"Carefully positioned toolbars and buttons" do nothing but slow people down.
Fair enough. I admit, I'm not too familiar with these programs (or at least not the expensive ones:) Still, as I said in reply to another's post, you don't have to type with both hands on the keyboard. So a 3D modeler remains, as I view it, a primarily mouse-driven interface.
So I mischaracterized the interface in 3D modelers, but that shouldn't affect my point, since they are still mouse-driven.
Sure. On none of these games do you actually have to type with both hands. So I'd say they are primarily mouse driven.
If, in these games, you actually had to use both hands on the keyboard (aka. getting fragged while chatting with your teammates), then you'd probably start complaining about reaching for the mouse, and finding it only a split second after chunks of your now dismembered player decorate all of the surrounding walls:-)
(OK, so the first time I beat doom I was just using the keyboard, but that's because I didn't have to worry about aiming up the vertical axis.)
Actually, an interesting game comes to mind: Darwinia actually uses mouse gestures to spawn new creatures within the game. Right click, draw the creature you'd like to create, and it pops up. I'm not sure this is the most efficient - but it was neat.
You're right - sort of. It's not that the mouse or the keyboard are burdening you - it's when an application forces you to use *both* of them in combination that your efficiency really starts to suffer.
Some programs are primary mouse-driven (eg. 3D modeler). Others rely primarily on keyboard input (eg. word processor). I would argue that an interface strives to be most efficient when it maximizes the functionality of its primary input device.
For a 3D modeler, this means an intuitive 3D interface for rotations, use of all mouse buttons, and carefully positioned clickable buttons and toolbars.
For a text-editor/word-processor, this means loads of keyboard shortcuts. emacs/vi come to mind (MS Word falls short in my mind - I *need* ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k).
What become challenging for the developer (and, consequentially, the user) are applications that are sometimes mostly mouse-driven, sometimes mostly keyboard-driven. These apps necessarily force the user to switch between the mouse and keyboard frequently. Often, there is some gain to be had via keyboard shortcuts, but the interface does not always allow these to be most efficient.
A web browser, for example, or a file browser require both a mouse and keyboard (OK, so many of us get by just fine with the terminal, but let's ignore that). In the case of the web browser, many folks are drawn to opera and firefox specifically because of their extensive keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, allowing you to stick to whatever input device you were already using.
So, for example, in opera, i can gesture left if I'm using the mouse, or I can hit 'z' if I'm using the keyboard. It's *never* more efficient to reach for one or the other, but ultimately, I'll always need both (I didn't type in this post using cut and paste, and I certainly didn't click on the link to your post by tabbing through everything).
The *real* problem is that your window manager does not allow efficient navigation via the mouse. If, for example, you had mouse gestures, hot corners, or OS X expose functionality bound to extraneous buttons on your 5 button mouse, you would reach less often for the keyboard when you were already using the mouse.
You're right - reaching for the mouse just adds more time, but so does reaching for the keyboard. A window manager is best when it forces you to do neither.
IE7 will continue IE's ways of non-standardization. Expect IE7 to break your site.
Fight back! I run a little personal website. It's standards compliant (XHTML 1.0 Strict) and looks great in every browser - except IE. If you visit the page with IE, your browser will just happen to crash. Every time. Perfect! This was unintentional, but, really, I couldn't be more pleased.
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
Many cities in the US just continue to grow. In many cases, they are not yet dense. Houston, for example, just added light rail.
Many cities have rail networks that are no longer used. These have been converted into multiuse paths and parks.
Here in Portland, Oregon, a beautiful multiuse path has been added along the waterfront. The city is adding many more. Where the city is most dense and resistant to new additions, none are really needed, since traffic moves about 18 miles an hour, so cyclists just ride with the traffic (ever been tailgated by a bicycle?)
Of course, we could always just do what they did in Europe: certain streets are converted to pedestrian zones, sometimes only during certain times of the day. If you want to go downtown, you have to ride a bike, take the subway, or park underground and then walk a few blocks.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
Sure. Just check out China, whose city planners were here in Portland just a couple weeks ago to examine, among other things, the waterfront path for pedestrians and cyclists.
My personal feeling is that bike paths and pedestrian walk ways are very small and will usually fit somewhere - if the city is so dense that it cannot support these, then it's probably also too dense for cars, and many of those streets would better serve the public if they were pedestrian zones instead.
There is a NY Times magazine article: A Church-State Solution (published on the web before the O'Conner announcement) that suggests that America's separation of Church-State problems could all be easily solved by reversing every one of O'Conner's swing rulings. I won't claim to agree with the article, but I found it an interesting read, more so now that the announcement has been made.
On a side note, it seems obvious to me that with Supreme Court decisions frequently making "News for Nerds," the retirement of Justice O'Conner is also news for nerds. Sure, the politics of it are rather tense, but I guarantee that O'Conner's replacement will be ruling on IP/privacy issues before their new chair is even warm.
Actually, the article says "Fumes generated from any type of cookware"... not just teflon.
This is emphasized largly because DuPont's product - Teflon - has been taking most of the heat, in much the same way the Kryptonite came under the most pressure recently for the compromised barrel cylinder lock. Kryptonite, like DuPont, was quick to point out that other manufacturers' locks were compromised.
From what I've been reading over the last hour, "Any type of cookware" is misleading, since it is specifically the Polytetraflouethylene in non-stick cookware that is a particular danger to birds. Telfon, understandably, gets the most attention here, since Teflon in the American psyche is virtually synonymous with "non-stick", in much the same way that "Kryptonite" is synonymous with "quality lock" and "Gore-Tex" is synonymous with "quality rain gear". Such are the hazards of brand recognition and effective marketing, I guess.:-)
The whitehouse seems to take a "pre-emptive" approach. Just in case they ever put stuff on the internet that they might someday not want you to see (or that they might not want archived by google), they seem to cover all the bases in their 92KB robots.txt file.
My personal favorites:
Disallow:/911/iraq
Disallow:/911/patriotism/iraq
Disallow:/911/patriotism2/iraq
Disallow:/911/sept112002/iraq [sic.]
There's a theme here. Can you spot it? I'd like to think it's intentional, but at 2255 lines, it may just be that all permutations of Republican buzzwords have been covered.
They were naked, sure. And the silly tactic worked, since their message obviously reached a lot of people. Of course, who knows if their message was well-received, since it was prefaced with "hey look at us we're naked and screaming." Still, I read their flyers, and I found them intriguing.
Oh but wait, you only wanted to tell us how you hate activists, and I guess some moderators thought "hey, I hate activists too!" because your kneejerk reply definitely lacks insight.
So why arent they protesting sellers of kitchenware?
Because you're not wearing your kitchenware in the form of tiny teflon fibers.
By the way, Teflon pans are deadly to birds when overheated. A gas is formed which can kill your pet in a matter of minutes. Does it affect humans? Dunno. You can read DuPont's assessment of the danger to birds here.
I'd like to find out exactly what the hazards of Teflon are, especially since we just bought a Teflon-treated couch. The fabric is awesome and inexpensive, but I want an objective assessment of the health risks.
Please don't let your distrust of activitists and love of the acronym FUD obscure the issue. The signal-noise ratio on slashdot is bad enough as it is.
Hawaii beats the Galapagos Islands hands down for adaptive radiation. It's estimated that 1 species was introduced to the isolated archipelago every 10,000 years. One of these species was a honeycreeper, ancestor to the 60-70 species [1] known to populate the islands. Of these birds, a huge number have long specialized beaks and are the primary pollinators of many species of lobelia, a plant that in turn has specialized long tubular flowers. The Maui parrotbill looks like a parrot - complete with hooked beak, but it too is a honeycreeper.
The statebird - the Nene - used to live all over the islands, but due to habitat loss is now restricted to higher elevations. Since humans have been in Hawaii, the webbing of these birds' feet has receded, as the population barely persists and is forced to adapt to an alpine habitat.
So, how did these specialized traits arise?
Every time the ID people show up at my doorstep, I invite them in, I make them tea, and we sit out on the desk, and I tell them that when they can adequately explain to me the Maui parrotbill [2] and the Nene [3], that I might begin to take them more seriously. They thank me for the tea, give me some "literature" (that looks like childrens books), and leave. Sure, it was probably weird to be invited in and all, but nobody's going to argue that I didn't give them the chance.
(Personally, I like to think that if anything is to be attributed to a creator, it should be admiration for such a carefully chosen ruleset that has led to such amazing complexity, not just admiration for the complexity itself. In this case, I see the whole God vs evolution thing as rather missing the point.)
- there are times when I really do want to use rm - I want to avoid recursive calls to trash:-) - trash isn't really ideal when your trashcan resides in a different filesystem...
I did alias 't' to 'trash'. It sure is easier to type 't' instead of fretting and then typing 'rm' (and then maybe fretting again).
This seems to be drifting off topic, but while we're talking about ways to avoid the catastrophe of rm -rf / just consider replacing rm altogether.
I just threw together a bash script to keep an indexed "trash" directory of everything I delete. Instead of typing
$rm -rf./this./or./that
I just run the script
$trash./this./or./that
and it gets moved into "${TRASH}/`date +%Y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S`/". I keep an index of these files and run another script:
$restore this
to undelete it. A couple more scripts let me check out the size/contents of the trash directory, empty the trash, etc.
It's been a few years since I instituted this command-line recycle bin, and I have never accidentally deleted anything since. I also have a really hard time believing I'm the only one who does this.
I believe many Mac users acquire software from Apple's website, by choosing "Mac OS X Software..." from the system menu. While Apple makes a point to state that they do not endorse and are not represented by these pieces of software, I can't imagine them turning a blind eye if spyware/adware/etc begins to pop up on this site. In this way, perhaps, your average Joe might be somewhat protected, since the path of least resistance (ie. Joe is lazy) is likely also to be the path of least malware.
I think the reason why people refuse to believe OS X is fundimentally more secure is simply because Apple hasn't been in the networking business for very long. They really have no proven track record. They do however utilize bits and pieces of software that does.
Riiight. And I suppose by "Apple" you implicitly exclude OpenBSD.
In addition, many of the basic command-line network utilities bundled with Windows NT-XP are direct re-compiles of BSD's comparable programs.[wikipedia]
Of course, by "Apple" you really weren't talking about technologies and engineers previously working for NeXT computers, whose machines were shipping with ethernet before most PCs supported any kind of networking at all.
Those aren't just "bits and pieces," and they have very established track records.
A well written, computerized flash program could probably teach you vocab far quicker than a human instructor. The computer can keep track of your accuracy and even response time for each item, figuring out your weak points and concentrating on those. And it can do this equally well whether you have 5 classmates or 500. No teacher can match this feat.
You just described the program I wrote for myself while learning German in college. I hooked it up to a text-to-speech synthesizer and wrote some tools to save time when writing text files for the parser (I hated writing, losing, and fiddling with flashcards).
Despite overloading, in 10 months I went from thinking Zeitgeist was hard to pronounce (and maybe Dutch?) to passing the German fluency test.I It surprised the hell out of me. 4 years later, I'm still fluent. (I had previously tried very hard to learn Spanish and was convinced that either I was a very not smart person, or that all this talk about mastering a foreign language was an farce.)
Now about a dozen friends have used this program to speed up their learning. For a few, this has been a motivation to learn to program.The computer, in this example, was not the only tool in the language learning toolkit (and immersion is always better), but it was the right tool when correctly applied.
That said, I think the applicability of computers to education is the exception and not the rule. I really couldn't find any other classes in college where a computer (beyond Latex and emacs) could be both effective and time-saving. Unless shown otherwise for specific tasks, I think it would be good for educators to assume first that a computer is not necessary or even useful in the classroom.
As a programmer and a mathematician, IMHO the computer still has a lot to do to catch up with the educational potential of the blackboard and a piece of chalk.
OS X also has a delay associated with some events, like opening up a new window. This can be configured in the Preferences (change it to zero!), and I think the default setting allows for some significant delay. So, if you're browsing in Finder and you think there's a delay, that could be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I admit, I'm not too familiar with these programs (or at least not the expensive ones :) Still, as I said in reply to another's post, you don't have to type with both hands on the keyboard. So a 3D modeler remains, as I view it, a primarily mouse-driven interface.
So I mischaracterized the interface in 3D modelers, but that shouldn't affect my point, since they are still mouse-driven.
Sure. On none of these games do you actually have to type with both hands. So I'd say they are primarily mouse driven.
If, in these games, you actually had to use both hands on the keyboard (aka. getting fragged while chatting with your teammates), then you'd probably start complaining about reaching for the mouse, and finding it only a split second after chunks of your now dismembered player decorate all of the surrounding walls :-)
(OK, so the first time I beat doom I was just using the keyboard, but that's because I didn't have to worry about aiming up the vertical axis.)
Actually, an interesting game comes to mind: Darwinia actually uses mouse gestures to spawn new creatures within the game. Right click, draw the creature you'd like to create, and it pops up. I'm not sure this is the most efficient - but it was neat.
You're right - sort of. It's not that the mouse or the keyboard are burdening you - it's when an application forces you to use *both* of them in combination that your efficiency really starts to suffer.
Some programs are primary mouse-driven (eg. 3D modeler). Others rely primarily on keyboard input (eg. word processor). I would argue that an interface strives to be most efficient when it maximizes the functionality of its primary input device.
For a 3D modeler, this means an intuitive 3D interface for rotations, use of all mouse buttons, and carefully positioned clickable buttons and toolbars.
For a text-editor/word-processor, this means loads of keyboard shortcuts. emacs/vi come to mind (MS Word falls short in my mind - I *need* ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k).
What become challenging for the developer (and, consequentially, the user) are applications that are sometimes mostly mouse-driven, sometimes mostly keyboard-driven. These apps necessarily force the user to switch between the mouse and keyboard frequently. Often, there is some gain to be had via keyboard shortcuts, but the interface does not always allow these to be most efficient.
A web browser, for example, or a file browser require both a mouse and keyboard (OK, so many of us get by just fine with the terminal, but let's ignore that). In the case of the web browser, many folks are drawn to opera and firefox specifically because of their extensive keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, allowing you to stick to whatever input device you were already using.
So, for example, in opera, i can gesture left if I'm using the mouse, or I can hit 'z' if I'm using the keyboard. It's *never* more efficient to reach for one or the other, but ultimately, I'll always need both (I didn't type in this post using cut and paste, and I certainly didn't click on the link to your post by tabbing through everything).
The *real* problem is that your window manager does not allow efficient navigation via the mouse. If, for example, you had mouse gestures, hot corners, or OS X expose functionality bound to extraneous buttons on your 5 button mouse, you would reach less often for the keyboard when you were already using the mouse.
You're right - reaching for the mouse just adds more time, but so does reaching for the keyboard. A window manager is best when it forces you to do neither.
IE7 will continue IE's ways of non-standardization. Expect IE7 to break your site.
Fight back! I run a little personal website. It's standards compliant (XHTML 1.0 Strict) and looks great in every browser - except IE. If you visit the page with IE, your browser will just happen to crash. Every time. Perfect! This was unintentional, but, really, I couldn't be more pleased.
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
Many cities in the US just continue to grow. In many cases, they are not yet dense. Houston, for example, just added light rail.
Many cities have rail networks that are no longer used. These have been converted into multiuse paths and parks.
Here in Portland, Oregon, a beautiful multiuse path has been added along the waterfront. The city is adding many more. Where the city is most dense and resistant to new additions, none are really needed, since traffic moves about 18 miles an hour, so cyclists just ride with the traffic (ever been tailgated by a bicycle?)
Of course, we could always just do what they did in Europe: certain streets are converted to pedestrian zones, sometimes only during certain times of the day. If you want to go downtown, you have to ride a bike, take the subway, or park underground and then walk a few blocks.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
Sure. Just check out China, whose city planners were here in Portland just a couple weeks ago to examine, among other things, the waterfront path for pedestrians and cyclists.
My personal feeling is that bike paths and pedestrian walk ways are very small and will usually fit somewhere - if the city is so dense that it cannot support these, then it's probably also too dense for cars, and many of those streets would better serve the public if they were pedestrian zones instead.
There is a NY Times magazine article: A Church-State Solution (published on the web before the O'Conner announcement) that suggests that America's separation of Church-State problems could all be easily solved by reversing every one of O'Conner's swing rulings. I won't claim to agree with the article, but I found it an interesting read, more so now that the announcement has been made.
On a side note, it seems obvious to me that with Supreme Court decisions frequently making "News for Nerds," the retirement of Justice O'Conner is also news for nerds. Sure, the politics of it are rather tense, but I guarantee that O'Conner's replacement will be ruling on IP/privacy issues before their new chair is even warm.
fundimentalists would be call "liberals" or "leftists" in any other era.
Or rather that conservatives would be called "liberals" in any other country.
A 7.0 earthquake
A 7.2 earthquake
occured at 7:50PM PST
occured at 6:50PM PST (7:50PM PDT)
source (same as in TFS)
PTFE is extremly non-reactive, and precisely because of this it is used in medical implants.
Neat. Well, this makes me feel better about that teflon treated couch we just bought...
This is emphasized largly because DuPont's product - Teflon - has been taking most of the heat, in much the same way the Kryptonite came under the most pressure recently for the compromised barrel cylinder lock. Kryptonite, like DuPont, was quick to point out that other manufacturers' locks were compromised.
From what I've been reading over the last hour, "Any type of cookware" is misleading, since it is specifically the Polytetraflouethylene in non-stick cookware that is a particular danger to birds. Telfon, understandably, gets the most attention here, since Teflon in the American psyche is virtually synonymous with "non-stick", in much the same way that "Kryptonite" is synonymous with "quality lock" and "Gore-Tex" is synonymous with "quality rain gear". Such are the hazards of brand recognition and effective marketing, I guess. :-)
The whitehouse seems to take a "pre-emptive" approach. Just in case they ever put stuff on the internet that they might someday not want you to see (or that they might not want archived by google), they seem to cover all the bases in their 92KB robots.txt file.
My personal favorites: /911/iraq /911/patriotism/iraq /911/patriotism2/iraq /911/sept112002/iraq [sic.]
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
There's a theme here. Can you spot it? I'd like to think it's intentional, but at 2255 lines, it may just be that all permutations of Republican buzzwords have been covered.
Did you even click on the link?
They were naked, sure. And the silly tactic worked, since their message obviously reached a lot of people. Of course, who knows if their message was well-received, since it was prefaced with "hey look at us we're naked and screaming." Still, I read their flyers, and I found them intriguing.
Oh but wait, you only wanted to tell us how you hate activists, and I guess some moderators thought "hey, I hate activists too!" because your kneejerk reply definitely lacks insight.
Because you're not wearing your kitchenware in the form of tiny teflon fibers.
By the way, Teflon pans are deadly to birds when overheated. A gas is formed which can kill your pet in a matter of minutes. Does it affect humans? Dunno. You can read DuPont's assessment of the danger to birds here.
I'd like to find out exactly what the hazards of Teflon are, especially since we just bought a Teflon-treated couch. The fabric is awesome and inexpensive, but I want an objective assessment of the health risks.
Please don't let your distrust of activitists and love of the acronym FUD obscure the issue. The signal-noise ratio on slashdot is bad enough as it is.
Hawaii beats the Galapagos Islands hands down for adaptive radiation. It's estimated that 1 species was introduced to the isolated archipelago every 10,000 years. One of these species was a honeycreeper, ancestor to the 60-70 species [1] known to populate the islands. Of these birds, a huge number have long specialized beaks and are the primary pollinators of many species of lobelia, a plant that in turn has specialized long tubular flowers. The Maui parrotbill looks like a parrot - complete with hooked beak, but it too is a honeycreeper.
The statebird - the Nene - used to live all over the islands, but due to habitat loss is now restricted to higher elevations. Since humans have been in Hawaii, the webbing of these birds' feet has receded, as the population barely persists and is forced to adapt to an alpine habitat.
So, how did these specialized traits arise?
Every time the ID people show up at my doorstep, I invite them in, I make them tea, and we sit out on the desk, and I tell them that when they can adequately explain to me the Maui parrotbill [2] and the Nene [3], that I might begin to take them more seriously. They thank me for the tea, give me some "literature" (that looks like childrens books), and leave. Sure, it was probably weird to be invited in and all, but nobody's going to argue that I didn't give them the chance.
(Personally, I like to think that if anything is to be attributed to a creator, it should be admiration for such a carefully chosen ruleset that has led to such amazing complexity, not just admiration for the complexity itself. In this case, I see the whole God vs evolution thing as rather missing the point.)
[1] - http://www.hawaii-forest.com/essays/9801.html
[2] - http://www.mauiforestbird.org/parrotbill.php
[3] - http://www.thewildones.org/Animals/nene.html
I can't figure out for the life of me what the mods were thinking when they modded you down to flamebait. Thanks for the mirror.
I thought about that, but
:-)
- there are times when I really do want to use rm
- I want to avoid recursive calls to trash
- trash isn't really ideal when your trashcan resides in a different filesystem...
I did alias 't' to 'trash'. It sure is easier to type 't' instead of fretting and then typing 'rm' (and then maybe fretting again).
This seems to be drifting off topic, but while we're talking about ways to avoid the catastrophe of rm -rf / just consider replacing rm altogether.
./this ./or ./that
./this ./or ./that
I just threw together a bash script to keep an indexed "trash" directory of everything I delete. Instead of typing
$rm -rf
I just run the script
$trash
and it gets moved into "${TRASH}/`date +%Y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S`/". I keep an index of these files and run another script:
$restore this
to undelete it. A couple more scripts let me check out the size/contents of the trash directory, empty the trash, etc.
It's been a few years since I instituted this command-line recycle bin, and I have never accidentally deleted anything since. I also have a really hard time believing I'm the only one who does this.
The RIAA litmus test for "infinging activities" sounds a lot like the Bedevere witch test to me.
BEDEVERE: Wait. Wait ... tell me, what also floats on water?
ALL: Bread? No, no, no. Apples .... gravy ... very small rocks ...
ARTHUR: A duck.
They all turn and look at ARTHUR. BEDEVERE looks up very impressed.
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So... logically ...
FIRST VILLAGER: (beginning to pick up the thread) If she ... weighs the same as a duck ... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE: And therefore?
ALL: A witch!
It could be worse. Americans could have turned it into a musical, hot on the heels of "Spamalot."
Many more fighter planes, helicopters, bombers, oh my! (Pima Air & Space Museum, Arizona)
I believe many Mac users acquire software from Apple's website, by choosing "Mac OS X Software..." from the system menu. While Apple makes a point to state that they do not endorse and are not represented by these pieces of software, I can't imagine them turning a blind eye if spyware/adware/etc begins to pop up on this site. In this way, perhaps, your average Joe might be somewhat protected, since the path of least resistance (ie. Joe is lazy) is likely also to be the path of least malware.
Riiight. And I suppose by "Apple" you implicitly exclude OpenBSD.
Of course, by "Apple" you really weren't talking about technologies and engineers previously working for NeXT computers, whose machines were shipping with ethernet before most PCs supported any kind of networking at all.
Those aren't just "bits and pieces," and they have very established track records.
I too am better at spelling in my second language (German) ... but I blame the English language :)
You just described the program I wrote for myself while learning German in college. I hooked it up to a text-to-speech synthesizer and wrote some tools to save time when writing text files for the parser (I hated writing, losing, and fiddling with flashcards).
Despite overloading, in 10 months I went from thinking Zeitgeist was hard to pronounce (and maybe Dutch?) to passing the German fluency test.I It surprised the hell out of me. 4 years later, I'm still fluent. (I had previously tried very hard to learn Spanish and was convinced that either I was a very not smart person, or that all this talk about mastering a foreign language was an farce.)
Now about a dozen friends have used this program to speed up their learning. For a few, this has been a motivation to learn to program.The computer, in this example, was not the only tool in the language learning toolkit (and immersion is always better), but it was the right tool when correctly applied.
That said, I think the applicability of computers to education is the exception and not the rule. I really couldn't find any other classes in college where a computer (beyond Latex and emacs) could be both effective and time-saving. Unless shown otherwise for specific tasks, I think it would be good for educators to assume first that a computer is not necessary or even useful in the classroom.
As a programmer and a mathematician, IMHO the computer still has a lot to do to catch up with the educational potential of the blackboard and a piece of chalk.
OS X also has a delay associated with some events, like opening up a new window. This can be configured in the Preferences (change it to zero!), and I think the default setting allows for some significant delay. So, if you're browsing in Finder and you think there's a delay, that could be it.