for rm to catch some common problems but I can't think of any elegant solutions, only kludges.
I've resorted to doing all non-trivial deletion via Konqueror or Midnight Commander. Not ideal either, sadly.
So, is it a rotary dial (two analog inputs: rotate left, rotate right; one digitial input: push down) or a d-pad (five digital inputs: up, down, left, right, push middle down)? Everyone seems to be assuming the latter, including the original article, but they that's not rotary, which it must be because that's in the title of the patent. Maybe it's both at once, but how do you stop it rotating when you're trying to push it in a direction?
My poor brain is confused, and trying to read the patent application itself didn't help. It's rather dense. Nevertheless, paragraph 37 of it says
For example, the rotatable disc 56 may provide a control function corresponding to a scrolling feature that allows a user, for example, to move the GUI vertically (up and down), or horizontally (left and right) in order to bring more data into view on the display screen
. Note that this says horizontal or vertical. So that implies a rotary dial as a straight replacement for a wheel; OK, I can deal with that.
Paragraph 60. however, says
For example, as shown in FIG. 10, the user can manipulate the disc 182 side to side as shown by arrows 183 for horizontal scrolling 184 and the user can manipulate the disc 182 backwards and forwards as shown by arrows 185 for vertical scrolling 186
and suddently it can do 2d scrolling, which a 1D wheel certainly can't. What gives? The diagrams page hates Galeon so I can't look at fig 10. Can someone shed light on this?
As for the ergonomics, I'm a little dubious. Isn't side-to-side motion of a finger actually quite bad for you? I though fingers had essentially one dimensional joints and were designed to move up and down and not much else. Roatating my finger in a 1-inch diameter circle feels a little uncomfortable to me. I do see their point about having to pick the finger up off a scroll wheel all the time, though; I've always had that problem with Sony jog dials, too.
Have you seen Trust's product lineup? A friend of mine bought this monstrosity from them the other day that had -- I kid you not -- the usual two buttons, two scrollwheels (one horizontal, one vertical; one was also a button), and another two buttons on the sides. That's a total of nine buttons, folks (counting the wheels as two buttons each). The Windows driver was about 60Mb.
It is a regular joke amongst our friends that it is only a matter of time before Trust made a mouse with a trackball on top of it, and that will be rapidly followed by a joystick mounted on top of a trackball atop a mouse. In the version 3, they'll add a four-way view switch button to the joystick and another half-dozen buttons to the bottom of the mouse. Version 4 will probably be wireless and integrate a toaster, oven and water cooler into the base of the charging cradle. You heard it here first.
I've been using Linux for five years, I am sysadmin of our household LAN and email server (8 users), and I still make mistakes like this. My most recent was rm -rf * ~ when I meant rm -rf *~ (there were hundreds of directories ending in ~, before anyone asks why I was using -rf and not -i. I forget why -- some sort of brain-dead temp-directory naming program that blew up halfway through the run. And this was as a user, not as root. There's little of value in/root, ironically.)
The analogy of a butcher's knife being dangerous a few posts down is faulty: yes, butcher's knives are still sharp things that are dangerous, but they have non-slip handles and other accroutments that make them as safe as they can be and still function acceptably. Frankly, rm is not as safe as it could be. I have it aliased to rm -i but that's not a catch-all; it's rather tedious to hit "y" a hundred times to clear a big directory. And even now, after two times in the last five years that I've gotten my backup CDRs out after a fuckup, I still occasionally type an rm in a rush and hit enter before really thinking about what I'm doing. It's only a matter of time before I do this again and I consider myself to be pretty average at these things.
Up until this morning, the only use of the words "strawberry shortcake" in the Penny Arcade cartoon or the associated news article were in the GIF and therefore un-indexable by Google. After this morning, it's all over the web like white on rice, and so are image mirrors. I can see what you're trying to say but you have to admit, from a practical viewpoint, this has not been a successful tactic.
If you'd like to point me to something equally good for writing my PhD thesis in, I'll gladly consider it. It must be able to cope with ~250 pages of document, page numbering, cross referencing, extensive biblographies and referencing, hundreds of embedded graphs and diagrams, and be free (speech or beer, I'll be generous).
And what is this printing DVI rubbish? You never print DVI, you print Postscript, or in my case, PDF as all my LaTeX is turned directly to PDF for better cross-platform viewability.
You've missed the actual joke the comic was making. Read the news item for this quote that explains it:
'My take on McGee/McFarlane:
'Making something gross or sexual or both is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. Just look at the margins of any 7th graders homework. You will find plenty of doodles on par with anything McGee has produced. American has said that his new game OZ will stay fairly true to the books but it will be "darker". It's sad that is the best he can come up with. American has the opportunity to take these well known and loved stories and re-imagine them for the world of video games, a medium with unlimited possibilities. When he made Alice I gave him credit for taking the story in a new direction even if it wasn't a terribly interesting one. Now with OZ he's doing the same thing and it shows that Alice was not some creative masterpiece. This guy is just a pervert and this is all he knows how to do. It's like he has some kind of huge fucking machine. Beloved stories and characters go in one side and junior high quality goth crap comes out the other.Yeah, Yeah McGee, we all know you are very angry. You should save yourself some fucking time and just wear a T-shirt that says "I am dark and brooding".'
You know, you really should stop and take stock: how much harm was that
parody *really* doing you? How much harm has this heavy-handed action
*really* done you? Is this really how you want to be percevied by potential customers?
Short, to the point, and not abusive. Hopefully they will take note. Frankly, I think they need to lighten up.
I should point out I'm cussing the poster, not the article. The article and the technology themselves are pretty nifty. But 3G apps calling vibrate()? Come on!
GTK2 I can live with (writing this in Galeon2, actually), and lack of vis too. When I want vis I can always slave the iBook as a pure mp3 machine and run fullscreen viz, which is ultimately pretty wasteful but impresses visitors no end. ID3 editing is less of a problem now iTunes has straightened out my metadata; everything I've ripped over the last three years has correct tags (and most of my collection is stuff I've ripped myself), so it's less of an issue now than it used to be.
Well, having apt-getted it, I can confirm rhythmbox looks pretty nifty; thanks for the tip, mate. I'll see how stable it is. It could use the playback-only-controls minimize mode iTunes has, but the three-pane browsing interface is perfect, and the get-info-on-this-song-from-web looks cool, too.
A stick goom window is a funky idea. I might investigate that at some point...
Thanks again! I'll just keep looking for the moon on a stick.
Oh man, that's really badly written. And I previewed it several times, too.
For a start, I do understand that Brain is supposed to be snagging stuff from the net according to my tastes; my central but utterly obscured point is that I'd rather get a player that can handly my own mp3s to my total satisfaction before getting fancy with one that can seek out new mp3s for me. Let's walk before we try to run.
However, I think this sort of learning algorithm can be sensibly applied to my personal collection; for example, if it scores a song up slightly whenever I listen to it right through, up a lot when I select it manually, and down a lot when I skip it halfway through. Then use those scores as weights in the shuffle algorithm. The downside is that this sort of functionality needs an awful lot of data to be any good and is hard to sell to people because, out of the box, it won't do diddly squat. That is why they are better off with a plugin than a native player -- the plugin has, effectively, zero cost of entry, provided there is a plugin for your chosen player, whereas switching to a whole new player is effort with very little immediate payoff to reward it.
This intelligent mp3 playback stuff seems like a really good idea to me; learning algorithms can be astonishingly effective, and even if it only when I hit "next track" halfway through a song it would help. However, I'm still looking for an mp3 player I like. I really like iTunes, but it's not perfect because I only have OSX on my laptop (Linux my desktops, where I want mp3 playback most).
Stuff I like about iTunes:
The integrated management software, and how if I fancy listening to a particular artist/album, I just type their name in a little box to get realtime filtering
It doesn't look like ass
Neato en-mass ID3 tag editing options
Fantastic visualistaions
Neat metadata (last played, ratings, etc)
All I really want is a Linux player to do all this too. XMMS is small and neat but the playlist feels like a clumsy management interface after iTunes. GQMpeg seems fiddly, and xtunes is ugly. Can anyone suggest alternatives?
Other features I want my mp3 player to have, but which I've never seen done:
I listen to music on shuffle a lot. What I would like to do is browse through my full mp3 list and add the next half-dozen or so tracks to the playlist, taking it out of shuffle... but only until those half-dozen tracks are played. After than I want it to go back to shuffle.
Intelligent gapless playback -- if the mp3 ends with no silence (think live albums), I want it to crossfade to the next track with a very short gap; otherwise, I want no crossfade. Ditto for when the next track begins with no silence. Seems like this wouldn't be too hard to code up, I may look into making a XMMS plugin one day to see if I can.
rsync-based synchronisation between iTunes (on my iBook) and my household fileserver. Involves knowledge of iTunes' XML files.
As someone who has read about half of Rice's novels and played a fair bit of WoD (World of Darkness) RPG, I feel qualified to say you are wrong. For a start, WoD's vampires are pretty different to Rice's; the detailed vampire social structures and history presented in the WoD are, to my mind, pretty much unrivalled. And secondly, there is a hell of a lot more to WoD than vampires; I don't recall Rice having many werewolves, mages, faerie or changelings in her stories.
Mage: The Awakening was particularly innovative; it's magic system was one of the most interesting ones ever placed into an RPG, with the possible exception of the kick-ass Amber RPG. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that White Wolf worked hard on the WoD games and to dismiss them as derivative is extremely unfair.
White Wolf should be pissed
on
Underworld Trailer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Vampires and werewolves fighting a secret war against a modern backdrop? Zeitgeist and angst? If I were the produces of the World of Darkness pen&paper roleplaying games series, I think I'd be rather annoyed. This film seems to have stolen most of its premise lock, stock and barrel.
In other news, it appears even/. itself is now slashdotted. Marvellous.
Heat can be a real issue. I've heard horror stories of Sharp Zaurus's (Zaurii?) fitted with 1Gb IBM CF Microdrives hitting 70degC... Rather worrying, methinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh. I was confused because I couldn't understand how the wheel could tell where it was being touched, but I think I see now. Can the solid state wheel on the iPod do this? I suppose it must be able to.
I'm not sure you can fix it with command line options, and that's not a matter of coding skill but GUI design. I suppose it's possible for rm to catch some common problems but I can't think of any elegant solutions, only kludges.
I've resorted to doing all non-trivial deletion via Konqueror or Midnight Commander. Not ideal either, sadly.
My poor brain is confused, and trying to read the patent application itself didn't help. It's rather dense. Nevertheless, paragraph 37 of it says . Note that this says horizontal or vertical. So that implies a rotary dial as a straight replacement for a wheel; OK, I can deal with that.
Paragraph 60. however, says and suddently it can do 2d scrolling, which a 1D wheel certainly can't. What gives? The diagrams page hates Galeon so I can't look at fig 10. Can someone shed light on this?
As for the ergonomics, I'm a little dubious. Isn't side-to-side motion of a finger actually quite bad for you? I though fingers had essentially one dimensional joints and were designed to move up and down and not much else. Roatating my finger in a 1-inch diameter circle feels a little uncomfortable to me. I do see their point about having to pick the finger up off a scroll wheel all the time, though; I've always had that problem with Sony jog dials, too.
Have you seen Trust's product lineup? A friend of mine bought this monstrosity from them the other day that had -- I kid you not -- the usual two buttons, two scrollwheels (one horizontal, one vertical; one was also a button), and another two buttons on the sides. That's a total of nine buttons, folks (counting the wheels as two buttons each). The Windows driver was about 60Mb.
It is a regular joke amongst our friends that it is only a matter of time before Trust made a mouse with a trackball on top of it, and that will be rapidly followed by a joystick mounted on top of a trackball atop a mouse. In the version 3, they'll add a four-way view switch button to the joystick and another half-dozen buttons to the bottom of the mouse. Version 4 will probably be wireless and integrate a toaster, oven and water cooler into the base of the charging cradle. You heard it here first.
I've been using Linux for five years, I am sysadmin of our household LAN and email server (8 users), and I still make mistakes like this. My most recent was rm -rf * ~ when I meant rm -rf *~ (there were hundreds of directories ending in ~, before anyone asks why I was using -rf and not -i. I forget why -- some sort of brain-dead temp-directory naming program that blew up halfway through the run. And this was as a user, not as root. There's little of value in /root, ironically.)
The analogy of a butcher's knife being dangerous a few posts down is faulty: yes, butcher's knives are still sharp things that are dangerous, but they have non-slip handles and other accroutments that make them as safe as they can be and still function acceptably. Frankly, rm is not as safe as it could be. I have it aliased to rm -i but that's not a catch-all; it's rather tedious to hit "y" a hundred times to clear a big directory. And even now, after two times in the last five years that I've gotten my backup CDRs out after a fuckup, I still occasionally type an rm in a rush and hit enter before really thinking about what I'm doing. It's only a matter of time before I do this again and I consider myself to be pretty average at these things.
Up until this morning, the only use of the words "strawberry shortcake" in the Penny Arcade cartoon or the associated news article were in the GIF and therefore un-indexable by Google. After this morning, it's all over the web like white on rice, and so are image mirrors. I can see what you're trying to say but you have to admit, from a practical viewpoint, this has not been a successful tactic.
If you'd like to point me to something equally good for writing my PhD thesis in, I'll gladly consider it. It must be able to cope with ~250 pages of document, page numbering, cross referencing, extensive biblographies and referencing, hundreds of embedded graphs and diagrams, and be free (speech or beer, I'll be generous).
And what is this printing DVI rubbish? You never print DVI, you print Postscript, or in my case, PDF as all my LaTeX is turned directly to PDF for better cross-platform viewability.
Curse these slow fingers! *shakes fist at the cruel heavens*
(Quoting Gabe)
Short, to the point, and not abusive. Hopefully they will take note. Frankly, I think they need to lighten up.
No, that's not dumb -- seems pretty sensible, actually.
3G apps aren't the only things using the vibrate() syscall.
I should point out I'm cussing the poster, not the article. The article and the technology themselves are pretty nifty. But 3G apps calling vibrate()? Come on!
How marvellously novel. I'm sure no-one has ever found a way to absorb energy from movement and store it for later use before, or turn that stored energy into electricity.
And on the subject of using the phone's own vibrating alert to recharge the battery: "Lisa! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!".
Actually, I have it installed. Damn thing keeps deposing my system clock from the upper right of the screen, grrrr. It's neat though.
GTK2 I can live with (writing this in Galeon2, actually), and lack of vis too. When I want vis I can always slave the iBook as a pure mp3 machine and run fullscreen viz, which is ultimately pretty wasteful but impresses visitors no end. ID3 editing is less of a problem now iTunes has straightened out my metadata; everything I've ripped over the last three years has correct tags (and most of my collection is stuff I've ripped myself), so it's less of an issue now than it used to be.
Well, having apt-getted it, I can confirm rhythmbox looks pretty nifty; thanks for the tip, mate. I'll see how stable it is. It could use the playback-only-controls minimize mode iTunes has, but the three-pane browsing interface is perfect, and the get-info-on-this-song-from-web looks cool, too.
A stick goom window is a funky idea. I might investigate that at some point...
Thanks again! I'll just keep looking for the moon on a stick.
I just downloaded this GJay (well, apt-get did) and it is very froody indeed.
Oh man, that's really badly written. And I previewed it several times, too.
For a start, I do understand that Brain is supposed to be snagging stuff from the net according to my tastes; my central but utterly obscured point is that I'd rather get a player that can handly my own mp3s to my total satisfaction before getting fancy with one that can seek out new mp3s for me. Let's walk before we try to run.
However, I think this sort of learning algorithm can be sensibly applied to my personal collection; for example, if it scores a song up slightly whenever I listen to it right through, up a lot when I select it manually, and down a lot when I skip it halfway through. Then use those scores as weights in the shuffle algorithm. The downside is that this sort of functionality needs an awful lot of data to be any good and is hard to sell to people because, out of the box, it won't do diddly squat. That is why they are better off with a plugin than a native player -- the plugin has, effectively, zero cost of entry, provided there is a plugin for your chosen player, whereas switching to a whole new player is effort with very little immediate payoff to reward it.
This intelligent mp3 playback stuff seems like a really good idea to me; learning algorithms can be astonishingly effective, and even if it only when I hit "next track" halfway through a song it would help. However, I'm still looking for an mp3 player I like. I really like iTunes, but it's not perfect because I only have OSX on my laptop (Linux my desktops, where I want mp3 playback most).
Stuff I like about iTunes:
- The integrated management software, and how if I fancy listening to a particular artist/album, I just type their name in a little box to get realtime filtering
- It doesn't look like ass
- Neato en-mass ID3 tag editing options
- Fantastic visualistaions
- Neat metadata (last played, ratings, etc)
All I really want is a Linux player to do all this too. XMMS is small and neat but the playlist feels like a clumsy management interface after iTunes. GQMpeg seems fiddly, and xtunes is ugly. Can anyone suggest alternatives?Other features I want my mp3 player to have, but which I've never seen done:
As someone who has read about half of Rice's novels and played a fair bit of WoD (World of Darkness) RPG, I feel qualified to say you are wrong. For a start, WoD's vampires are pretty different to Rice's; the detailed vampire social structures and history presented in the WoD are, to my mind, pretty much unrivalled. And secondly, there is a hell of a lot more to WoD than vampires; I don't recall Rice having many werewolves, mages, faerie or changelings in her stories.
Mage: The Awakening was particularly innovative; it's magic system was one of the most interesting ones ever placed into an RPG, with the possible exception of the kick-ass Amber RPG. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that White Wolf worked hard on the WoD games and to dismiss them as derivative is extremely unfair.
Vampires and werewolves fighting a secret war against a modern backdrop? Zeitgeist and angst? If I were the produces of the World of Darkness pen&paper roleplaying games series, I think I'd be rather annoyed. This film seems to have stolen most of its premise lock, stock and barrel.
/. itself is now slashdotted. Marvellous.
In other news, it appears even
Fucking lol
Nah, I just swapped it out for a 80gig one, which I then proceeded to fill with DivX :o)
Heat can be a real issue. I've heard horror stories of Sharp Zaurus's (Zaurii?) fitted with 1Gb IBM CF Microdrives hitting 70degC... Rather worrying, methinks.