...but in the case of naive Windows users, even asking them to reboot can be a scary concept for them.
OK, people are asking why this is scary. Here's why:
You reboot, and suddenly, all this small text in bright colours is crawling across your screen (at least, that's what Knoppix did, the last time I tried it). Your Windows environment is gone. You don't know if it's coming back, or even if it's reformatting your hard drive, that's what it's supposed to look like, right?
Yeah, I know, this crap is irrational. But guess what, if the world was purely rational, Microsoft would have gone out of business ages ago...
Having Knoppix run on the Windows desktop is reassuring. It lets you know that Windows is still there and you can return there at any time, and since all your icons are still on your desktop, your files must therefore be safe. Yeah, more irrational fears, sorry, but that's how many people think.
Most kids of that age understand board games, dice games, card games, etc.
One of the VIC-20 programs I remember seeing was simple: guess a number from 1 to 6, put a bet down, roll the die, and if it matches, you win money. I remember it because I "hacked" the program to tell you the results of the die throw before you had to guess, so I could make huge amounts of money. It sounds lame, but I was about 8 or 9 at the time, and for someone of that age it was quite a buzz.
If you want to get a bit more complicated, kids will understand games like craps and roulette, and if they play, they'll get involved, even if they're not geek types (and yeah, even at that age, you know who the class geeks are).
I'm quite sure that the RIAA want to increase the per-unit price; what I'm saying is that they could increase the profits they make from me by a factor of 10x or more by reducing the per-unit price 25%-40%.
The RIAA is saying that they could increase the profits they make from society in general (not you in particular) by increasing the per-unit price 25-40%. They may be wrong, then again, so may you be. That is the point I was trying to make - that there are two opposing views, and that's how a sweet spot even develops.
Well, I don't know about you, but my perception is that the music industry is way over to the right of the "sweet spot" on the sales-against-price graph.
Yeah. The thing about economics is, you have two totally opposing forces: consumers, who want the price pulled down, and producers, who want the price pulled up.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but from the music industry's perception, the music industry is way over to the left of the sweet spot. They probably think that CDs are too cheap. In reality, we're all probably close to the sweet spot already. (Of course, then you get into other economic theories, like, the RIAA is a cartel, etc. etc.)
This is one of those times where, by thinking outside the box, you come up with really new ideas.
Now, since it doesn't have a screen, you don't have a big reason to look at it. There's no screen to look at. You can look at the controls, but they're not very interesting, and there aren't many of them.
So, here's the new idea: you can use the iPod shuffle without looking at it. You couldn't do this with a standard iPod (try using the scroll wheel blindfolded). It's not as easy (although it's possible) with other flash players, 'cos the controls are obtuse, they're hard to tell from each other, and they're usually pretty small, due to having to fit a screen on the things. But you can do it all easily with the iPod shuffle.
By getting rid of the screen, they literally invented a whole new way of interacting with your MP3 player. Because there's no screen, Apple was forced to make a decent interface to compensate. This is the result.
Blind people could use the iPod shuffle. You can use it in the dark. You can keep it in your shirt pocket, or on the lanyard but on the inside of your shirt, and operate it through the fabric without taking it out. I do this, the only down side is, it looks like I'm tweaking my own nipples...
Sorry, this is a lame arguement. You should add "... and I am anal about not introducing artifacts into my purchased music..." or "... and I don't want to use Hymn to remove the protection".
Did you even read the parent (now grandparent) post? It says:
Sure, there are tools to decrypt these files, but many of the average ipod users don't have a clue about that stuff.
Your average iPod user is a teenage girl or a 21-year-old male with a hot rod or a young marketing exec or something. Your average iPod user is not a Slashdot reader and won't care for Hymn, or burning to CD to re-rip to Ogg Vorbis, or whatever.
I mean, it looks almost exactly like Microsoft Office. Even a lot of the toolbar icons are incredibly similar and function the same way. This is just an Office clone, not a new, innovative OSS office suite.
This has already been covered at length elsewhere, but I may as well jump in.
The point of OpenOffice is exactly to be a Microsoft Office clone, because if it's even slightly different, then a whole bunch of corporations won't even consider switching to it. For individuals and Mac users, innovation and a workable interface is important. Not so for corporations, who are (presumably) the target audience.
Whilst we're on Stephenson, I always thought that Zodiac would make a great film, better than his other books. It's the right length, the right pace, has an asshole protagonist, and sweeping views of Boston Harbor.
For Windows users, it's not a problem at all... just whip up a quick regexp and poof, it's gone, no matter what domain it comes from.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but I would consider "whipping up a quick regexp" a fairly big barrier for most Windows users.
Another nutshell review
on
Exultant
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Stephen Baxter is amongst the hardest of the hard sci-fi writers. I read a review of Coalescent, and in it, the reviewer described the end of the book as set in "a typical Baxterian universe". To me, there's no better way to describe it.
Exultant, to me, is a story that could read as one of Baxter's masterpieces, if only he got a few more elements right. (Alas, that's not the first time I've thought that of his stories). The narrative often doesn't flow well, sometimes cutting to dry physics lectures, and feeling like a disjoint list of tasks that must be done, filling in time until we make it to the climax, which seems rushed. Also, there seem to me to be some fairly obvious plot holes... for instance, his faster-than-light travel doesn't create time paradoxes except at the beginning of the story, where it's a plot device.
This is only a loose sequel to Coalescent, with some recurring themes. It's a very different book (as you may guess: one is set in Roman Britain and the other is 20,000 years in the future) but it also has a strong focus on hard physics. Some of this is at the expense of the characters... for instance, Baxter really needs to work on his romance writing, or (for preference) leave it out. But the action scenes were done well, and you really get the sense of the vast human empire and the insignifance of one little life.
But the central theme, A brief life burns brightly, is strong, and Baxter explores it well. As usual, he's got plenty of fascinating ideas, like how life may have proliferated in the deep past, causing some events that we've otherwise put down to straight, lifeless physics...
Even after all that? I'm hooked. I'm re-reading the story, and I haven't read anything from the Xeelee Sequence up until now, but that's next on the list.
I still have no idea what the purpose of the iPod Photo is...
The iPod Photo is not about photos. Repeat after me: The iPod Photo is not about photos.
OK, so that was an overly confrontational way to start a post. But let's plow on.
The iPod Photo is about Apple transitioning the iPod series to colour screens. Notice how the only black-and-white iPod remaining is the 20GB model - everything else is colour. Mark my words, the next time we get a refresh, it'll be a 20GB iPod Photo, and the black-and-white version will be gone.
If you're going to move the iPod series to colour screens, you want to make sure that they've got a distinctive name, to differentiate them from the standard - you can't just call them iPod. The obvious name is "iPod Color". But why stop there? "iPod Photo" is even better.
I think that Apple has reached the limit of hard drives - most people don't need 60GB for music storage. So I think that in the future, instead of increased hard drive space, they'll push the limits on size... by transitioning everybody to the iPod mini form-factor. You'll get a 10GB iPod mini, then a 20GB. And at some point, those will come in colour too.
Since nobody's mentioned this yet... in Windows (and probably Linux), you can force a reflow by changing the font size. Hold down Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel up, then down. (Or down, then up.)
It's become almost subconscious for me to do now, just like middle-clicking links to open new tabs.
Speaking for myself, a big factor in "quality" is form factor: being able to carry my things around, without the bulk causing my pants to slide down to my ankles.
There's another advantage of converged devices: you can get functions that are a "mix" of the two, which often turn out to be useful in their own right.
The Treo is a smartphone: a mobile phone and a PDA. But it's called "Treo" because it has three functions: mobile phone, PDA, and mobile Internet. The third function is a mix of the first two.
It's like mobile phones with cameras. Sure, they have mobile phone and camera capabilities. But the telco industry is betting that people will get into the third capability: sending MMS photo messages to their friends. (Although as of now, it hasn't taken off like SMS has.)
Having MP3 playback on the Treo has one unexpected, but welcome side-effect: when you're listening to music and a call comes in, you can hear the ring through your headphones. This is a godsend for those of us who play our music loud and would otherwise miss calls...
(Now, I shall proceed to debunk all my arguments. I admit to owning both a Treo 600 and an iPod shuffle.)
(I realise that this is a really really really cheap solution and is a bog-standard MP3 player when you could be getting a radio equivalent of an iPod - that's the RadioShark. And you can only record one station. What other drawbacks?)
Most people can get a radio, tune it, and connect it to the line-in (or microphone) port on their PC or Mac. Most people aren't using their line-in port. Given that, why not just let it run full time?
Then, the only problem is needing software: software that can record from the line-in port at any time of day, encode it and dump it to a file. Or just play it through the speaker in real-time. It doesn't sound too hard, in fact, it sounds like only a few hundred lines of code, given the right libraries.
So, I guess I'm asking, why hasn't it been done yet, or why hasn't it been made popular yet?
...so we are holding back from buying G4 PowerBooks because we just know it will be downright embarassing to have last year's model when the G5 PowerBook comes out.
Yeah.
The sad thing about this is, the PowerBook G5 has always supposedly been the next revision of the PowerBook. Ever since 2002, people have been convinced that the PowerBook G5 is right around the corner, and the current PowerBook G4 is the last iteration of the G4 series. So that's why these people can't bring themselves to buy one. Even though there have been heaps of iterations in the meantime. That's the tragedy.
If I had to speculate, I'd say that the PowerBook G5 is several revisions away. Maybe three, maybe four. We could see PowerBooks G4 models at 1.67GHz, 1.83GHz, and 2.0GHz before that happens. OK, it's speculation, but the point is, if you want a PowerBook, buy one now, use it, love it, and don't feel bad that you bought it.
Can you point out one shipping game for the mac that the mac mini does not meet the requirements for? I mean UT2004, WOW, Warcraft3, Neverwinter Nights, Halo, etc. all seem to have minimum requirements below its specs.
I think this is a circular argument, though... because Mac development houses won't port games that require insane amounts of horsepower. Obviously there are other factors, too (the big one being licensing), but the fact that a previous-generation iMac won't play the game is taken into consideration. What's the point in porting a game if it's out of the reach of most Mac gamers?
Besides, there is no sharp line between a system that meets min spec and one that doesn't. It's a continuous gradient, some people will be happy to play on a min spec machine, some won't. Suggest to your usual hardcore PC gamer, used to 60-100fps, that they play on a min spec machine... they'll point and laugh at you. Whilst the Mac mini will get you 15-20fps in World of Warcraft, many won't find that personally acceptable, and some will be amazed that anybody finds that playable.
However the most "novel" thing about it was how you navigated. It didn't use a pointing device (i.e. mouse) but used two dedicated keys on the keyboards labeled "JUMP" (you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've had it out and played with it, so this might not be perfectly correct). You would use the jump keys to "hop" around the document/screen.
Yep, the good ol' LEAP key.
One "modern" computing feature that a lot of people here appreciate is incremental search. It's in Firefox - hit ctrl-f (or whatever you've set it up to be) and start typing - it'll find the next occurrence. In Emacs, ctrl-s and start typing. Once you get used to the feature, it's indispensable.
The Canon Cat had this, all that time ago, this is what the parent is referring to. Instead of hitting ctrl-f, you just held down the LEAP key and started typing. Even more efficient, if you can believe that.
The big challenge to today's users is this: this LEAP searching was the only way you could navigate through text; no arrow keys, no mouse. Apparently it was a lot better anyway...
But the more I think about it - holding down one key *while* typing - the less motivation I feel.
I assume you're talking about the LEAP key. They realised that when you're doing normal typing, your thumbs do nothing, so they put the LEAP key in a place where your thumb can hold it down whilst typing (underneath the space bar). It's all pretty convenient. The one counter-example is when you're hitting the space bar, and even then, you only hit that with one thumb, so your other thumb could be holding down that LEAP key.
That's for the original Jef-Raskin-ideal-computer, the Canon Cat. Obviously, most other keyboards don't have a LEAP key, so they've been forced to do some ugly workarounds. Time will tell whether people will adapt, or shrug and say that it's too hard.
Yes. Both Jim Sanborn and Ed Scheidt have repeated over and over that it's solvable. Sanborn has also been quoted in interviews as saying he was surprised that it hadn't been solved yet. And when Elonka Dunin, co-moderator of the Kryptos group, asked him flat out in mid-2003 whether or not part 4 was solvable, his answer was: "Yes. It ain't easy, but it's solvable!"
Didn't Stephen Hawking say recently that there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes?
It's true (well, for a given value of "true"), but black holes aren't the same things as wormholes. Wormholes are a quantum concept (in the sense that they're really really small) where you get to travel between different bits of spacetime by taking shortcuts. Did I say they're really really small? We're talking mind-boggling sub-sub-sub-atomic here.
Black holes are just huge chunks of mass (think ultra-massive stars) which have collapsed under their own gravity.
I am not a physicist so it's all been dumbed down, and is possibly completely wrong, any real physicists are invited to make corrections.
No, it is not. Is it relevant how big the problem is?
If you want big problems, try the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. 175,000 dead. Dead. Not even variable naming conventions or lack of comments compare.
The topic was about solving a problem, and if you don't think that it's a big problem, so be it. I think it is a big problem, but it's possible that I see aspects of it that you don't (or perhaps the other way around).
Slashdot Mirror
...but in the case of naive Windows users, even asking them to reboot can be a scary concept for them.
OK, people are asking why this is scary. Here's why:
You reboot, and suddenly, all this small text in bright colours is crawling across your screen (at least, that's what Knoppix did, the last time I tried it). Your Windows environment is gone. You don't know if it's coming back, or even if it's reformatting your hard drive, that's what it's supposed to look like, right?
Yeah, I know, this crap is irrational. But guess what, if the world was purely rational, Microsoft would have gone out of business ages ago...
Having Knoppix run on the Windows desktop is reassuring. It lets you know that Windows is still there and you can return there at any time, and since all your icons are still on your desktop, your files must therefore be safe. Yeah, more irrational fears, sorry, but that's how many people think.
Most kids of that age understand board games, dice games, card games, etc.
One of the VIC-20 programs I remember seeing was simple: guess a number from 1 to 6, put a bet down, roll the die, and if it matches, you win money. I remember it because I "hacked" the program to tell you the results of the die throw before you had to guess, so I could make huge amounts of money. It sounds lame, but I was about 8 or 9 at the time, and for someone of that age it was quite a buzz.
If you want to get a bit more complicated, kids will understand games like craps and roulette, and if they play, they'll get involved, even if they're not geek types (and yeah, even at that age, you know who the class geeks are).
I wasn't ever talking about per-unit price.
I'm quite sure that the RIAA want to increase the per-unit price; what I'm saying is that they could increase the profits they make from me by a factor of 10x or more by reducing the per-unit price 25%-40%.
The RIAA is saying that they could increase the profits they make from society in general (not you in particular) by increasing the per-unit price 25-40%. They may be wrong, then again, so may you be. That is the point I was trying to make - that there are two opposing views, and that's how a sweet spot even develops.
Well, I don't know about you, but my perception is that the music industry is way over to the right of the "sweet spot" on the sales-against-price graph.
Yeah. The thing about economics is, you have two totally opposing forces: consumers, who want the price pulled down, and producers, who want the price pulled up.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but from the music industry's perception, the music industry is way over to the left of the sweet spot. They probably think that CDs are too cheap. In reality, we're all probably close to the sweet spot already. (Of course, then you get into other economic theories, like, the RIAA is a cartel, etc. etc.)
Screen? Don't really need the screen.
This is one of those times where, by thinking outside the box, you come up with really new ideas.
Now, since it doesn't have a screen, you don't have a big reason to look at it. There's no screen to look at. You can look at the controls, but they're not very interesting, and there aren't many of them.
So, here's the new idea: you can use the iPod shuffle without looking at it. You couldn't do this with a standard iPod (try using the scroll wheel blindfolded). It's not as easy (although it's possible) with other flash players, 'cos the controls are obtuse, they're hard to tell from each other, and they're usually pretty small, due to having to fit a screen on the things. But you can do it all easily with the iPod shuffle.
By getting rid of the screen, they literally invented a whole new way of interacting with your MP3 player. Because there's no screen, Apple was forced to make a decent interface to compensate. This is the result.
Blind people could use the iPod shuffle. You can use it in the dark. You can keep it in your shirt pocket, or on the lanyard but on the inside of your shirt, and operate it through the fabric without taking it out. I do this, the only down side is, it looks like I'm tweaking my own nipples...
Sorry, this is a lame arguement. You should add "... and I am anal about not introducing artifacts into my purchased music..." or "... and I don't want to use Hymn to remove the protection".
Did you even read the parent (now grandparent) post? It says:
Sure, there are tools to decrypt these files, but many of the average ipod users don't have a clue about that stuff.
Your average iPod user is a teenage girl or a 21-year-old male with a hot rod or a young marketing exec or something. Your average iPod user is not a Slashdot reader and won't care for Hymn, or burning to CD to re-rip to Ogg Vorbis, or whatever.
I mean, it looks almost exactly like Microsoft Office. Even a lot of the toolbar icons are incredibly similar and function the same way. This is just an Office clone, not a new, innovative OSS office suite.
This has already been covered at length elsewhere, but I may as well jump in.
The point of OpenOffice is exactly to be a Microsoft Office clone, because if it's even slightly different, then a whole bunch of corporations won't even consider switching to it. For individuals and Mac users, innovation and a workable interface is important. Not so for corporations, who are (presumably) the target audience.
Sorry, maybe look elsewhere?
I'm sorry, but I'm not in the mood of another 24 hours spend in a plane.
You could say the same about any destination in Australia), so why even bother posting in a Linux.conf.au discussion?
Whilst we're on Stephenson, I always thought that Zodiac would make a great film, better than his other books. It's the right length, the right pace, has an asshole protagonist, and sweeping views of Boston Harbor.
For Windows users, it's not a problem at all ... just whip up a quick regexp and poof, it's gone, no matter what domain it comes from.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but I would consider "whipping up a quick regexp" a fairly big barrier for most Windows users.
Stephen Baxter is amongst the hardest of the hard sci-fi writers. I read a review of Coalescent, and in it, the reviewer described the end of the book as set in "a typical Baxterian universe". To me, there's no better way to describe it.
Exultant, to me, is a story that could read as one of Baxter's masterpieces, if only he got a few more elements right. (Alas, that's not the first time I've thought that of his stories). The narrative often doesn't flow well, sometimes cutting to dry physics lectures, and feeling like a disjoint list of tasks that must be done, filling in time until we make it to the climax, which seems rushed. Also, there seem to me to be some fairly obvious plot holes... for instance, his faster-than-light travel doesn't create time paradoxes except at the beginning of the story, where it's a plot device.
This is only a loose sequel to Coalescent, with some recurring themes. It's a very different book (as you may guess: one is set in Roman Britain and the other is 20,000 years in the future) but it also has a strong focus on hard physics. Some of this is at the expense of the characters... for instance, Baxter really needs to work on his romance writing, or (for preference) leave it out. But the action scenes were done well, and you really get the sense of the vast human empire and the insignifance of one little life.
But the central theme, A brief life burns brightly, is strong, and Baxter explores it well. As usual, he's got plenty of fascinating ideas, like how life may have proliferated in the deep past, causing some events that we've otherwise put down to straight, lifeless physics...
Even after all that? I'm hooked. I'm re-reading the story, and I haven't read anything from the Xeelee Sequence up until now, but that's next on the list.
I still have no idea what the purpose of the iPod Photo is...
The iPod Photo is not about photos. Repeat after me: The iPod Photo is not about photos.
OK, so that was an overly confrontational way to start a post. But let's plow on.
The iPod Photo is about Apple transitioning the iPod series to colour screens. Notice how the only black-and-white iPod remaining is the 20GB model - everything else is colour. Mark my words, the next time we get a refresh, it'll be a 20GB iPod Photo, and the black-and-white version will be gone.
If you're going to move the iPod series to colour screens, you want to make sure that they've got a distinctive name, to differentiate them from the standard - you can't just call them iPod. The obvious name is "iPod Color". But why stop there? "iPod Photo" is even better.
I think that Apple has reached the limit of hard drives - most people don't need 60GB for music storage. So I think that in the future, instead of increased hard drive space, they'll push the limits on size... by transitioning everybody to the iPod mini form-factor. You'll get a 10GB iPod mini, then a 20GB. And at some point, those will come in colour too.
Since nobody's mentioned this yet... in Windows (and probably Linux), you can force a reflow by changing the font size. Hold down Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel up, then down. (Or down, then up.)
It's become almost subconscious for me to do now, just like middle-clicking links to open new tabs.
Is it any easier on your Treo?
Go to the Camera app, press the button to take a photo. Click "Send", click "MMS", enter phone number (or look up in address book), click "Send".
Speaking for myself, a big factor in "quality" is form factor: being able to carry my things around, without the bulk causing my pants to slide down to my ankles.
There's another advantage of converged devices: you can get functions that are a "mix" of the two, which often turn out to be useful in their own right.
The Treo is a smartphone: a mobile phone and a PDA. But it's called "Treo" because it has three functions: mobile phone, PDA, and mobile Internet. The third function is a mix of the first two.
It's like mobile phones with cameras. Sure, they have mobile phone and camera capabilities. But the telco industry is betting that people will get into the third capability: sending MMS photo messages to their friends. (Although as of now, it hasn't taken off like SMS has.)
Having MP3 playback on the Treo has one unexpected, but welcome side-effect: when you're listening to music and a call comes in, you can hear the ring through your headphones. This is a godsend for those of us who play our music loud and would otherwise miss calls...
(Now, I shall proceed to debunk all my arguments. I admit to owning both a Treo 600 and an iPod shuffle.)
(I realise that this is a really really really cheap solution and is a bog-standard MP3 player when you could be getting a radio equivalent of an iPod - that's the RadioShark. And you can only record one station. What other drawbacks?)
Most people can get a radio, tune it, and connect it to the line-in (or microphone) port on their PC or Mac. Most people aren't using their line-in port. Given that, why not just let it run full time?
Then, the only problem is needing software: software that can record from the line-in port at any time of day, encode it and dump it to a file. Or just play it through the speaker in real-time. It doesn't sound too hard, in fact, it sounds like only a few hundred lines of code, given the right libraries.
So, I guess I'm asking, why hasn't it been done yet, or why hasn't it been made popular yet?
...so we are holding back from buying G4 PowerBooks because we just know it will be downright embarassing to have last year's model when the G5 PowerBook comes out.
Yeah.
The sad thing about this is, the PowerBook G5 has always supposedly been the next revision of the PowerBook. Ever since 2002, people have been convinced that the PowerBook G5 is right around the corner, and the current PowerBook G4 is the last iteration of the G4 series. So that's why these people can't bring themselves to buy one. Even though there have been heaps of iterations in the meantime. That's the tragedy.
If I had to speculate, I'd say that the PowerBook G5 is several revisions away. Maybe three, maybe four. We could see PowerBooks G4 models at 1.67GHz, 1.83GHz, and 2.0GHz before that happens. OK, it's speculation, but the point is, if you want a PowerBook, buy one now, use it, love it, and don't feel bad that you bought it.
Can you point out one shipping game for the mac that the mac mini does not meet the requirements for? I mean UT2004, WOW, Warcraft3, Neverwinter Nights, Halo, etc. all seem to have minimum requirements below its specs.
I think this is a circular argument, though... because Mac development houses won't port games that require insane amounts of horsepower. Obviously there are other factors, too (the big one being licensing), but the fact that a previous-generation iMac won't play the game is taken into consideration. What's the point in porting a game if it's out of the reach of most Mac gamers?
Besides, there is no sharp line between a system that meets min spec and one that doesn't. It's a continuous gradient, some people will be happy to play on a min spec machine, some won't. Suggest to your usual hardcore PC gamer, used to 60-100fps, that they play on a min spec machine... they'll point and laugh at you. Whilst the Mac mini will get you 15-20fps in World of Warcraft, many won't find that personally acceptable, and some will be amazed that anybody finds that playable.
However the most "novel" thing about it was how you navigated. It didn't use a pointing device (i.e. mouse) but used two dedicated keys on the keyboards labeled "JUMP" (you'll have to forgive me, it's been a while since I've had it out and played with it, so this might not be perfectly correct). You would use the jump keys to "hop" around the document/screen.
Yep, the good ol' LEAP key.
One "modern" computing feature that a lot of people here appreciate is incremental search. It's in Firefox - hit ctrl-f (or whatever you've set it up to be) and start typing - it'll find the next occurrence. In Emacs, ctrl-s and start typing. Once you get used to the feature, it's indispensable.
The Canon Cat had this, all that time ago, this is what the parent is referring to. Instead of hitting ctrl-f, you just held down the LEAP key and started typing. Even more efficient, if you can believe that.
The big challenge to today's users is this: this LEAP searching was the only way you could navigate through text; no arrow keys, no mouse. Apparently it was a lot better anyway...
But the more I think about it - holding down one key *while* typing - the less motivation I feel.
I assume you're talking about the LEAP key. They realised that when you're doing normal typing, your thumbs do nothing, so they put the LEAP key in a place where your thumb can hold it down whilst typing (underneath the space bar). It's all pretty convenient. The one counter-example is when you're hitting the space bar, and even then, you only hit that with one thumb, so your other thumb could be holding down that LEAP key.
That's for the original Jef-Raskin-ideal-computer, the Canon Cat. Obviously, most other keyboards don't have a LEAP key, so they've been forced to do some ugly workarounds. Time will tell whether people will adapt, or shrug and say that it's too hard.
This is interesting - do you know of any Sendmail milters / other service that can digitally sign all outgoing emails...
See parent post. PGP Universal seems to indicate that it's Sendmail-compatible.
OK, here we go. From the FAQ:
Q: Are you sure that Kryptos part 4 is solvable?
Yes. Both Jim Sanborn and Ed Scheidt have repeated over and over that it's solvable. Sanborn has also been quoted in interviews as saying he was surprised that it hadn't been solved yet. And when Elonka Dunin, co-moderator of the Kryptos group, asked him flat out in mid-2003 whether or not part 4 was solvable, his answer was: "Yes. It ain't easy, but it's solvable!"
Didn't Stephen Hawking say recently that there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes?
It's true (well, for a given value of "true"), but black holes aren't the same things as wormholes. Wormholes are a quantum concept (in the sense that they're really really small) where you get to travel between different bits of spacetime by taking shortcuts. Did I say they're really really small? We're talking mind-boggling sub-sub-sub-atomic here.
Black holes are just huge chunks of mass (think ultra-massive stars) which have collapsed under their own gravity.
I am not a physicist so it's all been dumbed down, and is possibly completely wrong, any real physicists are invited to make corrections.
Is this really THAT big a problem?
No, it is not. Is it relevant how big the problem is?
If you want big problems, try the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. 175,000 dead. Dead. Not even variable naming conventions or lack of comments compare.
The topic was about solving a problem, and if you don't think that it's a big problem, so be it. I think it is a big problem, but it's possible that I see aspects of it that you don't (or perhaps the other way around).