Executive Summary:The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here is the article where Tognazzini describes his test.
Tognazzini writes:
The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for
the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they
could in some cases be faster than the mouse.
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every
instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|).
The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e."....
The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse,
50.22 seconds.
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits.
He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone,
from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//s/|/e/g
Six seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes.
(That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one,
the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1),
"{/|^[re" and then repeat "n."
But why would you make the user do that?
That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard,
but of the computer itself.
So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two
times?
If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to
the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times;
you do it once.
Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac System 6 tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose
of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two
times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for
forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard!
A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys --
it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text.
There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and
a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get.
This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character
in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically
form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location,
rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility
of error.
What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are
visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green"
throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed?
Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user:
take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't
touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols,
words and keywords, blocks and sentences....
It even ignores the symbols themselves;
it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the
document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to
select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being
written to?)
Revised Executive Summary:The mouse is faster than the keyboard that has
nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter.
Hon. Stephen Harper, Leader of the Opposition: Mr Speaker, today Liberal spin doctors and Liberal lawyers are trying -- actually, they have the gall to depict the Liberal Party as the victim of the sponsorship scandal. Caught as it is, will the government at least have the decency to admit that the only victim is the Canadian taxpayer whose money was stolen?
Speaker: The Right Honourable Prime Minister.
Paul Martin: Mr Speaker
Some Member: Guilty!
Speaker: Order, order. The Right Honorable Prime Minister has the floor.
Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, Prime Minister: Mr Speaker, the Liberal Party consists of thousands of men and women, in Quebec and right across this country, who are dedicated to the Liberal Party and to their country. They work day in and day out, Mr Speaker, for the benefit of Canadians, and Mr Speaker, those members of the Liberal party should not have to bear the rumours, Mr Speaker, or the burden of the activities of a very small few who may have colluded against the Party and against, Mr Speaker, the well being of Canadians, and we will defend, Mr Speaker, those Liberals. These are Canadians, Mr Speaker, who have given their all for this country.
Some Member: Hear, hear.
Speaker:[inaudible] the Opposition.
Stephen Harper: Mr Speaker, the judge, police, and Canadians will be the judge of how involved the Liberal party is.
On another subject, last week Canadians finally learned the details of the brutal torture and murder of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi. Now it turns out, for months the Prime Minister knew the true extent of the brutality inflicted upon Ms Kazemi. Instead of taking a firm stand against Iran, he sent our ambassador back to that oppressive regime. What kind of callous, spineless government reestablishes normal diplomatic relations with this kind of regime?
Speaker: Hon. Prime Minister.
Paul Martin:[inaudible]... respond first to the preamble. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that Candians do de-- [aside] are Americans -- that Canadians should have the facts, Mr Speaker, and that is why I called for the Gomery commission, that is why this government, Mr Speaker, put that commission in place, Mr Speaker, it is precisely to have those facts, and that's why there should not be an election until Justice Gomery has reported, because Canadians deserve to know the facts.
Now, Mr Speaker, if I may respond to the Honourable Member's question, if the baying on the other side... the member has asked a question,....
Speaker: I'm afraid the Right Honourable Prime Minister has used up the time responding to the preamble, but I suspect there might be a supplementary question, may be a supplementary question from the Honourable Leader of the Opposition.
Stephen Harper: Mr Speaker, may I just say that that is a perfect example of what is wrong with this government. They should have used this opportunity to defend a Canadian citizen, not the Liberal party.
Nothing. We're in the centre of the visible universe. We're in the centre of what we can see, because we can see equally far in all directions. (This is pretty trivial, and is not one of the problems on the list.)
Many years ago, the British Medical Journal was a simple but honest medical journal. Then, it happened into possession of a wondrous ring that made it more visible. Unable or unwilling to resist this corrupting influence, the BMJ has over many years deformed into a grotesque birdlike creature
recognizable by its diet of
crickets,
it
ducklikecall,
and its monstrously overgrown left wing.
In Canada, the english media is dominated by CanWest Global which owns most anglo papers as well as GLobalTV.
No, it isn't. CanWest runs a distant third to the CBC (television and radio; hard left) and (television and print; centre by Canadian standards, i.e. left by American), both of which, unlike CanWest, also have 24-hour news channels. In newspapers, Quebecor and Torstar are major players beyond those mentioned.
Im a little surprised that the jewish lobby hasnt jumped on it, then again those parasites dont mind anti-semites when it suits them.
Non-Canadians are probably wondering how AC's post ended up there: it's because his post is the local version of the "Jews control the media" conspiracy theory.
No, they mean trademarked. There are some things you can't photograph without permission because the image is a trademark - the "lone cypress" tree for instance. Copyright doesn't prevent making an original picture of a building. I'm not sure what the status of trademarking the appearance of a building is at present; I seem to recall cases involving the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, and the Transamerica building, but I don't know how they turned out.
Since the antecedent comment has, at the moment, been moderated up (as "underrated" to evade metamoderation) rather than off-topic -
In a March 31, 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO's executive committee, said:
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism. It has also been a conceptual war for the ownership of the term 'Palestinian' which has been transferred over to the Arabs, whereas before 1967, 'Palestine' has always been synonymous with the land of Israel.
You can't bookmark a page that uses flash? Since when?
You can't bookmark "pages" within a flashything.
I have no idea what "can't index" means.
Ooh, you must be a "web designer". It means the flashy stuff isn't text, so it can't be indexed and searched. 'Text', FYI, refers to those rows of funny squiggles you sometimes see on old-fashioned web pages that don't win design awards. Text sometimes means something (which can occasionally be important to non-postmodernists), and indexing it helps people find bits of text they want to read.
And doesn't it have the same overgrown-TV-remote rubber-sheet action as all their (and nearly everyone else's) current crap?
Proper keyswitches register well before the end of their stroke, and provide gradually increasing resistance the rest of the way down. Rubber-sheet keyboard register at the end of their squishy stroke, so you have no choice but to bash your fingers against the bottom all day long.
Apple used to make decent keyboards - the Apple Extended Keyboard is wonderful (once modified to put the control key in the right place). The Extended II is almost as good. The smaller M0116 and the compact Apple ADB Keyboard - the obvious inspiration for the physical form of their latest abomination - are good too.
If you plan to keep using your fingers, get one of those old Apple keyboards and an ADB-to-USB converter. Or get one of these. Or, for that matter, get an AT-to-USB converter and an IBM Model M, a Fujitsu FKB4700 (OEM, many labels), or that skinny one with the fold-over function key templates.
War on Terror? Please. Who, specifically, are we fighting again?
Militant Islam. Unfortunately, political correctness prevents our governments saying so, hence the pretense that "a terrorist could be anyone" leading to restrictions and regulations like these.
Other parts of the world have lived with terrorism for years without freaking out. The key bit there is "lived with". You begin by understanding that there's no "win"...
Sigh. At the risk of a -1 Redundant, the whole point of quantum-encrypted communication is that there is a "PHYSICS law" that makes it impossible to monitor a message.
Minor correction: the version of Shor's paper linked in my comment above was published in 1995, but an earlier version (apparently not available online) was published the previous year.
Feynman (1982) went one step closer to a true quantum computer with his 'universal quantum simulator' [.... although] it is not a computing machine in the sense of this article.
From http://www.qubit.org/oldsite/resource/news.html:
David Deutsch's "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer" is now available in
PostScript and PDF format. This article laid the foundations for the field of quantum computation and exhibits the first quantum algorithm. We felt that it would be appropriate to make the paper also accessible to researchers who have difficulty obtaining the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
That's the author of the somewhat muddled book review that Slashdot linked to, not the author of the book that Slashdot didn't link to. (Actually I think amazon has some better written reviews than this one.)
The 49g+ (the currently-available successor of the 49g non-plus) uses an ARM -- running a Saturn emulator.
Re:Myself, personally..
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Methane is actually odorless. What you smell are mercaptans, which are either biologically generated along with methane, or, in the case of commercial gas, deliberately added to make leaks noticable.
Slashdot Mirror
Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here is the article where Tognazzini describes his test. Tognazzini writes:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//s/|/e/gSix seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac System 6 tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter.
Speaker: The Right Honourable Prime Minister.
Paul Martin: Mr Speaker
Some Member: Guilty!
Speaker: Order, order. The Right Honorable Prime Minister has the floor.
Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, Prime Minister: Mr Speaker, the Liberal Party consists of thousands of men and women, in Quebec and right across this country, who are dedicated to the Liberal Party and to their country. They work day in and day out, Mr Speaker, for the benefit of Canadians, and Mr Speaker, those members of the Liberal party should not have to bear the rumours, Mr Speaker, or the burden of the activities of a very small few who may have colluded against the Party and against, Mr Speaker, the well being of Canadians, and we will defend, Mr Speaker, those Liberals. These are Canadians, Mr Speaker, who have given their all for this country.
Some Member: Hear, hear.
Speaker: [inaudible] the Opposition.
Stephen Harper: Mr Speaker, the judge, police, and Canadians will be the judge of how involved the Liberal party is.
On another subject, last week Canadians finally learned the details of the brutal torture and murder of Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi. Now it turns out, for months the Prime Minister knew the true extent of the brutality inflicted upon Ms Kazemi. Instead of taking a firm stand against Iran, he sent our ambassador back to that oppressive regime. What kind of callous, spineless government reestablishes normal diplomatic relations with this kind of regime?
Speaker: Hon. Prime Minister.
Paul Martin: [inaudible] ... respond first to the preamble. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that Candians do de-- [aside] are Americans -- that Canadians should have the facts, Mr Speaker, and that is why I called for the Gomery commission, that is why this government, Mr Speaker, put that commission in place, Mr Speaker, it is precisely to have those facts, and that's why there should not be an election until Justice Gomery has reported, because Canadians deserve to know the facts.
Now, Mr Speaker, if I may respond to the Honourable Member's question, if the baying on the other side... the member has asked a question, ....
Speaker: I'm afraid the Right Honourable Prime Minister has used up the time responding to the preamble, but I suspect there might be a supplementary question, may be a supplementary question from the Honourable Leader of the Opposition.
Stephen Harper: Mr Speaker, may I just say that that is a perfect example of what is wrong with this government. They should have used this opportunity to defend a Canadian citizen, not the Liberal party.
[continues re Iran]
Nothing. We're in the centre of the visible universe. We're in the centre of what we can see, because we can see equally far in all directions. (This is pretty trivial, and is not one of the problems on the list.)
Many years ago, the British Medical Journal was a simple but honest medical journal. Then, it happened into possession of a wondrous ring that made it more visible. Unable or unwilling to resist this corrupting influence, the BMJ has over many years deformed into a grotesque birdlike creature recognizable by its diet of crickets, it ducklike call, and its monstrously overgrown left wing.
You mean, the IBM PowerPC 970 can emulate an IBM 5100?
No, they mean trademarked. There are some things you can't photograph without permission because the image is a trademark - the "lone cypress" tree for instance. Copyright doesn't prevent making an original picture of a building. I'm not sure what the status of trademarking the appearance of a building is at present; I seem to recall cases involving the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, and the Transamerica building, but I don't know how they turned out.
You might think you're joking, but the current HP graphing calculators use a 32-bit CPU (ARM) emulating the 4-bit CPU (Saturn) of earlier models.
In a March 31, 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO's executive committee, said:
You can't bookmark a page that uses flash? Since when?
You can't bookmark "pages" within a flashything.
I have no idea what "can't index" means.
Ooh, you must be a "web designer". It means the flashy stuff isn't text, so it can't be indexed and searched. 'Text', FYI, refers to those rows of funny squiggles you sometimes see on old-fashioned web pages that don't win design awards. Text sometimes means something (which can occasionally be important to non-postmodernists), and indexing it helps people find bits of text they want to read.
Proper keyswitches register well before the end of their stroke, and provide gradually increasing resistance the rest of the way down. Rubber-sheet keyboard register at the end of their squishy stroke, so you have no choice but to bash your fingers against the bottom all day long.
Apple used to make decent keyboards - the Apple Extended Keyboard is wonderful (once modified to put the control key in the right place). The Extended II is almost as good. The smaller M0116 and the compact Apple ADB Keyboard - the obvious inspiration for the physical form of their latest abomination - are good too.
If you plan to keep using your fingers, get one of those old Apple keyboards and an ADB-to-USB converter. Or get one of these. Or, for that matter, get an AT-to-USB converter and an IBM Model M, a Fujitsu FKB4700 (OEM, many labels), or that skinny one with the fold-over function key templates.
You could buy diodes? You had it easy! We had to make our own. The first one was easy enough, but catching the cat the second time....
Microwave ovens generally operate at 2.450 GHz, which only intersects 802.11 channels 7 through 10.
And the humans won't explode if you poke a few holes in them with a fork.
Sigh. At the risk of a -1 Redundant, the whole point of quantum-encrypted communication is that there is a "PHYSICS law" that makes it impossible to monitor a message.
So, you're saying Area 51 has landing strips for gay Martians?
Minor correction: the version of Shor's paper linked in my comment above was published in 1995, but an earlier version (apparently not available online) was published the previous year.
See the references to Feynman's work in Deutch's 1985 paper Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer :
jfern wrote:
Peter Shor's famous algorithm was published in 1995 and cites Deutch's above paper among others.Fortunately, the book (that Slashdot didn't link to) is not written by the same person as the book review that Slashdot did link to.
That's the author of the somewhat muddled book review that Slashdot linked to, not the author of the book that Slashdot didn't link to. (Actually I think amazon has some better written reviews than this one.)
Then you've heard of the Institute of Physics' Dirac Prize, right?
Don't blame Deutsch for the allsci reviewer's article! A major part of the book is in fact an explicit defense of Popperian epistemology.
The 49g+ (the currently-available successor of the 49g non-plus) uses an ARM -- running a Saturn emulator.
Methane is actually odorless. What you smell are mercaptans, which are either biologically generated along with methane, or, in the case of commercial gas, deliberately added to make leaks noticable.