As for me, I demand nothing less than total disambiguation. We need sufficient variation in spelling to make sure that the sense of each word is clear. I shouldn't have to depend on context to infer what you mean. If you reply to this post and call me "slipshod," I want to know that you are referring to the sloppy, careless reasoning of my post, and not to the looseness of my footwear (for which I propose to the new substitute "slipshoed"). Likewise, trademarks using common words will be disambiguated from the meaning of those words - popular word game Scrabble would need to be renamed, as this spelling is already in use by at least four other meanings, each of which will need its own variation anyhow. We can keep "scrabble" for "to scratch or scrape," but make subtle changes to the rest; "scragble" for "to struggle toward a goal," "scrubble" for "to climb over" (as over rubble!) and the sense "to scribble" should simply be eliminated, as "scribble" is already too close to "scrabble" anyway and might as well be handled as a variant of pronunciation. The game itself might be renamed B-3, after the second letter in the alphabet and its point value in the game (A-1 having been used for the tasty steak sauce and several thousand local plumbing, towing, and other services companies vying for the first spot in the telephone directory, each of which will celebrate its uniqueness with a new, never-before-seen name). Each town with the same name as another will also need to be reborn under a new moniker (surely a cause for revelry in the Midways, Fairviews, and Oak Groves of the world!). Finally, each of us whose name unfortunately coincides with that of another, shall have to make the tiniest of adjustments, on a first-come, first-served basis; thus, the eldest John Smith on record shall keep his spelling, while the next shall have to be subtly altered (Johnn Smith), and the next altered only the tiniest bit (Jahnn Smith), and so on (Djahnne Pschmiythe). For completeness, the birth and death certificates, tax and census records, and headstones or memorial plaques of some few billions of our ancestors shall likewise need to be "tweaked," possibly according to some fractal algorithm in cases where no living relatives can recommend how John might have preferred it, if only he'd taken the opportunity.
This technique is called "frying" in the Atari 2600 (VCS) realm, and the last two point releases of Stella (the 2600 emulator) have included support for simulated frying.
Suppose I'm sitting by a pond one day, busy coding on my laptop, when I hear a lound splash. I look up and see a couple of kids picking up rocks and a circular wave having a diameter that indicates it was formed about 5s ago. Well, I wasn't a witness to the event, but I could hypothesize that one of the kids threw a rock into the water. To confirm, I could roll up my pant legs and feel around in the soft muddy floor of the pond for a rock. Now I've got a supported theory. The rock turns out to be the same imported blue granite used to grit the path around the pond but not found natively in the area? Even more confirmation...
Actually, I had the same problem with the Anir/3M ergonomic mouse (the one that looks like a....er, flight stick).
Even though it *does* have a shelf built into it, if I allowed my lower arm to be in any other posture than the "ideal," it caused me great pain in my hand. Needless to say, holding your arm "just so" for hours at a time is simply exhausting, so you end up leaning on the mouse and hurting yourself. I have gone back to a regular mouse.
OTOH, the Anir/3M would probably be perfect for people wearing a wrist brace, who *can't* limber up their lower arm.
You can't find an example? Ever use Slashdot? You need to pass a captcha to post anonymously and/or open an account. Don't tell me you come here to look at the icons...
Right, but hummingbirds almost certainly didn't evolve flight independently of other birds. Even if they had a flightless ancestor, they still had many flight-enabling genes around to work with. Hummingbird flight is a specialization of preexisting avian flight. So, if they're all descended from flying dinosaurs, then hummingbirds are part of one of the two lines discussed in the article.
I've had problems, at work, with ads that never download because their servers have been blocked by the Gods of Firewalldom. I have no influence over these Gods, so when I see that a page is not loading because, for instance, view.atdmt.com or ak.bluestreak.com is not responding, I just add that name to my/etc/hosts file as an alias for 127.0.0.1. Broken images on/. are better than no/. at all, and I'm not costing Slashdot anything because the ad wouldn't have been delivered anyway (sorry guys, I blame the Gods).
I was curious, too, and had a look around the web. The only images I could find from Clementine were 1 pixel == 1 km, though some National Academy of Sciences site says they took the surface at 100m to 400m per pixel (still way too big to see anything left on the surface).
Even Hubble can only "resolve objects as small as 280 meters" across (not sure how that translates to pixels per unit). Which is amazing, considering the views of the universe it's given us. Then again, the universe is a bit bigger than 280 meters...
I asked my aunt, who's a hand surgeon, about "ergonomic" input devices, and she told me that the opposite is true. The best thing to do is to move around a lot, so that you don't stiffly stick to one position; she said that a variety of motions is less likely to cause RSI. In her opinion, old-fashioned typewriters were better than modern keyboards because they forced users to lift their hands to return the carriage, roll paper, etc.
I think I'll be building a keyboard hack where every switch is a different gizmo. =)
The RSI monster likes it when you hold still
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I asked my aunt, who's a hand surgeon, about "ergonomic" input devices, and she told me that the opposite is true. The best thing to do is to move around a lot, so that you don't stiffly stick to one position; she said that a variety of motions is less likely to cause RSI. In her opinion, old-fashioned typewriters were better than modern keyboards because they forced users to lift their hands to return the carriage, roll paper, etc.
I think I'll be building a keyboard hack where every switch is different. =)
I made lots of bitmap fonts on the Amiga, but I've only made one complete vector font. It's a lot of work!
I put the font I made under the Open Publication License. I wanted it to be available, but I wanted to keep my name attached to it and to hear about it if people changed it. After spending several of my weekends putting it together, I thought that was fair.
Here's the heart of it:
1) The modified version must be labeled as such.
2) The person making the modifications must be identified and the modifications dated.
3) Acknowledgement of the original author and publisher if applicable must be retained according to normal academic citation practices.
4) The location of the original unmodified document must be identified.
5) The original author's (or authors') name(s) may not be used to assert or imply endorsement of the resulting document without the original author's (or authors') permission.
I didn't consider document embedding of the font at the time, though, and while this isn't a font many people would ever use (it's kind of demented looking: http://whiteshell.com/fonts/beltway-prophet), I don't want to limit people who might consider it, so it looks like I'll have to change my choice of license...any suggestions?
It's as if icons STARTED 2-4 years ago...
on
A History of Icons
·
· Score: 1
I have to disagree. The NeXT had amazing icons back in the late 80s and early 90s, many of which still hold up today (though they were only 2-bit black and white).
I really like having the side-by-side comparison of icons, but they've chosen mostly modern, mostly mainstream OSes. "Trash" icons in particular are a favorite of mine, but here they're all nearly identical (with the exception of OS/2's wacky shredder). It's also weird that they don't include the folder icon, one of those basics that some OSes did slightly differently (eg, the Amiga's "drawers").
They do show some Lisa icons here, but what about all the other early GUIs? It would be great to include DEC GEM, a sampling of X11 icons from different UNIXes, and geesh - the NeXT, which they claim to be represented by Rhapsody (it's not! Where are the Black Hole and Recycler?!?)
Plus, any history of the GUI that excludes Xerox is missing the prime mover! With a quick search I found this site which includes screenshots from the Xerox Star. The icons are distorted, being photos of a curved screen, but surely someone somewhere has the original bitmaps.
The "interactive chart" of GUI influences on this page shows dozens of sources I've never even heard of...I'd like to see a history that cites these designs, to show the initial struggle to represent all these machine functions graphically, not just the differences between popular, modern UIs, after everyone's adopted a common visual vocabulary for most things.
True, but of course my point was that Apple's following the market, which clearly favors Windows today, though I won't attempt any particular percentages of the market again =)
Businesses and government using Linux desktops in productivity environments aren't really the iPod's demographic. I wonder if someone has statistics on home/student Linux deployment (not counting TiVOs and other special-purpose devices)? It'd be particularly telling to know the percentage who only run Linux, rather than people who use Linux sometimes in a dual-boot configuration, or who use it side-by-side with Mac or Windows.
Yes, but it's not as though they could give it away for free, and be happy to get the bucks from the few percent of the few percent of people who only run Linux desktops and also want iPods.
They'd have to port the thing, which costs money, and they'd have to support the port, which costs money. I would expect that it would be a loss to the company. And, as I pointed out in my post, what platform should they give back to? It's not as though Mac OS X is a complete Red Hat under the hood.
Is "giving back to the OSS community" equivalent to providing a binary RPM that only runs on a recent Red Hat/Fedora?
If you're suggesting that Apple open-source its iTunes client, I think that would be fantastic, but I'd guess they're probably bound by lots of patent arrangements and simply can't without mind-boggling expense.
I'm talking desktop operating systems. I will be very impressed if you can find any statistics that indicate Linux has a bigger installed base than 2% on the desktop.
If people synchronized their iPods with their personal web servers, I'm sure Apple would have put out a nice set of Apache module binaries for Linux!
As to why Apple chose to roll out iTunes on the Mac even with its marginal market share, well, if you can't figure that one out...
You'll also notice that they recently replaced FireWire cables with USB 2.0. That means if you have an older Mac, you have to shell out $29 for the FireWire cable or suffer with USB 1.0. So they really are focusing on where the market share is.
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
That's an odd complaint. I don't think Apple is demonstrating a grudge against OSS or Linux in particular, it's just that the market share of Linux on the desktop is tiny (2%). If Linux had 70% of the desktop market, they'd certainly be offering iTunes for X11 and Linux. Moreover, if it were purely a quid-pro-quo arrangement, I'm not sure that Apple would be bound to produce iTunes for Linux - maybe they should provide iTunes for OpenBSD, since they actually use that team's products (OpenSSH, for instance). Just because you get Apache and Samba with Red Hat, and OS X (OS X Server has Samba) also includes them, doesn't make them "part of Linux," after all, though they're clearly important to making Linux useful.
Some people have more money than time, some people have more time than money. I think this is a pretty good solution for someone with more time than money.
The Mac Mini is small enough to fit, whole and unblemished, into any old Apple model (except maybe the Cube, and I'm sure the guts would fit into that once the case was off).
Fit a Mac Mini into a Timex-Sinclair, and then I'll be impressed. =)
Slashdot Mirror
As for me, I demand nothing less than total disambiguation. We need sufficient variation in spelling to make sure that the sense of each word is clear. I shouldn't have to depend on context to infer what you mean. If you reply to this post and call me "slipshod," I want to know that you are referring to the sloppy, careless reasoning of my post, and not to the looseness of my footwear (for which I propose to the new substitute "slipshoed"). Likewise, trademarks using common words will be disambiguated from the meaning of those words - popular word game Scrabble would need to be renamed, as this spelling is already in use by at least four other meanings, each of which will need its own variation anyhow. We can keep "scrabble" for "to scratch or scrape," but make subtle changes to the rest; "scragble" for "to struggle toward a goal," "scrubble" for "to climb over" (as over rubble!) and the sense "to scribble" should simply be eliminated, as "scribble" is already too close to "scrabble" anyway and might as well be handled as a variant of pronunciation. The game itself might be renamed B-3, after the second letter in the alphabet and its point value in the game (A-1 having been used for the tasty steak sauce and several thousand local plumbing, towing, and other services companies vying for the first spot in the telephone directory, each of which will celebrate its uniqueness with a new, never-before-seen name). Each town with the same name as another will also need to be reborn under a new moniker (surely a cause for revelry in the Midways, Fairviews, and Oak Groves of the world!). Finally, each of us whose name unfortunately coincides with that of another, shall have to make the tiniest of adjustments, on a first-come, first-served basis; thus, the eldest John Smith on record shall keep his spelling, while the next shall have to be subtly altered (Johnn Smith), and the next altered only the tiniest bit (Jahnn Smith), and so on (Djahnne Pschmiythe). For completeness, the birth and death certificates, tax and census records, and headstones or memorial plaques of some few billions of our ancestors shall likewise need to be "tweaked," possibly according to some fractal algorithm in cases where no living relatives can recommend how John might have preferred it, if only he'd taken the opportunity.
Perfect match. =)
Compare:
Mattel Aquarius
This technique is called "frying" in the Atari 2600 (VCS) realm, and the last two point releases of Stella (the 2600 emulator) have included support for simulated frying.
Suppose I'm sitting by a pond one day, busy coding on my laptop, when I hear a lound splash. I look up and see a couple of kids picking up rocks and a circular wave having a diameter that indicates it was formed about 5s ago. Well, I wasn't a witness to the event, but I could hypothesize that one of the kids threw a rock into the water. To confirm, I could roll up my pant legs and feel around in the soft muddy floor of the pond for a rock. Now I've got a supported theory. The rock turns out to be the same imported blue granite used to grit the path around the pond but not found natively in the area? Even more confirmation...
Actually, I had the same problem with the Anir/3M ergonomic mouse (the one that looks like a....er, flight stick).
Even though it *does* have a shelf built into it, if I allowed my lower arm to be in any other posture than the "ideal," it caused me great pain in my hand. Needless to say, holding your arm "just so" for hours at a time is simply exhausting, so you end up leaning on the mouse and hurting yourself. I have gone back to a regular mouse.
OTOH, the Anir/3M would probably be perfect for people wearing a wrist brace, who *can't* limber up their lower arm.
Or it would be perhaps as expensive to open source IE/Mac as to maintain it indefinitely...
You can't find an example? Ever use Slashdot? You need to pass a captcha to post anonymously and/or open an account. Don't tell me you come here to look at the icons...
Right, but hummingbirds almost certainly didn't evolve flight independently of other birds. Even if they had a flightless ancestor, they still had many flight-enabling genes around to work with. Hummingbird flight is a specialization of preexisting avian flight. So, if they're all descended from flying dinosaurs, then hummingbirds are part of one of the two lines discussed in the article.
I've had problems, at work, with ads that never download because their servers have been blocked by the Gods of Firewalldom. I have no influence over these Gods, so when I see that a page is not loading because, for instance, view.atdmt.com or ak.bluestreak.com is not responding, I just add that name to my /etc/hosts file as an alias for 127.0.0.1. Broken images on /. are better than no /. at all, and I'm not costing Slashdot anything because the ad wouldn't have been delivered anyway (sorry guys, I blame the Gods).
I was curious, too, and had a look around the web. The only images I could find from Clementine were 1 pixel == 1 km, though some National Academy of Sciences site says they took the surface at 100m to 400m per pixel (still way too big to see anything left on the surface).
Even Hubble can only "resolve objects as small as 280 meters" across (not sure how that translates to pixels per unit). Which is amazing, considering the views of the universe it's given us. Then again, the universe is a bit bigger than 280 meters...
Drat, so the Flashback 2 won't have the long-awaited 16-bit addressing enhancement? I guess we'll just be stuck with 12 bits for another 30 years.
I asked my aunt, who's a hand surgeon, about "ergonomic" input devices, and she told me that the opposite is true. The best thing to do is to move around a lot, so that you don't stiffly stick to one position; she said that a variety of motions is less likely to cause RSI. In her opinion, old-fashioned typewriters were better than modern keyboards because they forced users to lift their hands to return the carriage, roll paper, etc.
I think I'll be building a keyboard hack where every switch is a different gizmo. =)
I asked my aunt, who's a hand surgeon, about "ergonomic" input devices, and she told me that the opposite is true. The best thing to do is to move around a lot, so that you don't stiffly stick to one position; she said that a variety of motions is less likely to cause RSI. In her opinion, old-fashioned typewriters were better than modern keyboards because they forced users to lift their hands to return the carriage, roll paper, etc.
I think I'll be building a keyboard hack where every switch is different. =)
I made lots of bitmap fonts on the Amiga, but I've only made one complete vector font. It's a lot of work!
I put the font I made under the Open Publication License. I wanted it to be available, but I wanted to keep my name attached to it and to hear about it if people changed it. After spending several of my weekends putting it together, I thought that was fair.
Here's the heart of it:
1) The modified version must be labeled as such.
2) The person making the modifications must be identified and the modifications dated.
3) Acknowledgement of the original author and publisher if applicable must be retained according to normal academic citation practices.
4) The location of the original unmodified document must be identified.
5) The original author's (or authors') name(s) may not be used to assert or imply endorsement of the resulting document without the original author's (or authors') permission.
I didn't consider document embedding of the font at the time, though, and while this isn't a font many people would ever use (it's kind of demented looking: http://whiteshell.com/fonts/beltway-prophet), I don't want to limit people who might consider it, so it looks like I'll have to change my choice of license...any suggestions?
I have to disagree. The NeXT had amazing icons back in the late 80s and early 90s, many of which still hold up today (though they were only 2-bit black and white).
I really like having the side-by-side comparison of icons, but they've chosen mostly modern, mostly mainstream OSes. "Trash" icons in particular are a favorite of mine, but here they're all nearly identical (with the exception of OS/2's wacky shredder). It's also weird that they don't include the folder icon, one of those basics that some OSes did slightly differently (eg, the Amiga's "drawers").
They do show some Lisa icons here, but what about all the other early GUIs? It would be great to include DEC GEM, a sampling of X11 icons from different UNIXes, and geesh - the NeXT, which they claim to be represented by Rhapsody (it's not! Where are the Black Hole and Recycler?!?)
Plus, any history of the GUI that excludes Xerox is missing the prime mover! With a quick search I found this site which includes screenshots from the Xerox Star. The icons are distorted, being photos of a curved screen, but surely someone somewhere has the original bitmaps.
The "interactive chart" of GUI influences on this page shows dozens of sources I've never even heard of...I'd like to see a history that cites these designs, to show the initial struggle to represent all these machine functions graphically, not just the differences between popular, modern UIs, after everyone's adopted a common visual vocabulary for most things.
True, but of course my point was that Apple's following the market, which clearly favors Windows today, though I won't attempt any particular percentages of the market again =)
Okay, I'm impressed. =)
I think I should have been more specific, though!
Businesses and government using Linux desktops in productivity environments aren't really the iPod's demographic. I wonder if someone has statistics on home/student Linux deployment (not counting TiVOs and other special-purpose devices)? It'd be particularly telling to know the percentage who only run Linux, rather than people who use Linux sometimes in a dual-boot configuration, or who use it side-by-side with Mac or Windows.
Yes, but it's not as though they could give it away for free, and be happy to get the bucks from the few percent of the few percent of people who only run Linux desktops and also want iPods.
They'd have to port the thing, which costs money, and they'd have to support the port, which costs money. I would expect that it would be a loss to the company. And, as I pointed out in my post, what platform should they give back to? It's not as though Mac OS X is a complete Red Hat under the hood.
Is "giving back to the OSS community" equivalent to providing a binary RPM that only runs on a recent Red Hat/Fedora?
If you're suggesting that Apple open-source its iTunes client, I think that would be fantastic, but I'd guess they're probably bound by lots of patent arrangements and simply can't without mind-boggling expense.
I'm talking desktop operating systems. I will be very impressed if you can find any statistics that indicate Linux has a bigger installed base than 2% on the desktop.
If people synchronized their iPods with their personal web servers, I'm sure Apple would have put out a nice set of Apache module binaries for Linux!
As to why Apple chose to roll out iTunes on the Mac even with its marginal market share, well, if you can't figure that one out...
You'll also notice that they recently replaced FireWire cables with USB 2.0. That means if you have an older Mac, you have to shell out $29 for the FireWire cable or suffer with USB 1.0. So they really are focusing on where the market share is.
That's an odd complaint. I don't think Apple is demonstrating a grudge against OSS or Linux in particular, it's just that the market share of Linux on the desktop is tiny (2%). If Linux had 70% of the desktop market, they'd certainly be offering iTunes for X11 and Linux. Moreover, if it were purely a quid-pro-quo arrangement, I'm not sure that Apple would be bound to produce iTunes for Linux - maybe they should provide iTunes for OpenBSD, since they actually use that team's products (OpenSSH, for instance). Just because you get Apache and Samba with Red Hat, and OS X (OS X Server has Samba) also includes them, doesn't make them "part of Linux," after all, though they're clearly important to making Linux useful.
Some people have more money than time, some people have more time than money. I think this is a pretty good solution for someone with more time than money.
I have an empty (mostly) LC III case if anyone wants it...
The Mac Mini is small enough to fit, whole and unblemished, into any old Apple model (except maybe the Cube, and I'm sure the guts would fit into that once the case was off).
Fit a Mac Mini into a Timex-Sinclair, and then I'll be impressed. =)
PS. I wonder how you'd type command-T on the membrane keyboard.