touchscreen tech is still artificially high priced so that will not be common until companies pull their heads out of their arses and start putting it on all LCD's.
I commented to someone at work a few months back that I reckoned touch-screen technology would be present in the majority of laptops- if not monitors in general- in five years time.
I also commented that it would not replace the mouse for the same ergonomic and practical reasons that they were an unsatisfactory replacement for keyboards 25 years ago. If you have them vertically and have to point at them, it's exhausting for your muscles; it you have them horizontally, they're hard to look at, and your hands will get in the way.
Unless you're using one for display and one for input; but if you have the input and display separate (possibly with the main monitor mirroring what you're doing with the input monitor) it cuts out half the point of using a touch screen over a mouse or laptop touch-pad.
Computers are not the same as the iPhone; or rather, you don't use an iPhone in the same way that you'd use a computer. So touch screens will be useful on PCs, but they won't replace the mouse IMHO.
Just because you can't be bothered with tweaking, doesn't mean others don't want to. The fact these drives can be enhanced is a selling point. When better algorithms come along, people can update their existing products if they choose to. I guess you're a conditioned consumer? Throw it in the bin and buy another? Like Apple's bling too I suppose?
Maybe he's just not that obsessed with having the very latest and best performance regardless of whether the tradeoff would be money or hassle.
Ever consider that *your* obsession with having the latest and the best might be a greater reflection of consumer conditioning?
I'm not sure if your quotes are supposed to imply that my writing isn't "true" cursive (the term you would use) or you think that "joined-up writing" means something different to cursive.
"Joined-up writing" is the British name for what you Americans refer to as cursive; there's no difference as such.
You may have a point about lifting my pen off the paper, but it's notable that (e.g.) the stroke of the "t" goes downwards to become the start of the following "e", and the "joined-uppedness" of my writing increases when I'm writing normally or fast.
The cost of both paper and computer is negligible for my uses (I'd have a computer anyway, and paper isn't expensive). Price isn't an issue.
And remember when disk arrays because "smart"? Well... just looks at the electronics on the average SATA IDE drive and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, but to be fair IDE (the original) has been around- and even standard- for a long time now. It's not like this is something just coming back.
Actually, I'm kind of surprised that a standard that was originally associated with the lower end of the hard drive market- and until recently still the mass-market favourite, its philosophy continued by SATA- is one based around each drive having its own "smart" electronics. You'd have thought that from a cost point of view that it would have been less favoured for that reason.
Having Googled it, most of the Palmer method examples I came across aren't as OTT fancy (or pretty) as some handwriting I've seen, but there still seems to be an excess of tails and loops. It's quite "schoolish".
I'm not sure what systems they used here in the UK over the years; though there are probably a few elements of that style remaining in the way I was taught to write- ironically, the few bits I probably don't use in my own writing.:-)
It's notable that (apparently) in the Palmer era, they used to teach kids to write joined-up from the start, and it was when this was changed to let kids start with non-joined letters that Palmer declined.
I was certainly taught plain letters some time before joined-up writing, and I'm in my early thirties now.
I even have difficulty signing my name sometimes, but that's mostly because cursive is my most unpracticed form.
You obviously don't sign your name that much then.
My signature used to look like a vaguely "signaturey" version of my handwriting. At some stage- I think it was around 10 years ago when I had to sign things a lot as part of my job- it became detached from my handwriting and got more and more stylised.
Nowadays it's bordering on a meaningless squiggle; only the first letter is remotely legible. I can still see parts of it, but that's mainly because I know my own name and know what it's meant to be.
Its only *real* value- and the only intended one!- is that it looks like my other meaningless signature squiggles.:)
But back to the point- my signature has very little to do with my (not bad) handwriting these days. (^_^)
I really admire some of the cursive scripts some folks are able to produce. My parents have wonderful cursive handwriting, so it boggles my mind that mine is so illegible!
Are you talking about "prettiness" or legibility? As I mentioned elsewhere, my joined-up handwriting style is essentially primary-school-style plain letters with joins, but I defy anyone to tell me that this is less legible than old-fashioned handwriting, which I didn't think was particularly easy to read, even as a kid.
That said, I rarely write anything these days and it's often just a scrawl when I do.
I used to be a reasonably neat writer (*), and if I'm writing something properly and not trying to rush, my writing's as good as ever.
On the other hand, it's much messier- but still legible- when I'm writing quick notes and stuff. I've come to the conclusion that because I'm now used to being able to type much faster than I can write, I get impatient and try to rush it. (Which doesn't really work, but makes it look messier anyway).
(*) By good, I mean clear and legible. The way we were taught when I was a kid was essentially a flowing version of "plain" lettering, which is quite similar to the way I still do it. (**) Copperplate and old-fashioned "pretty" handwriting might be aesthetically pleasing to some people, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that it's anything more than that, and it certainly doesn't make your writing any easier to read- quite the opposite.
(**) Except that I just noticed that I dot my i's and cross my t's at the time I write them (in the latter case using them as the connection with the next letter) rather than going back and doing them at the end of the word. Anyone else find the "proper" way more disruptive and unnatural?
The PCB issue I raised was an unverified possibility- no more- and not the story being reported.
But since- as I suspect you would mention if I didn't- the Soviet regime *did* have a dismal record on pollution and contamination in other similar cases anyway, let's ignore that for the sake of refuting your argument.
The Soviet regime was neither democratically elected nor accountable, and they were policing their own actions. And you're using this worst-case and undemocratic example to represent "government regulation" as one side of a false dichotomy (*) against laissez-faire capitalism policing itself via legal means. Neither is desirable or necessary.
It's naive to think that- even in the (relatively) democratic US or other Western countries- there wouldn't be- and aren't- problems with government regulation, but it's not- or shouldn't be- comparable to the Soviet situation. If it were, it would say more about the failure of your democracy and it being beholden to big business interests; and certainly not a case that they should be more responsible for themselves.
The legal route is already weighted in favour of the big guy- particularly in the US- and I don't think that under your libertarian system it would be any better.
Those bankruptcy problems that you can't- and don't- even argue against, but try to minimise by saying "no system is perfect" are in fact a major flaw, and having to imply that Soviet-style corrupt and unaccountable "government" regulation is the only alternative in an attempt to make it look good is comparing one very bad system with another very bad one. We know that businesses are very clever at delaying, reorganising and wriggling out of things like this, and this *would* be what happened under your system, leaving the mess to... well, to the poor sods that had to live in the shithole they'd left behind.
That's an interesting story that raises a number of questions:-
(a) Who spilled the beans to your friend?
(b) Did he spill the beans to the authorities?
(c) If not, why not, and if so, who got landed with the cleanup bill and what happened?
(d) Did they have to destroy the building once (if) the pollution was discovered?
And if, as the other guy asked, the company or entity goes bankrupt and doesn't have a chance in hell of paying it back, (regardless of what you do to them or threaten them with), who pays then?
I hear that the US has problems recovering the cleanup money for "Superfund" polluted sites, and half those companies aren't even bankrupt, merely stalling.
Pfft... you only need duct tape if you want it to look pretty. Otherwise there's nothing stopping you from piggybacking 16,666 of these together.
I can get them for $13.99 each, bringing the whole thing to just $233,158! That's excluding the cost of connecting wire, of course. Lots and lots and lots of wire...
Does anyone know what the arrangements are to receive my consultant's fee for that answer?
Is there any chance that this transformer would have contained PCBs (i.e. Polychlorinated biphenyl)? They used to be used as dielectrics. I know that the US banned them in the early 70s- or rather, read that on WP- but the age and Soviet/Russian regulations could still make this an unpleasant possibility.
If it's plain crud, then I'd agree with its deletion because unless it was something very unusual you'd be the only source of that information.
Suppose some academics did a large-scale study on fingernail crud in several thousand people and released *all* the detailed information gathered, then someone else wrote an article on each of those people's fingernail crud? (^_^)
Still, protests against deletionism don't involve stuff like that
That's beside the point I was making, which is that virtually everyone is deletionist to however limited an extent, it's just a question of where you draw the line.
Wikipedia isn't a *.* copy of the internet. What you want is the internet, its already out there, go nuts.
In the newfangled Internet verncacular... "this".
Wikipedia isn't- and isn't meant to be, by its own rules- a primary source of information. It follows therefore that its only real purpose must be to collate, distill and make existing information more useful and reliable.
If we simply wanted a mass of information over everything else, well... we already have the Internet and search engines. And most of the non-OR content (i.e. stuff that follows the rules) on WP is already available on the Internet.
(Personally, I'm neither a deletionist nor an inclusionist; the fact I'm not a 100% inclusionist can be indicated by the fact that I *don't* think everyone's pet cat warrants a page. In fact, unless you agree that some crud I found under my fingernail this morning (*) warrants a writeup if it's somehow verifiable, then you do- to however small an extent- have deletionist tendencies, the only question then being where one draws the line.)
(*) Not a small green lump of putty, which *is* notable for reasons you'll either know or not:-)
SNES - previously mentioned on/. Early production runs of the SNES shell used a cheap plastic that over time turned a ghastly yellow.
Over *what* length of time? Because I'm pretty sure that whether or not Nintendo knew about the problem at the time, it's unlikely that they would have given a toss about the consoles starting to go yellow 15 years later.
If they went yellow after a year for want of a few cents worth of additive or better plastic, that might count, but otherwise no- regardless of how much it sucks for collectors. (And yes, my Atari 800XL has gone yellow too...:-( )
My complaint with the article (at least after reading the 1st half) is that lots of these "mistakes" are really just laments that the technology of the 80's was not as good as today's.
Poor sound? Well how much would a 'better' chip cost, and would the very best sound chip of its time really measure up to the author's expectations?
If you read the article, you'll find that the Atari 7800 (the machine mentioned as having poor sound) had virtually identical sound to the original 1977 Atari 2600- one music and one sound channel- despite being released seven years later.
This was significantly inferior to the NES, and even to its predecessor, the 1982 Atari 5200. And the 5200 internal hardware was identical to the older 400/800 computers first released in 1979.
So the 7800 was supposed to be a "next generation" console, but it had "last generation" sound that couldn't even compete with the 5-year-old 400/800 computers. Let's not even compare it to the 1982 Commodore 64's SID chip.
My cousin had an Atari 5200. I recall him at some point noting his Atari being "better." But seemed every other time I saw him, the 5200 was away being repaired or some such.
The 5200 was internally based on the 400/800 computer system (in fact, the insides were near identical, albeit with some minor memory map and OS changes that killed direct compatibility). The 400/800 was miles better than the 2600- unsurprising when you consider that it was originally meant as a next-generation successor to the 2600.
I've never used one, but from what I know, the 5200's problems primarily stemmed from the horrible external hardware design (particularly the controllers) and lack of 2600 compatibility.
The former wouldn't have been a problem with the 400/800, which used the same style controls as the 2600, and the latter wouldn't have been such an issue, since they had plenty of pre-existing software.
Atari later released the XEGS (XE Games System) that- unlike the 5200- retained compatibility with the 400/800/XL/XE series it was virtually identical to. However, that was the late-1980s, and another era.
Slashdot Mirror
touchscreen tech is still artificially high priced so that will not be common until companies pull their heads out of their arses and start putting it on all LCD's.
I commented to someone at work a few months back that I reckoned touch-screen technology would be present in the majority of laptops- if not monitors in general- in five years time.
I also commented that it would not replace the mouse for the same ergonomic and practical reasons that they were an unsatisfactory replacement for keyboards 25 years ago. If you have them vertically and have to point at them, it's exhausting for your muscles; it you have them horizontally, they're hard to look at, and your hands will get in the way.
Unless you're using one for display and one for input; but if you have the input and display separate (possibly with the main monitor mirroring what you're doing with the input monitor) it cuts out half the point of using a touch screen over a mouse or laptop touch-pad.
Computers are not the same as the iPhone; or rather, you don't use an iPhone in the same way that you'd use a computer. So touch screens will be useful on PCs, but they won't replace the mouse IMHO.
Just because you can't be bothered with tweaking, doesn't mean others don't want to. The fact these drives can be enhanced is a selling point. When better algorithms come along, people can update their existing products if they choose to. I guess you're a conditioned consumer? Throw it in the bin and buy another? Like Apple's bling too I suppose?
Maybe he's just not that obsessed with having the very latest and best performance regardless of whether the tradeoff would be money or hassle.
Ever consider that *your* obsession with having the latest and the best might be a greater reflection of consumer conditioning?
Your "joined" writing is probably readable
I'm not sure if your quotes are supposed to imply that my writing isn't "true" cursive (the term you would use) or you think that "joined-up writing" means something different to cursive.
"Joined-up writing" is the British name for what you Americans refer to as cursive; there's no difference as such.
You may have a point about lifting my pen off the paper, but it's notable that (e.g.) the stroke of the "t" goes downwards to become the start of the following "e", and the "joined-uppedness" of my writing increases when I'm writing normally or fast.
The cost of both paper and computer is negligible for my uses (I'd have a computer anyway, and paper isn't expensive). Price isn't an issue.
And remember when disk arrays because "smart"? Well ... just looks at the electronics on the average SATA IDE drive and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, but to be fair IDE (the original) has been around- and even standard- for a long time now. It's not like this is something just coming back.
Actually, I'm kind of surprised that a standard that was originally associated with the lower end of the hard drive market- and until recently still the mass-market favourite, its philosophy continued by SATA- is one based around each drive having its own "smart" electronics. You'd have thought that from a cost point of view that it would have been less favoured for that reason.
You think you're safer by having it off 16 hours a day?
Dude, if I was having it off for 16 hours a day, I wouldn't give a flying **** about some shitty PC security!
Having Googled it, most of the Palmer method examples I came across aren't as OTT fancy (or pretty) as some handwriting I've seen, but there still seems to be an excess of tails and loops. It's quite "schoolish".
:-)
I'm not sure what systems they used here in the UK over the years; though there are probably a few elements of that style remaining in the way I was taught to write- ironically, the few bits I probably don't use in my own writing.
It's notable that (apparently) in the Palmer era, they used to teach kids to write joined-up from the start, and it was when this was changed to let kids start with non-joined letters that Palmer declined.
I was certainly taught plain letters some time before joined-up writing, and I'm in my early thirties now.
I even have difficulty signing my name sometimes, but that's mostly because cursive is my most unpracticed form.
You obviously don't sign your name that much then.
:)
My signature used to look like a vaguely "signaturey" version of my handwriting. At some stage- I think it was around 10 years ago when I had to sign things a lot as part of my job- it became detached from my handwriting and got more and more stylised.
Nowadays it's bordering on a meaningless squiggle; only the first letter is remotely legible. I can still see parts of it, but that's mainly because I know my own name and know what it's meant to be.
Its only *real* value- and the only intended one!- is that it looks like my other meaningless signature squiggles.
But back to the point- my signature has very little to do with my (not bad) handwriting these days. (^_^)
I really admire some of the cursive scripts some folks are able to produce. My parents have wonderful cursive handwriting, so it boggles my mind that mine is so illegible!
Are you talking about "prettiness" or legibility? As I mentioned elsewhere, my joined-up handwriting style is essentially primary-school-style plain letters with joins, but I defy anyone to tell me that this is less legible than old-fashioned handwriting, which I didn't think was particularly easy to read, even as a kid.
That said, I rarely write anything these days and it's often just a scrawl when I do.
I used to be a reasonably neat writer (*), and if I'm writing something properly and not trying to rush, my writing's as good as ever.
On the other hand, it's much messier- but still legible- when I'm writing quick notes and stuff. I've come to the conclusion that because I'm now used to being able to type much faster than I can write, I get impatient and try to rush it. (Which doesn't really work, but makes it look messier anyway).
(*) By good, I mean clear and legible. The way we were taught when I was a kid was essentially a flowing version of "plain" lettering, which is quite similar to the way I still do it. (**) Copperplate and old-fashioned "pretty" handwriting might be aesthetically pleasing to some people, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that it's anything more than that, and it certainly doesn't make your writing any easier to read- quite the opposite.
(**) Except that I just noticed that I dot my i's and cross my t's at the time I write them (in the latter case using them as the connection with the next letter) rather than going back and doing them at the end of the word. Anyone else find the "proper" way more disruptive and unnatural?
Disregard the above, I see that you already answered (or rather skirted around and didn't answer) this issue elsewhere; see my reply to that.
The PCB issue I raised was an unverified possibility- no more- and not the story being reported.
But since- as I suspect you would mention if I didn't- the Soviet regime *did* have a dismal record on pollution and contamination in other similar cases anyway, let's ignore that for the sake of refuting your argument.
The Soviet regime was neither democratically elected nor accountable, and they were policing their own actions. And you're using this worst-case and undemocratic example to represent "government regulation" as one side of a false dichotomy (*) against laissez-faire capitalism policing itself via legal means. Neither is desirable or necessary.
It's naive to think that- even in the (relatively) democratic US or other Western countries- there wouldn't be- and aren't- problems with government regulation, but it's not- or shouldn't be- comparable to the Soviet situation. If it were, it would say more about the failure of your democracy and it being beholden to big business interests; and certainly not a case that they should be more responsible for themselves.
The legal route is already weighted in favour of the big guy- particularly in the US- and I don't think that under your libertarian system it would be any better.
Those bankruptcy problems that you can't- and don't- even argue against, but try to minimise by saying "no system is perfect" are in fact a major flaw, and having to imply that Soviet-style corrupt and unaccountable "government" regulation is the only alternative in an attempt to make it look good is comparing one very bad system with another very bad one. We know that businesses are very clever at delaying, reorganising and wriggling out of things like this, and this *would* be what happened under your system, leaving the mess to... well, to the poor sods that had to live in the shithole they'd left behind.
That's an interesting story that raises a number of questions:-
(a) Who spilled the beans to your friend?
(b) Did he spill the beans to the authorities?
(c) If not, why not, and if so, who got landed with the cleanup bill and what happened?
(d) Did they have to destroy the building once (if) the pollution was discovered?
And if, as the other guy asked, the company or entity goes bankrupt and doesn't have a chance in hell of paying it back, (regardless of what you do to them or threaten them with), who pays then?
I hear that the US has problems recovering the cleanup money for "Superfund" polluted sites, and half those companies aren't even bankrupt, merely stalling.
Oops... make that 16,667 of them. I hope that doesn't make my proposal uncompetitive...
...that the answer involves duct tape.
Pfft... you only need duct tape if you want it to look pretty. Otherwise there's nothing stopping you from piggybacking 16,666 of these together.
I can get them for $13.99 each, bringing the whole thing to just $233,158! That's excluding the cost of connecting wire, of course. Lots and lots and lots of wire...
Does anyone know what the arrangements are to receive my consultant's fee for that answer?
Is there any chance that this transformer would have contained PCBs (i.e. Polychlorinated biphenyl)? They used to be used as dielectrics. I know that the US banned them in the early 70s- or rather, read that on WP- but the age and Soviet/Russian regulations could still make this an unpleasant possibility.
If it's plain crud, then I'd agree with its deletion because unless it was something very unusual you'd be the only source of that information.
Suppose some academics did a large-scale study on fingernail crud in several thousand people and released *all* the detailed information gathered, then someone else wrote an article on each of those people's fingernail crud? (^_^)
Still, protests against deletionism don't involve stuff like that
That's beside the point I was making, which is that virtually everyone is deletionist to however limited an extent, it's just a question of where you draw the line.
Yes, but where do you sit on the "crud under my fingernail" issue?
Wikipedia isn't a *.* copy of the internet. What you want is the internet, its already out there, go nuts.
In the newfangled Internet verncacular... "this".
Wikipedia isn't- and isn't meant to be, by its own rules- a primary source of information. It follows therefore that its only real purpose must be to collate, distill and make existing information more useful and reliable.
If we simply wanted a mass of information over everything else, well... we already have the Internet and search engines. And most of the non-OR content (i.e. stuff that follows the rules) on WP is already available on the Internet.
(Personally, I'm neither a deletionist nor an inclusionist; the fact I'm not a 100% inclusionist can be indicated by the fact that I *don't* think everyone's pet cat warrants a page. In fact, unless you agree that some crud I found under my fingernail this morning (*) warrants a writeup if it's somehow verifiable, then you do- to however small an extent- have deletionist tendencies, the only question then being where one draws the line.)
(*) Not a small green lump of putty, which *is* notable for reasons you'll either know or not :-)
A Wiki language geek "honored" the article by translating it into Anglo-Saxon for the Anglo-Saxon language version of Wikipedia.
I love the fact that there's an article on the Atari Jaguar written in Anglo Saxon. (^_^)
And, sadly, cutting and pasting a Euro symbol into Slashdot doesn't work.
Pfftt... I bet that's your American PC's fault. Did you know that the dollar symbol shows up as "I'm a little teapot" on European PCs?
SNES - previously mentioned on /. Early production runs of the SNES shell used a cheap plastic that over time turned a ghastly yellow.
Over *what* length of time? Because I'm pretty sure that whether or not Nintendo knew about the problem at the time, it's unlikely that they would have given a toss about the consoles starting to go yellow 15 years later.
:-( )
If they went yellow after a year for want of a few cents worth of additive or better plastic, that might count, but otherwise no- regardless of how much it sucks for collectors. (And yes, my Atari 800XL has gone yellow too...
And as far as missing items, where the HELL is the sidetalker? The original N-Gage belongs on this list more than half the items listed.
Some people liked sidetalkin', you know...
My complaint with the article (at least after reading the 1st half) is that lots of these "mistakes" are really just laments that the technology of the 80's was not as good as today's.
Poor sound? Well how much would a 'better' chip cost, and would the very best sound chip of its time really measure up to the author's expectations?
If you read the article, you'll find that the Atari 7800 (the machine mentioned as having poor sound) had virtually identical sound to the original 1977 Atari 2600- one music and one sound channel- despite being released seven years later.
This was significantly inferior to the NES, and even to its predecessor, the 1982 Atari 5200. And the 5200 internal hardware was identical to the older 400/800 computers first released in 1979.
So the 7800 was supposed to be a "next generation" console, but it had "last generation" sound that couldn't even compete with the 5-year-old 400/800 computers. Let's not even compare it to the 1982 Commodore 64's SID chip.
My cousin had an Atari 5200. I recall him at some point noting his Atari being "better." But seemed every other time I saw him, the 5200 was away being repaired or some such.
The 5200 was internally based on the 400/800 computer system (in fact, the insides were near identical, albeit with some minor memory map and OS changes that killed direct compatibility). The 400/800 was miles better than the 2600- unsurprising when you consider that it was originally meant as a next-generation successor to the 2600.
I've never used one, but from what I know, the 5200's problems primarily stemmed from the horrible external hardware design (particularly the controllers) and lack of 2600 compatibility.
The former wouldn't have been a problem with the 400/800, which used the same style controls as the 2600, and the latter wouldn't have been such an issue, since they had plenty of pre-existing software.
Atari later released the XEGS (XE Games System) that- unlike the 5200- retained compatibility with the 400/800/XL/XE series it was virtually identical to. However, that was the late-1980s, and another era.