Give yourself rewards. Make some of your usual things (going to a move, etc) a rewards. You'll only get that new pair of headphones if you manage to finish the term paper this weekend. That way, you get artificial pressure.
Eliminate distractions.
Don't use Linux or LaTeX.:-) I always spend time dicking around playing with new features when I should be doing work if I'm writing a paper. Seriously, if you're working away, absolutely restrict yourself from learning new features of the software you're using properly. Do the bare minimum in research to get whatever it is working properly, and get back to work.
Don't browse your usual news sites. You can only run across something to sidetrack you. Slashdot is really bad about this. Avoid Slashdot comments like the plague.
Get interested in what you're doing. Most schoolwork actually *is* kind of nifty, but if you're treating it as torture, it will be.
Only eat snacks/pizza/whatever when you're doing work. Good way to get yourself in a mood of enjoying homework.
Yeah, at one time I got really excited about rigging up some cables to hook a VT220 up to my Linux box.
Problem is, there just isn't much point. Computers are *cheap* these days, and finding a used computer from the masses out there made in the last twenty years is easy. You can use any x86 box ever *made* as a good terminal emulator, and get color and other goodies the VT doesn't provide.
There are lots of terminal emulation programs, though if you have 4 MB of memory on the thing or more, I'd probably run Linux, which was originally a terminal emulator and still makes a darn good one. And if you just love the amber look of the VTs, you can theme your Linux terminal box using this relatively unknown program.
You also then get color, a nice big scrollback buffer, multiple virtual terminals per box. You don't have to hassle with weird cables -- a null modem cable is all it takes. You can put cast-off monitors of any size on the thing (and the move to LCDs is producing lots of excess CRTs...getting used 15 inchers for free is easy, and they're much nicer and larger than the VT100 screens, and don't have the annoying whine to them).
What I would love is a MUD with a roguelike interface.
You mean a cross-platform, GPL game with vast worlds, lots of development, and years of content under their belt? Free to play?
I believe that looking for the Crossfire webpage. A bit more Gauntletish than I'd like (contains monster generators), but other than that, good.
And while I haven't played it (and I don't know if it's as far along, there's also the more modern WorldForge, which has some screenshots of the various clients.
What he's claiming is very interesting for people that aren't familiar with the nastiness of big business, though. Sort of an eye-opener for me a few years back, and tech folks should be aware of this if they're interested in IP.
See, you know how most Free Software folks complain bitterly about (at least some) software patents, saying that it makes things really hard to operate? They aren't lying. Engineers working at big companies ran into the same problem *years* ago. You simply cannot build things in a world with this many tech patents. It's impossible. You'd have to check through huge numbers of patents to do anything.
So big business came up with a solution. They just cross-license *everything*. One company is free to use all of another company's (or organizations...for example, MIT and Microsoft cross-license) patents. Most tech companies with decent IP portfolios do this with their competitors. For example, Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc, all cross license each others' patents.
This seems, at first, counterproductive. After all, isn't the point of patents to give you a short-term edge over competitors, to encourage new development? Nope. Patents in a situation like this still provide one big benefit to their owners -- they maintain oligopolies. If a new hard drive manufacturer comes along and wants to make hard drives, they can't. Seagate, WD, etc own masses of IP, enough to keep the new vendor from entering the market.
This is why patents are pretty frusterating in the world of big business. Go work at a corporate research lab...any patents you come up with don't do your company any good against their competitors. They just keep anyone else from entering the arena.
Now, Gates is troubled enough by Linux to pull the patent oligopoly card out of his sleeve, which normally doesn't get played. MS cross-licenses with *huge* numbers of organizations. They own massive amounts of IP. And yes, it's almost certain that they have rights to a large number of patents that Linux does not have rights to.
Hell, last time Slashdot ran a contest asking for silly patents (a ways back, maybe a year ago), I searched for "computer". First ten hits contained the just-granted patent on the table-lookup optimization for computing CRC-32s. Now, *everyone* does this...modem manufacturers, lots of hardware vendors. Not doing it is stupid. And maybe this patent would have gotten challenged if the owner went after, say, 3com with it. But instead, it's almost certainly in a large patent portfolio somewhere, waiting around for a day when its owner feels threatened by a newcomer to the industry. Then it can pull out its portfolio and start beating folks up.
This is not a trivially fixable feature of the patent system. Most US corporate research (probably foreign as well...I'm just not that familiar with non-US legalities) depends upon the oligopoly benefits provided by patents.
And just throwing out the patent system has other problems. I'm not sure that, say, RSA encryption would *ever* have been developed without a patent system to provide encouragement.
The best thing to do, I think, would be to cap tech patents at seven years, so that companies have to keep frantically coming up with new tech. Wastes more on lawyers -- it costs a couple of thousand per patent, and more patents would have to be produced to compensate -- but that at least alleviates some of the effect.
The GIMP less (vs more, doesn't make sense to new UNIX users) Linux (named after it's creator?) GNU (recursive, cutsey)...and by extension, gtk-gnutella (Gimp ToolKit-GNUTELLA, Gnu image manipulation program ToolKit-GNUTELLA, Gnu's not unix image manipulation program ToolKit-GNUTELLA) Bonobo. I love this. Ximian is a play on "simian" (monkeys). Bonobo is the GNOME system for interconnecting components. Bonobos are famously promiscuous monkeys. bash awk hurd
ARTS is awful -- you have to be joking. It's even worse than esd, and that's saying something. They're heavyweight and high-latency, the both of them.
The current sound server situation on Linux is silly. 99.99% of people (that's probably a pretty damn accurate measurement) use sound servers only for local stuff. (Essentially nobody streams sound with their windowing system, and this is coming from someone who does lots of remote X work.) You'd want to focus on low latency and only falling back to software mixing after hardware channels are exhausted, in a design for a local-system sound server. Yet they don't do that.
And even though we're not exactly an ally, Sweden and the US have never been at war either. In fact Sweden's hardly been at war since the founding of the US (there's the tiff with the Russians in 1809 but that's about it).
Course not! Who wants to fight with a nation where half the populace consists of Swedish women?
There's always a tendancy for language to shift. It makes it damn hard for people to understand further down the road what people are saying, unless there's some sort of standardization.
I consider "online" time when your compuer has the ability to send a packet and have it reach another computer.
My parents, at least, write all their email offline, queue it up, dial up, and then send it at once, then read any new mail offline. So they do indeed deal with email offline.
Maybe it was just the sort of people that hung out on them, but there seemed to be a lot more to them depthwise than pop MMORPGs.
Well, MUDs didn't really "go away", but the percentage of the folks on the Internet that use 'em are a lot smaller (absolute numbers might have gone up, I dunno).
I don't understand the statistics
on
Reiser4 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The statistics on that page are measured in seconds, no? So larger numbers are worse.
The comparisons are done with [foreign filesystem] divided by reiser4.
One would think that numbers greater than one, where the foreign filesystem has a long running time and reiser4 a short one, would be the ones that benefit reiser4.
Yet the numbers *less* than one are green, where Hans says reiser4 is considered better.
What's going on?
(Incidently, after having a friend lose a filesystem to buggy reiser code, I'm a bit inclined to wait until people have *seriously* hammered on this).
The new Swedish law does not mention cookies as such. The new law is, simply said, a response to the new technologies for collecting/storing/tracking information about private citizens, and the abuse these technologies may be used for.
I recognize the abuses being put on Internet technologies as their commercial applications grow. I've been predicting that spyware would become common when RealPlayer first showed up with their "phone home" gunk. (This is back in the day where phoning home to check for a current version was considered potentially offensive and always disableable.) However, as an engineer, I'm very frusterated by legal restrictions over what can be done, and I'm quite doubt that world legislatures can move quickly enough to make fair laws to control rapidly changing tech. Cookies can go or come, and if the US makes a similar law, I'm sure a differently-named system to store client-side state will be introduced.
In general, it appears the privacy/integrity is more respected/protected in Europe than in USA.
Mmmm...debatable. Traditionally (9/11 has screwed things up a bit) the US has done a better job of preventing government abuse of information. The FBI and the CIA have domain restrictions. FOIA lets people see what data the government is building up on them. Key escrow was shut down. Contrast this to Britain, where passwords must be supplied to the government on demand or jail time can be handed down, or most European countries, where key escrow is common.
Where Europe shines (more socialized environment that it is) is in preventing corporate abuse of information. Companies have a lot of laws regulating what they can do with information on people.
The US has started to get worse WRT government data (Office of Homeland Security, PATRIOT Act) and better WRT corporate information (limitations on sharing of data between financial institutions -- of course, this just prompted a bunch of mergers of financials to bypass said limitation, but still:-) ). The US is becoming slightly more European on information policy.
You know, I've come to wonder what issues people really honestly have with DRM.
My primary reason for disliking it is really an engineering one -- it's really, really hard to do DRM, at least on plain ol' audio and video. I'd put it on the same level as antispam legislation -- I'm pretty sure that it isn't going to work, and there's a lot of irritating legislation that indirectly impacts me (like ability to grab information from ISPs by copyright holders...privacy issue that I'm sure will be abused in the long run) and money wasted on lawyers in the meantime.
Most folks on Slashdot are the technorati. They were, in a much higher percentage than other groups, using MP3s and other forms of audio trading well before anyone else. They caught the "sweet spot", where they could pirate music without everyone doing it, so that those that pay subsidized the development of popular music. Piracy hadn't yet hit the point of moving music towards the public good dillemma (where nobody wants to pay for it because it's easier to pirate). Now, though, it's easy for anyone to download music, and the subsidization of the folks that used to download music from FTP servers isn't there.
DRM as a concept isn't all that "neat feeling", but neither is copyright or other forms of IP. What is the actual, practical impact on you of DRM? In this case, Apple was unable to obtain non-US rights. To my way of thinking, that's a fairly minor issue for people. The biggest drawback is that a US citizen might become comfortable buying music in the US from Apple, then move, and not be able to use the route he has come to prefer.
How about cost? To most teens, cost of music is a pretty legitimate issue. I don't really care much any more, now that I'm out in the work force -- the effort of getting an album in the format I want with the quality I want really isn't worth it. I go to work all day, and when I come home I'd rather just spend a little money and get the thing in full quality. So if DRM prevents piracy, it doesn't really impact me much.
What about inability to trade music around? I guess this could be an issue for some (I know some people that lend CDs out left and right), but I don't. At least for me, this really doesn't affect me.
What about limited-time ownership of music? This I *do* find unacceptable -- I won't buy music that expires. The point's kind of moot, though, since attempts to commercialize expiring music and video haven't really gone anywhere.
What about inability to move from place to place with a music collection? Well, I'm biased -- I live in a first world nation so forms of region coding tend to screw me over by letting media companies charge me more. While I've never moved out of the US, I'd like the ability to do so, so I consider region coding sufficiently irritating that I would be happy to break 'em. Incidently, I don't believe I've yet seen a DRM lawsuit over violating region coding -- the media companies aren't willing to test it, and I suspect it might fall over in court.
There's a good deal of noise about folks that can't separate video games from reality, and how ridiculous it is that people do this. Of course, that's always in context of someone gunning down a bunch of people in real life.
Now it's considered healthy and mature to again be unable to separate video games and reality, except this time to extend moral worries to video games?
I'll grant that the latter is less likely to have nasty direct real world consequences...
Because people will continue to get away with murder and rape we should consider it ok to murder and rape?
No. I didn't say that it was ok, and I doubt that you personally have murdered or raped anyone.
You need a little something called perspective.
No, this is exactly what my post was intended to do for you. I didn't say that you were wrong, or say anything about whether speeding or pirating software was wrong. I'm really not interested in getting into a long, drawn out argument over something as unresolvable as definitions of right and wrong. My only point was that you should consider your own post.
It's also kind of ironic that you're blasting me for making unfounded assumptions and lacking perspective (two things that I certainly don't see in my original post) in the very post where you're doing exactly those two things.
Naw, I have to say that Logitech puts out better input devices than MS.
I think the main reason that people like MS keyboards is because it's not uncommon for people to either have a shitty keyboard or a decent Microsoft keyboard, so the only non-lousy keyboards they ever use are Microsoft keyboards.
And in the world of mice, Logitech's MX700 really *is* just about perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
They should give him a free copy of Max Payne. I'd take it.
If it *is* a real name, it cannot be trademarked.
Give yourself rewards. Make some of your usual things (going to a move, etc) a rewards. You'll only get that new pair of headphones if you manage to finish the term paper this weekend. That way, you get artificial pressure.
:-) I always spend time dicking around playing with new features when I should be doing work if I'm writing a paper. Seriously, if you're working away, absolutely restrict yourself from learning new features of the software you're using properly. Do the bare minimum in research to get whatever it is working properly, and get back to work.
Eliminate distractions.
Don't use Linux or LaTeX.
Don't browse your usual news sites. You can only run across something to sidetrack you. Slashdot is really bad about this. Avoid Slashdot comments like the plague.
Get interested in what you're doing. Most schoolwork actually *is* kind of nifty, but if you're treating it as torture, it will be.
Only eat snacks/pizza/whatever when you're doing work. Good way to get yourself in a mood of enjoying homework.
Yeah, at one time I got really excited about rigging up some cables to hook a VT220 up to my Linux box.
Problem is, there just isn't much point. Computers are *cheap* these days, and finding a used computer from the masses out there made in the last twenty years is easy. You can use any x86 box ever *made* as a good terminal emulator, and get color and other goodies the VT doesn't provide.
There are lots of terminal emulation programs, though if you have 4 MB of memory on the thing or more, I'd probably run Linux, which was originally a terminal emulator and still makes a darn good one. And if you just love the amber look of the VTs, you can theme your Linux terminal box using this relatively unknown program.
You also then get color, a nice big scrollback buffer, multiple virtual terminals per box. You don't have to hassle with weird cables -- a null modem cable is all it takes. You can put cast-off monitors of any size on the thing (and the move to LCDs is producing lots of excess CRTs...getting used 15 inchers for free is easy, and they're much nicer and larger than the VT100 screens, and don't have the annoying whine to them).
What I would love is a MUD with a roguelike interface.
You mean a cross-platform, GPL game with vast worlds, lots of development, and years of content under their belt? Free to play?
I believe that looking for the Crossfire webpage. A bit more Gauntletish than I'd like (contains monster generators), but other than that, good.
And while I haven't played it (and I don't know if it's as far along, there's also the more modern WorldForge, which has some screenshots of the various clients.
He's not claiming reverse engineering.
What he's claiming is very interesting for people that aren't familiar with the nastiness of big business, though. Sort of an eye-opener for me a few years back, and tech folks should be aware of this if they're interested in IP.
See, you know how most Free Software folks complain bitterly about (at least some) software patents, saying that it makes things really hard to operate? They aren't lying. Engineers working at big companies ran into the same problem *years* ago. You simply cannot build things in a world with this many tech patents. It's impossible. You'd have to check through huge numbers of patents to do anything.
So big business came up with a solution. They just cross-license *everything*. One company is free to use all of another company's (or organizations...for example, MIT and Microsoft cross-license) patents. Most tech companies with decent IP portfolios do this with their competitors. For example, Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc, all cross license each others' patents.
This seems, at first, counterproductive. After all, isn't the point of patents to give you a short-term edge over competitors, to encourage new development? Nope. Patents in a situation like this still provide one big benefit to their owners -- they maintain oligopolies. If a new hard drive manufacturer comes along and wants to make hard drives, they can't. Seagate, WD, etc own masses of IP, enough to keep the new vendor from entering the market.
This is why patents are pretty frusterating in the world of big business. Go work at a corporate research lab...any patents you come up with don't do your company any good against their competitors. They just keep anyone else from entering the arena.
Now, Gates is troubled enough by Linux to pull the patent oligopoly card out of his sleeve, which normally doesn't get played. MS cross-licenses with *huge* numbers of organizations. They own massive amounts of IP. And yes, it's almost certain that they have rights to a large number of patents that Linux does not have rights to.
Hell, last time Slashdot ran a contest asking for silly patents (a ways back, maybe a year ago), I searched for "computer". First ten hits contained the just-granted patent on the table-lookup optimization for computing CRC-32s. Now, *everyone* does this...modem manufacturers, lots of hardware vendors. Not doing it is stupid. And maybe this patent would have gotten challenged if the owner went after, say, 3com with it. But instead, it's almost certainly in a large patent portfolio somewhere, waiting around for a day when its owner feels threatened by a newcomer to the industry. Then it can pull out its portfolio and start beating folks up.
This is not a trivially fixable feature of the patent system. Most US corporate research (probably foreign as well...I'm just not that familiar with non-US legalities) depends upon the oligopoly benefits provided by patents.
And just throwing out the patent system has other problems. I'm not sure that, say, RSA encryption would *ever* have been developed without a patent system to provide encouragement.
The best thing to do, I think, would be to cap tech patents at seven years, so that companies have to keep frantically coming up with new tech. Wastes more on lawyers -- it costs a couple of thousand per patent, and more patents would have to be produced to compensate -- but that at least alleviates some of the effect.
If you're trying to absolutly maximize productivity, video games probably waste a lot of a nation's resources...
The GIMP
less (vs more, doesn't make sense to new UNIX users)
Linux (named after it's creator?)
GNU (recursive, cutsey)...and by extension, gtk-gnutella (Gimp ToolKit-GNUTELLA, Gnu image manipulation program ToolKit-GNUTELLA, Gnu's not unix image manipulation program ToolKit-GNUTELLA)
Bonobo. I love this. Ximian is a play on "simian" (monkeys). Bonobo is the GNOME system for interconnecting components. Bonobos are famously promiscuous monkeys.
bash
awk
hurd
MySQL? Postgres?
The GNOME project grew up and started moving away from "g*" on new projects as it went mainstream. KDE is still shoving Ks in front of everything.
ARTS is awful -- you have to be joking. It's even worse than esd, and that's saying something. They're heavyweight and high-latency, the both of them.
The current sound server situation on Linux is silly. 99.99% of people (that's probably a pretty damn accurate measurement) use sound servers only for local stuff. (Essentially nobody streams sound with their windowing system, and this is coming from someone who does lots of remote X work.) You'd want to focus on low latency and only falling back to software mixing after hardware channels are exhausted, in a design for a local-system sound server. Yet they don't do that.
And even though we're not exactly an ally, Sweden and the US have never been at war either. In fact Sweden's hardly been at war since the founding of the US (there's the tiff with the Russians in 1809 but that's about it).
Course not! Who wants to fight with a nation where half the populace consists of Swedish women?
Ebonics?
There's always a tendancy for language to shift. It makes it damn hard for people to understand further down the road what people are saying, unless there's some sort of standardization.
I consider "online" time when your compuer has the ability to send a packet and have it reach another computer.
My parents, at least, write all their email offline, queue it up, dial up, and then send it at once, then read any new mail offline. So they do indeed deal with email offline.
Maybe it was just the sort of people that hung out on them, but there seemed to be a lot more to them depthwise than pop MMORPGs.
Well, MUDs didn't really "go away", but the percentage of the folks on the Internet that use 'em are a lot smaller (absolute numbers might have gone up, I dunno).
The statistics on that page are measured in seconds, no? So larger numbers are worse.
The comparisons are done with [foreign filesystem] divided by reiser4.
One would think that numbers greater than one, where the foreign filesystem has a long running time and reiser4 a short one, would be the ones that benefit reiser4.
Yet the numbers *less* than one are green, where Hans says reiser4 is considered better.
What's going on?
(Incidently, after having a friend lose a filesystem to buggy reiser code, I'm a bit inclined to wait until people have *seriously* hammered on this).
The new Swedish law does not mention cookies as such. The new law is, simply said, a response to the new technologies for collecting/storing/tracking information about private citizens, and the abuse these technologies may be used for.
:-) ). The US is becoming slightly more European on information policy.
I recognize the abuses being put on Internet technologies as their commercial applications grow. I've been predicting that spyware would become common when RealPlayer first showed up with their "phone home" gunk. (This is back in the day where phoning home to check for a current version was considered potentially offensive and always disableable.) However, as an engineer, I'm very frusterated by legal restrictions over what can be done, and I'm quite doubt that world legislatures can move quickly enough to make fair laws to control rapidly changing tech. Cookies can go or come, and if the US makes a similar law, I'm sure a differently-named system to store client-side state will be introduced.
In general, it appears the privacy/integrity is more respected/protected in Europe than in USA.
Mmmm...debatable. Traditionally (9/11 has screwed things up a bit) the US has done a better job of preventing government abuse of information. The FBI and the CIA have domain restrictions. FOIA lets people see what data the government is building up on them. Key escrow was shut down. Contrast this to Britain, where passwords must be supplied to the government on demand or jail time can be handed down, or most European countries, where key escrow is common.
Where Europe shines (more socialized environment that it is) is in preventing corporate abuse of information. Companies have a lot of laws regulating what they can do with information on people.
The US has started to get worse WRT government data (Office of Homeland Security, PATRIOT Act) and better WRT corporate information (limitations on sharing of data between financial institutions -- of course, this just prompted a bunch of mergers of financials to bypass said limitation, but still
companies can take over the world
You know, I've come to wonder what issues people really honestly have with DRM.
My primary reason for disliking it is really an engineering one -- it's really, really hard to do DRM, at least on plain ol' audio and video. I'd put it on the same level as antispam legislation -- I'm pretty sure that it isn't going to work, and there's a lot of irritating legislation that indirectly impacts me (like ability to grab information from ISPs by copyright holders...privacy issue that I'm sure will be abused in the long run) and money wasted on lawyers in the meantime.
Most folks on Slashdot are the technorati. They were, in a much higher percentage than other groups, using MP3s and other forms of audio trading well before anyone else. They caught the "sweet spot", where they could pirate music without everyone doing it, so that those that pay subsidized the development of popular music. Piracy hadn't yet hit the point of moving music towards the public good dillemma (where nobody wants to pay for it because it's easier to pirate). Now, though, it's easy for anyone to download music, and the subsidization of the folks that used to download music from FTP servers isn't there.
DRM as a concept isn't all that "neat feeling", but neither is copyright or other forms of IP. What is the actual, practical impact on you of DRM? In this case, Apple was unable to obtain non-US rights. To my way of thinking, that's a fairly minor issue for people. The biggest drawback is that a US citizen might become comfortable buying music in the US from Apple, then move, and not be able to use the route he has come to prefer.
How about cost? To most teens, cost of music is a pretty legitimate issue. I don't really care much any more, now that I'm out in the work force -- the effort of getting an album in the format I want with the quality I want really isn't worth it. I go to work all day, and when I come home I'd rather just spend a little money and get the thing in full quality. So if DRM prevents piracy, it doesn't really impact me much.
What about inability to trade music around? I guess this could be an issue for some (I know some people that lend CDs out left and right), but I don't. At least for me, this really doesn't affect me.
What about limited-time ownership of music? This I *do* find unacceptable -- I won't buy music that expires. The point's kind of moot, though, since attempts to commercialize expiring music and video haven't really gone anywhere.
What about inability to move from place to place with a music collection? Well, I'm biased -- I live in a first world nation so forms of region coding tend to screw me over by letting media companies charge me more. While I've never moved out of the US, I'd like the ability to do so, so I consider region coding sufficiently irritating that I would be happy to break 'em. Incidently, I don't believe I've yet seen a DRM lawsuit over violating region coding -- the media companies aren't willing to test it, and I suspect it might fall over in court.
Interesting you should put it that way.
There's a good deal of noise about folks that can't separate video games from reality, and how ridiculous it is that people do this. Of course, that's always in context of someone gunning down a bunch of people in real life.
Now it's considered healthy and mature to again be unable to separate video games and reality, except this time to extend moral worries to video games?
I'll grant that the latter is less likely to have nasty direct real world consequences...
Because people will continue to get away with murder and rape we should consider it ok to murder and rape?
No. I didn't say that it was ok, and I doubt that you personally have murdered or raped anyone.
You need a little something called perspective.
No, this is exactly what my post was intended to do for you. I didn't say that you were wrong, or say anything about whether speeding or pirating software was wrong. I'm really not interested in getting into a long, drawn out argument over something as unresolvable as definitions of right and wrong. My only point was that you should consider your own post.
It's also kind of ironic that you're blasting me for making unfounded assumptions and lacking perspective (two things that I certainly don't see in my original post) in the very post where you're doing exactly those two things.
There's a difference between IT programs (useless, nobody needs a degree to do IT work) and CS programs.
wan two cyber
In a *crowded lecture hall*? Dear God, I don't think even OU is there...
Because someone obviously feels that theft is right. Nothing justifies stealing.
Speeding in your car isn't a right either. Matter of fact, it puts human lives at danger, not just a pizza for the software developer.
Do you ever speed?
Why is it necessary for all of Slashdot to have a single, consistent, die-hard view of things?
Naw, I have to say that Logitech puts out better input devices than MS.
I think the main reason that people like MS keyboards is because it's not uncommon for people to either have a shitty keyboard or a decent Microsoft keyboard, so the only non-lousy keyboards they ever use are Microsoft keyboards.
And in the world of mice, Logitech's MX700 really *is* just about perfect.