I know I'm being obtuse, but seriously, this stuff is too complicated for simple little animations and pictures to make substantially easier.
I'd say high quality animations and pictures are EXACTLY what's required to make basic biology, chemistry, and physics substantially easier. These subjects are ideal targets to improve with these tools. Consider the excellent animations in this ted talk: (animations start at around 3:40).
How long do you think the level of understanding granted by a few minutes with these animations would take to impart via "dialog, lots of words, and drawing on blackboards"?
I don't know about the European market, but here in Canada our ISPs throttle our traffic, at least during prime time, which is when I tend to use my home computers.
What's the point of me upgrading to their higher tiered bandwidth selections if they're going to throttle me anyway? I don't want to pay for potential throughput during off-hours. Eliminate throttling practices and I'd be happy to pay for a faster connection.
I posted my own thoughts elsewhere, but I forgot to mention my chair. Thank you for reminding me.
I agree that a simple one can be ergonomically sound. I use a very basic chair now, with no armrests. I think the most important thing is that it's at a good height and the backrest is adjusted appropriately, but in my case (and it won't be the same for everyone), the best thing I did was to eliminate using a chair with armrests. The armrests tended to give me "lazy posture" because I tended to lean to one side on them, and they also propped my elbows too high or too far away from my body at times.
My background: I have struggled with RSI due mainly to computer-based overuse for nearly 15 years. I first developed problems when I was a software developer. When I wasn't developing software, I tended to spend a great deal of my leisure time playing games (mostly FPS games using a PC with a keyboard+mouse setup). In my case, that was a really bad idea, but it seems genetics and other factors play a role as well. Others might be able to handle what I was doing year after year with no problems[1], or they might heal up after their injury, fix their ergonomic situation, and be able to continue at the same pace with no further problems. I am not one of the lucky ones, so I ultimately chose to give up developing software professionally and switched to a (lower-paying but more physically active) career that mostly kept me away from a desk. That way, I could continue to use a computer after-hours without much trouble. I did lay off the FPS games, though, and made MANY ergonomic improvements.
Once you're struck with a problem, it will become pretty obvious what works and what doesn't for you, because the pain will tell you. Everybody makes different mistakes, but here are the two I believe to be most common:
1) A desk that is too high.
Put your monitor wherever it's most comfortable for you, but don't think you need to put your input devices on the same surface. Lower your keyboard as close to your lap as you can, and especially your mouse. I find that if my upper/fore arms are forming an acute angle, it makes me very prone to re-injury. An obtuse angle is not as bad, but optimally, something near a right angle seems to work best, at least for me. I won't claim that it will be the same for everyone, but I will claim that most people have their keyboard and pointing device too high.
Keyboard/mouse trays may help, but attaching one to any old desk might not lower the surface enough. When I first injured my tendons, I simply got a cardboard box and put it down near the level of my quadriceps, next to my chair. That helped immensely. As others have pointed out, improving ergonomics doesn't require expensive equipment.
2) Not varying your working position.
The latest trend seems to be standing desks. I'm sure those can help, but might open you up to new ergonomic issues. As others have stated, varying your position between standing and sitting is probably better. I've found that the best thing while I'm at home is to switch between my laptop (on my couch) and desktop, seated at my desk. If you look up "correct posture", I'm pretty sure none of the diagrams will look like me reclined on my sofa with my macbook pro on my lap, but that is one of the best improvements I've made. I now alternate between laptop/couch and my desktop computer with standard desk chair.
I also highly recommend switching between various pointing devices. For me, mice seem to be the worst. Especially heavy ones. If you have a high end mouse that lets you add the desired amount of weights to it, I suggest removing them all. If your wireless mouse uses standard removable AA batteries, use rechargeable NiMH rather than alkaline batteries to decrease the weight even more.
Trackballs seem slightly better for my tendons than mice but I could never quite get used to them, and the thumb-based ones scare me. That particular digit is more precious to me than the others. Trackpads (some of them) and touchscreens are wonderful from an ergonomic perspective if you can get used to them, though my MBP's trackpad has a button which I tend to use my thumb exclusively to depress, and now my thumb is exhibiting signs of tendon or joint problems. I am learning to alternate between using my thumb and fingers for depressing it now, and it seems to be improving.
I also use one of Apple's magic trackpads with my desktop, which is a bit clunkier and much tougher to get used to (and the Windows/bootcamp drivers are terrible compared to the OS X drivers), but it's much easier on my tendons than my mice--I still use mice for gam
Maybe geeks in Oz need to start their own campaign. Knock on doors and educate people why everyone should open their router? I recently visited Australia and was amazed at how hard a time I had finding open access points with my ipod. I didn't have a notebook or 3G phone on me, I was backpacking and trying to keep the weight down. The problem is not much better here at home, in Canada. I live in a neighbourhood of dense housing and can see about 20 wifi networks broadcasting, but mine is the only open one. (I call it KarmaNet.) Most connections to it are iphones, and the occasional neighbour that uses it regularly. In the two years I've had it open and uncapped, I've noticed no change in my overall bandwidth consumption.
Yes, there is a miniscule chance that someone will use it to do something truly nefarious, like posting kiddie porn. This common argument is very lopsided relative to the amount of good it could do to society as a whole if everyone had an open network, even if most had capped public bandwidth to something relatively small.
Yes, I know it's against most ISP rules. We should be pushing to have laws that force ISPs to remove this clause from TOS agreements. This should be on the agenda of the growing Pirate Parties of the world. It's something the average person can relate to, even if they have no interest in the copyright issues on the current Pirate Party agendas.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, and I know slashdotters and generally too complacent to actually go door to door and educate people about this (I know I am). Seriously, though, why not bring the subject up with our non-techy friends (many who now own smartphones or other portable wifi devices and can easily relate to how wonderful it would be to not rely on 3G networks). Get people thinking about this "what if" scenario.
About 6 years ago I tried mounting a gyro-mouse to a helmet to see if it would be suitable to give my arms a rest, since I suffer from a repetitive stress disorder in both arms. (A gyro mouse is a hand-held mouse that you wave in the air to move the cursor rather than moving it across a flat surface).
It was futile, I quickly discovered, because my head (and everyone else's) has a subtle jittery motion that I didn't know about until I tried this experiment. It makes the cursor erratic.
Hands have much finer control, and doubly so when they're pushing a mouse across a stable surface. For that reason, the hand-held gyro mouse works pretty well, and standard surface mice work extremely well.
So now I wonder if this product (the motion smoothing aspect of it) could be used to make a do-it-yourself head-mounted mouse.
I know there are already head-mounted products available, and at least some of them probably use similar algorithms, but last I checked--several years ago--the prices for quality head-tracking was quite high, and most of them used cameras or similar sensors to track wearable "dots" or your eyes.
HP has been using "smart chips" on their cartridges from some time now to discourage people from refilling them, though there are ways to defeat them. This is just the next step for them to put artificial limitations on their products to squeeze a little more money out of us.
Canon, on the other hand, had no artificial restrictions last time I checked.
There is another hi tech company named Intel that was in a market-dominant position and made decent products, but they overpriced their stuff and used artificial means to prevent people from getting the most out of their product (prevented overclocking). Tech-savvy people wised up and started buying from the competition instead, and Intel's market share has been steadily eroding to AMD ever since.
Buy Canon or other alternative instead, and watch the same thing happen to HP. Vote with your dollars and the competition will decide not to follow HP's lead.
So what if it's not in the car. It's still being put on my property. Does this mean that the police can attach whatever they want to my vehicle, so long as they don't open the doors, etc?
It's even worse than that. "Bugging" a car in this way is not as straightforward as many people think. It's unlikely they even did it without opening the doors. I used to work for a company that did vehicle tracking, including covert law enforcement use such as the one described, and for "bait-cars" that were left out for people to steal.
It's not like they're just slapping a tiny magnetic device to the undercarriage of the vehicle.
The biggest problems are the GPS antenna and the power supply. A small battery won't last any longer powering the unit than your mobile phone would without being recharged, so for long term surveillance you need to tap into the vehicle's power supply. That means you need to mount it where you can splice into the vehicle's power lines--for example, we'd sometimes mount ours inside the frame of a door (if it has power windows or locks) or concealed under the dash if there was enough space (usually there isn't).
As for the GPS antenna, it requires line-of-sight to 3 or more overhead satellites, meaning you need to "see" a good chunk of the sky with it. You can mount it under plastic or glass, but if you tried to mount it under steel you'd lose reception. What's often done to conceal it is to mount the antenna under the car's plastic dash or within the bumper, if the bumper is made at least partially of plastic or rubber. You only need about a square inch or two of surface-area to mount a tiny patch antenna underneath.
There's also power circuitry (to clean up the vehicle's 12v line), logic circuitry, and a mobile phone or other transmitter included with the tracker. A common misconception is that only a GPS receiver is needed, but GPS receivers are just that--receivers. They receive signals from the GPS satellites, they don't transmit anything back to the satellites. You need to accommodate relaying the vehicle position to your monitoring station through other means such as an SMS-enabled radio (phone).
If you don't integrate all this onto a single PCB (we didn't), then this is a whole lot of electronics to mount in the vehicle. Even if it is on one PCB, you've got the circuit board, power cable running to the source, a transmitter antenna plus it's cable running to the mounting spot, and a GPS patch-antenna plus it's cable running to a limited-position mounting spot. It's not easy to conceal all this stuff, mount it where vibration and weather won't harm it, and accommodate the GPS antenna's restrictions. I'm sure that's why they did this when the guy was out of town--so they could rip his car apart for a couple hours while they installed it.
As you can imagine it's not just intrusive with regard to privacy. It's very physically intrusive as well.
I wouldn't be surprised if I spent more time playing InFiNiTy CoMpLeX than anyone else on the planet. (Sad, I know..)
I started playing it during it's beta days on a MajorBBS system in Calgary that went by several names over the years (Viewline, The Station, The Nucleus..) I believe it debuted in that City on July 22, 1988, though it was also being tested from a slightly earlier date on a MajorBBS system in Edmonton (Canada).
It was a real-time, persistent state game with a modifiable map. It was a wacky text-based "FPS" game based heavily on the paper and pen RPG, Paranoia. Unfortunately, MajorBBS operators often complained about its instability throughout it's lifetime (it often crashed the server) and many sysops pulled it because of this.
I found it to be incredibly addictive. Because text commands given were processed by the server immediately, there wasn't really a firm "cap" as to how quickly one could move about the map. Even though descriptions of the rooms were limited to how fast they could come across your modem, your movement and other text commands would be processed as received by the server without regard to client synchronization or real world physics. Because of this, one could physically move through 50 rooms in under a second (on a 1200 baud modem), as long as you didn't care about seeing the room descriptions.
Combined with the use of client-side macros, this made for the fastest gameplay of any game I have ever played. It puts the fastest Quake games to shame. A skilled player with a solid knowledge of the (constantly evolving) map could do amazing things.
I have great memories of that game. If anybody knows where I can still get a copy of it, I'd be interested in preserving a running server of it.
- "Gnimsh", of Viewline, Calgary.
Former team member of:
"Gnome Raiders" and the
"Freedom Union of Commie Killers"
Yep. Several versions of gyro-mice have been around for years. I bought a Gyropoint Pro II several years ago, which is shaped like an egg, presumably to feel more natural when you're holding it in your hand. It's not made for desktop use, only handheld.
Judging from this review from 1998, my model's been around for at least four years. I originally bought it because I developed tendonitis from using my standard desktop mouse, so I was looking for alternatives that might be easier on my arm.
I found the gyro-mouse to be annoying to use, though. It doesn't have the precision of a regular mouse or trackball device, and every minute or two the pointer starts to drift in one direction. To stop the drift you have to recalibrate it by pressing a couple of buttons or setting it down for about 5 seconds.
It's not suitable for use with most applications because of these problems. Web browsing is about the only thing I'd consider using it for, and even for that purpose I find it to be not worth the bother. I don't know if the newer models work better or not.
For conference room or auditorium presentations, though, it would be great. The range that the mouse will work from the receiver is advertised at 75 feet, which seems about right--possible even a bit conservative--based on the tests I did with it when I first bought it.
I briefly considered mounting it on a helmet, with the buttons rigged to a glove. However, it turns out that your head is a lot more jittery than you might think. I couldn't keep the pointer stable using my head. I have much finer control with my hands.
And with that, they extracted from the CyberPatrol program a full and complete list of all the Web pages blocked by CyberPatrol. And they published it on the Internet... The fact is, this has happened before, and I'm sure it's unpleasant for the filtering company. They'd rather not have this happen. But to say we're going to go out of business -- well, I don't know.
Well, it seems to me that although the companies can survive a "blip" such as the cited incident where a snapshot of their blocking list is published, I doubt they would survive if their lists were all forced permanently into the open.
It seems to me that these companies are selling the effort that's gone into compiling their lists, and compiling these lists is no doubt the bulk of their ongoing development costs. Any competent system administrator can block a list of sites at their proxy without purchasing this additional software, provided they have a list of URLs. Obviously then, it's this list of URLs and the organization/accuracy of said list that's really of value, not the blocking software itself.
Why should I spend money on them if I already have a list of sites I want blocked? I'll concede that I have never used third party blocking software, so I may be missing something here-- perhaps they also have real time filtration by context-filters rather than just "evil" URL lists.
So, yes, the companies have a lot to worry about--they could easily get pushed out of the market if their lists are forced public, but to me, this doesn't seem to me to be such a bad price to pay in the grand scheme. So what if a handful of people lose their jobs or get pushed into other areas. That's a small price to pay when you think about all the problems that open-source lists can solve. Errata or questionable blockages could be challenged and removed or re-categorized. A broader selection of blockage categories could be maintained (and selected from by parents/schoolboards/sys-admins who want to use a subset of the list). A vast army of concerned parents could be enlisted to help keep the list current by contributing new block candidates if there was a universal list.
Let the existing companies change their focus to develop more accurate context-filtration for when naughty bits get past the list, and leave the list to the global community, because the blockage list itself is an ideal case for open-source.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm being obtuse, but seriously, this stuff is too complicated for simple little animations and pictures to make substantially easier.
I'd say high quality animations and pictures are EXACTLY what's required to make basic biology, chemistry, and physics substantially easier. These subjects are ideal targets to improve with these tools. Consider the excellent animations in this ted talk: (animations start at around 3:40).
How long do you think the level of understanding granted by a few minutes with these animations would take to impart via "dialog, lots of words, and drawing on blackboards"?
I don't know about the European market, but here in Canada our ISPs throttle our traffic, at least during prime time, which is when I tend to use my home computers.
What's the point of me upgrading to their higher tiered bandwidth selections if they're going to throttle me anyway? I don't want to pay for potential throughput during off-hours. Eliminate throttling practices and I'd be happy to pay for a faster connection.
I posted my own thoughts elsewhere, but I forgot to mention my chair. Thank you for reminding me.
I agree that a simple one can be ergonomically sound. I use a very basic chair now, with no armrests. I think the most important thing is that it's at a good height and the backrest is adjusted appropriately, but in my case (and it won't be the same for everyone), the best thing I did was to eliminate using a chair with armrests. The armrests tended to give me "lazy posture" because I tended to lean to one side on them, and they also propped my elbows too high or too far away from my body at times.
My background: I have struggled with RSI due mainly to computer-based overuse for nearly 15 years. I first developed problems when I was a software developer. When I wasn't developing software, I tended to spend a great deal of my leisure time playing games (mostly FPS games using a PC with a keyboard+mouse setup). In my case, that was a really bad idea, but it seems genetics and other factors play a role as well. Others might be able to handle what I was doing year after year with no problems[1], or they might heal up after their injury, fix their ergonomic situation, and be able to continue at the same pace with no further problems. I am not one of the lucky ones, so I ultimately chose to give up developing software professionally and switched to a (lower-paying but more physically active) career that mostly kept me away from a desk. That way, I could continue to use a computer after-hours without much trouble. I did lay off the FPS games, though, and made MANY ergonomic improvements.
Once you're struck with a problem, it will become pretty obvious what works and what doesn't for you, because the pain will tell you. Everybody makes different mistakes, but here are the two I believe to be most common:
1) A desk that is too high.
Put your monitor wherever it's most comfortable for you, but don't think you need to put your input devices on the same surface. Lower your keyboard as close to your lap as you can, and especially your mouse. I find that if my upper/fore arms are forming an acute angle, it makes me very prone to re-injury. An obtuse angle is not as bad, but optimally, something near a right angle seems to work best, at least for me. I won't claim that it will be the same for everyone, but I will claim that most people have their keyboard and pointing device too high.
Keyboard/mouse trays may help, but attaching one to any old desk might not lower the surface enough. When I first injured my tendons, I simply got a cardboard box and put it down near the level of my quadriceps, next to my chair. That helped immensely. As others have pointed out, improving ergonomics doesn't require expensive equipment.
2) Not varying your working position.
The latest trend seems to be standing desks. I'm sure those can help, but might open you up to new ergonomic issues. As others have stated, varying your position between standing and sitting is probably better. I've found that the best thing while I'm at home is to switch between my laptop (on my couch) and desktop, seated at my desk. If you look up "correct posture", I'm pretty sure none of the diagrams will look like me reclined on my sofa with my macbook pro on my lap, but that is one of the best improvements I've made. I now alternate between laptop/couch and my desktop computer with standard desk chair.
I also highly recommend switching between various pointing devices. For me, mice seem to be the worst. Especially heavy ones. If you have a high end mouse that lets you add the desired amount of weights to it, I suggest removing them all. If your wireless mouse uses standard removable AA batteries, use rechargeable NiMH rather than alkaline batteries to decrease the weight even more.
Trackballs seem slightly better for my tendons than mice but I could never quite get used to them, and the thumb-based ones scare me. That particular digit is more precious to me than the others. Trackpads (some of them) and touchscreens are wonderful from an ergonomic perspective if you can get used to them, though my MBP's trackpad has a button which I tend to use my thumb exclusively to depress, and now my thumb is exhibiting signs of tendon or joint problems. I am learning to alternate between using my thumb and fingers for depressing it now, and it seems to be improving.
I also use one of Apple's magic trackpads with my desktop, which is a bit clunkier and much tougher to get used to (and the Windows/bootcamp drivers are terrible compared to the OS X drivers), but it's much easier on my tendons than my mice--I still use mice for gam
Maybe geeks in Oz need to start their own campaign. Knock on doors and educate people why everyone should open their router? I recently visited Australia and was amazed at how hard a time I had finding open access points with my ipod. I didn't have a notebook or 3G phone on me, I was backpacking and trying to keep the weight down. The problem is not much better here at home, in Canada. I live in a neighbourhood of dense housing and can see about 20 wifi networks broadcasting, but mine is the only open one. (I call it KarmaNet.) Most connections to it are iphones, and the occasional neighbour that uses it regularly. In the two years I've had it open and uncapped, I've noticed no change in my overall bandwidth consumption.
Yes, there is a miniscule chance that someone will use it to do something truly nefarious, like posting kiddie porn. This common argument is very lopsided relative to the amount of good it could do to society as a whole if everyone had an open network, even if most had capped public bandwidth to something relatively small.
Yes, I know it's against most ISP rules. We should be pushing to have laws that force ISPs to remove this clause from TOS agreements. This should be on the agenda of the growing Pirate Parties of the world. It's something the average person can relate to, even if they have no interest in the copyright issues on the current Pirate Party agendas.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, and I know slashdotters and generally too complacent to actually go door to door and educate people about this (I know I am). Seriously, though, why not bring the subject up with our non-techy friends (many who now own smartphones or other portable wifi devices and can easily relate to how wonderful it would be to not rely on 3G networks). Get people thinking about this "what if" scenario.
About 6 years ago I tried mounting a gyro-mouse to a helmet to see if it would be suitable to give my arms a rest, since I suffer from a repetitive stress disorder in both arms. (A gyro mouse is a hand-held mouse that you wave in the air to move the cursor rather than moving it across a flat surface).
It was futile, I quickly discovered, because my head (and everyone else's) has a subtle jittery motion that I didn't know about until I tried this experiment. It makes the cursor erratic.
Hands have much finer control, and doubly so when they're pushing a mouse across a stable surface. For that reason, the hand-held gyro mouse works pretty well, and standard surface mice work extremely well.
So now I wonder if this product (the motion smoothing aspect of it) could be used to make a do-it-yourself head-mounted mouse.
I know there are already head-mounted products available, and at least some of them probably use similar algorithms, but last I checked--several years ago--the prices for quality head-tracking was quite high, and most of them used cameras or similar sensors to track wearable "dots" or your eyes.
HP has been using "smart chips" on their cartridges from some time now to discourage people from refilling them, though there are ways to defeat them. This is just the next step for them to put artificial limitations on their products to squeeze a little more money out of us.
Canon, on the other hand, had no artificial restrictions last time I checked.
There is another hi tech company named Intel that was in a market-dominant position and made decent products, but they overpriced their stuff and used artificial means to prevent people from getting the most out of their product (prevented overclocking). Tech-savvy people wised up and started buying from the competition instead, and Intel's market share has been steadily eroding to AMD ever since.
Buy Canon or other alternative instead, and watch the same thing happen to HP. Vote with your dollars and the competition will decide not to follow HP's lead.
These are not Robots, they're Cyborgs.
So what if it's not in the car. It's still being put on my property. Does this mean that the police can attach whatever they want to my vehicle, so long as they don't open the doors, etc?
It's even worse than that. "Bugging" a car in this way is not as straightforward as many people think. It's unlikely they even did it without opening the doors. I used to work for a company that did vehicle tracking, including covert law enforcement use such as the one described, and for "bait-cars" that were left out for people to steal.
It's not like they're just slapping a tiny magnetic device to the undercarriage of the vehicle.
The biggest problems are the GPS antenna and the power supply. A small battery won't last any longer powering the unit than your mobile phone would without being recharged, so for long term surveillance you need to tap into the vehicle's power supply. That means you need to mount it where you can splice into the vehicle's power lines--for example, we'd sometimes mount ours inside the frame of a door (if it has power windows or locks) or concealed under the dash if there was enough space (usually there isn't).
As for the GPS antenna, it requires line-of-sight to 3 or more overhead satellites, meaning you need to "see" a good chunk of the sky with it. You can mount it under plastic or glass, but if you tried to mount it under steel you'd lose reception. What's often done to conceal it is to mount the antenna under the car's plastic dash or within the bumper, if the bumper is made at least partially of plastic or rubber. You only need about a square inch or two of surface-area to mount a tiny patch antenna underneath.
There's also power circuitry (to clean up the vehicle's 12v line), logic circuitry, and a mobile phone or other transmitter included with the tracker. A common misconception is that only a GPS receiver is needed, but GPS receivers are just that--receivers. They receive signals from the GPS satellites, they don't transmit anything back to the satellites. You need to accommodate relaying the vehicle position to your monitoring station through other means such as an SMS-enabled radio (phone).
If you don't integrate all this onto a single PCB (we didn't), then this is a whole lot of electronics to mount in the vehicle. Even if it is on one PCB, you've got the circuit board, power cable running to the source, a transmitter antenna plus it's cable running to the mounting spot, and a GPS patch-antenna plus it's cable running to a limited-position mounting spot. It's not easy to conceal all this stuff, mount it where vibration and weather won't harm it, and accommodate the GPS antenna's restrictions. I'm sure that's why they did this when the guy was out of town--so they could rip his car apart for a couple hours while they installed it.
As you can imagine it's not just intrusive with regard to privacy. It's very physically intrusive as well.
There was also another one where you started with a planet, you could build industry on it, and ICBMs and nuke or ally with the other planets.
I believe you're thinking of "Galactiwars"
I wouldn't be surprised if I spent more time playing InFiNiTy CoMpLeX than anyone else on the planet. (Sad, I know..)
I started playing it during it's beta days on a MajorBBS system in Calgary that went by several names over the years (Viewline, The Station, The Nucleus..) I believe it debuted in that City on July 22, 1988, though it was also being tested from a slightly earlier date on a MajorBBS system in Edmonton (Canada).
It was a real-time, persistent state game with a modifiable map. It was a wacky text-based "FPS" game based heavily on the paper and pen RPG, Paranoia. Unfortunately, MajorBBS operators often complained about its instability throughout it's lifetime (it often crashed the server) and many sysops pulled it because of this.
I found it to be incredibly addictive. Because text commands given were processed by the server immediately, there wasn't really a firm "cap" as to how quickly one could move about the map. Even though descriptions of the rooms were limited to how fast they could come across your modem, your movement and other text commands would be processed as received by the server without regard to client synchronization or real world physics. Because of this, one could physically move through 50 rooms in under a second (on a 1200 baud modem), as long as you didn't care about seeing the room descriptions.
Combined with the use of client-side macros, this made for the fastest gameplay of any game I have ever played. It puts the fastest Quake games to shame. A skilled player with a solid knowledge of the (constantly evolving) map could do amazing things.
I have great memories of that game. If anybody knows where I can still get a copy of it, I'd be interested in preserving a running server of it.
- "Gnimsh", of Viewline, Calgary. Former team member of:
"Gnome Raiders" and the "Freedom Union of Commie Killers"
Yep. Several versions of gyro-mice have been around for years. I bought a Gyropoint Pro II several years ago, which is shaped like an egg, presumably to feel more natural when you're holding it in your hand. It's not made for desktop use, only handheld.
Judging from this review from 1998, my model's been around for at least four years. I originally bought it because I developed tendonitis from using my standard desktop mouse, so I was looking for alternatives that might be easier on my arm.
I found the gyro-mouse to be annoying to use, though. It doesn't have the precision of a regular mouse or trackball device, and every minute or two the pointer starts to drift in one direction. To stop the drift you have to recalibrate it by pressing a couple of buttons or setting it down for about 5 seconds.
It's not suitable for use with most applications because of these problems. Web browsing is about the only thing I'd consider using it for, and even for that purpose I find it to be not worth the bother. I don't know if the newer models work better or not.
For conference room or auditorium presentations, though, it would be great. The range that the mouse will work from the receiver is advertised at 75 feet, which seems about right--possible even a bit conservative--based on the tests I did with it when I first bought it.
I briefly considered mounting it on a helmet, with the buttons rigged to a glove. However, it turns out that your head is a lot more jittery than you might think. I couldn't keep the pointer stable using my head. I have much finer control with my hands.
And with that, they extracted from the CyberPatrol program a full and complete list of all the Web pages blocked by CyberPatrol. And they published it on the Internet ... The fact is, this has happened before, and I'm sure it's unpleasant for the filtering company. They'd rather not have this happen. But to say we're going to go out of business -- well, I don't know.
Well, it seems to me that although the companies can survive a "blip" such as the cited incident where a snapshot of their blocking list is published, I doubt they would survive if their lists were all forced permanently into the open.
It seems to me that these companies are selling the effort that's gone into compiling their lists, and compiling these lists is no doubt the bulk of their ongoing development costs. Any competent system administrator can block a list of sites at their proxy without purchasing this additional software, provided they have a list of URLs. Obviously then, it's this list of URLs and the organization/accuracy of said list that's really of value, not the blocking software itself.
Why should I spend money on them if I already have a list of sites I want blocked? I'll concede that I have never used third party blocking software, so I may be missing something here-- perhaps they also have real time filtration by context-filters rather than just "evil" URL lists.
So, yes, the companies have a lot to worry about--they could easily get pushed out of the market if their lists are forced public, but to me, this doesn't seem to me to be such a bad price to pay in the grand scheme. So what if a handful of people lose their jobs or get pushed into other areas. That's a small price to pay when you think about all the problems that open-source lists can solve. Errata or questionable blockages could be challenged and removed or re-categorized. A broader selection of blockage categories could be maintained (and selected from by parents/schoolboards/sys-admins who want to use a subset of the list). A vast army of concerned parents could be enlisted to help keep the list current by contributing new block candidates if there was a universal list.
Let the existing companies change their focus to develop more accurate context-filtration for when naughty bits get past the list, and leave the list to the global community, because the blockage list itself is an ideal case for open-source.