"Other craters on Earth we know about were created in hard rocks, whereas Silverpit would have been formed in soft underwater sediments - creating a very different shape of crater," explains Stewart.
This suggests that similar craters are found only in non-rocky places, such as Jupiters icy moons Callisto and Europa.
First of all the binary downloads of PostgreSQL don't seem to include the enterprise jdbc drivers (implementations of the interfaces in javax.sql.*) which I wanted to use to implement connection pooling in an application using jdk1.4.
Downloading the latest PostgreSQL from cvs (a few months ago) did appear to include the source for this, however they wouldn't build with jdk1.4 due to many new methods having been added to the interfaces since the implementation was last updated (and even many of those that were there will just throw an org.postgresql.Driver.notImplemented exception).
By modifying the source to add implementations of the missing methods to also throw notImplemented exceptions I have successfully built some drivers which appear to work correctly with my connection pool manager (and having since then got a proper internet connection have gathered from the mailing lists and news groups that other people have done the same thing).
The problem with this is that you no longer have a program that just works out of the box. (and building from source also entails either creating or suitably modifying some init.d scripts)
OTOH it was an educational experience, and made me seriously consider learning more about PostgreSQL and maybe trying to join the development effort (though I haven't actually done so yet, too many other things have come up)
I have also used the C++ interface, which seems to work O.K, but it is much less powerfull than the jdbc implementation could be if it were to implement some of the cool features such as writable result sets and prepared statements that the java interfaces declare (but which PostgreSQL doesn't yet implement)
However the reason for my suggestion of two keyboards was to make some (ie the middle columns), or even all, of the keys available to both hands, for those of us who don't touch type by the book
I find myself not keeping my hands in the recommended typing positions mostly because all of the symbols which form a large percentage of the source code of most computer languages would be rather uncomfortable to type, notably the }, )and Tab (if you're using emacs or anything with tab completion) characters one a qwerty keyboard which have very high frequencies in java and c++ (and the problem is even worse on a dvorak layout, which is great for typing English, but terrible for c++).
With the whole keyboard repeated, I'd be able to type like back in the bad old days of non-split keyboards and let the other hand drift over momentarily whilst typing a back-tick, Escape or a } (or worst of all a "Page Up" (well not quite the worst, when some software forces you to have to reach for the mouse.... grrrrrr)) rather than having to either stretch excessivly or wait for the correct hand to get back in place.
Using a USB keyboard solves the problem of needing some kind of ps2 Y splitter.
re: never learned to touch type... hands sort of float over the keyboard and move back and forth
I had the same problem when I got my very first split keyboard, but after a couple of weeks I mostly got used to it and am now a convert, although I do still occasionally go for the "y" key with the left hand etc., and they do slow down one-handed typing considerably (ie if you're on the phone, or using the mouse)
A trivial solution for us untrained typists would be for split keyboards to be manufactured with the middle columns of keys duplicated, so that for example both the 6 and the 7 keys would be available for both the left and the right hands. It doesn't sound like a difficult thing to do, apart from increasing the seperation of the two keyboard halfs slightly, but I've not yet seen such a device
One could try taking this to an extreme and purchase two non-split USB keyboards and use one for each hand! (If anyone has tried this I'd be interested to hear whether its worth it or not, I don't have any USB keyboards available to give it a go)
and not so common 5) rep (well its installed on my system, but I'd never heard of it, further investigation reveals it to be a standalone lisp interpretter from the librep package (see "info librep", I am indeed learning something new every day))
The first thing you need to do is to understand all the logic gates and how they work, and then work with the various logic gate chips (the 74 series) to get various simple experiments working. This will get you familiar with HOW the circuits are passing information around, as well as give you some experience with wiring the components together in a useful fashion.
Whilst you're reading up on this you'll probably find that most electronics text books include chapters on computers.
My personal favourite "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill
walks you through an example of incorporating a 68008 (I think, I haven't actually got my copy of it available at the moment) into an instrument (ie. specialized rather then general purpose computer) they construct in chapter 11.
If you want to start off really simple (think more of really simple programable calculator kind of level) then something more along the lines of a PIC 16fxx microcontroller from Microchip is a good starting point, as you can have something up and running very quickly with just a breadboard, the microcontroller and a handful of discrete components (and maybe some LED's for output) using a PC to program the device, and then slowly add to the base design with some external memory, and LCD display, a numeric keypad for input, and so on...
Get a roundabout (don't know where you buy them from, but all kids playgrounds have them....) and put it in your computer room, then mount your computer in the middle of it, and spin it up....
You should be able to get an extra 50 RPM out of it, but you might have trouble with your mouse moving due to centrifugal force...
Surely just like the ".com" tld, this is going to cause problems for both consumers and suppliers of accounting / law services with a lack of localization (if anybody takes them up on the £300 offer of course).
I think that the tld's should be reserved for global things only, e.g. java.sun.com seems good, sun is a multinational company, and the same java is used the world over. (and as a counter-example, I've seen people looking for the U.K safeway chain caught out by www.safeway.com, using the store locator and being given an address in Florida).
It does however seem a good idea for governments (or some other authority) to try to set up "authoritive" sources of information that people are more aware of, and with suitable degrees of localization.
For example if I want accurate information on Tax or benifits in the U.K, I'll start of with a google search including "site:.gov.uk", as I'm pretty sure that they don't let just anybody have a.gov.uk domain, or for non-crackpot theories of relativity, limit to "site:.ac.uk" or "site:.edu", or to find a local doctor, something under ".nhs.uk" for the national health service seems a good bet.
Back to the ".pro" idea, this is already partially implemented with for example the ".co.uk", ".com", ".ltd.uk" domains, except that:
there is not enough checking of the validity of peoples claims to them, e.g..com's and.co.uk's can be owned by anybody, not necessarily real businesses (though at least the ".ltd.uk" domain is meant to be only available to registered limited companies)
not enough people (either companies and consumers) are aware of them, so lots of companies still feel they need the ".com" domain when something else would really be far more appropriate
There are too many overlapping domains that a company or service could register in (and a global ".pro" will only add to the confusion).
Though not particularly revolutionary, creating a cloud chamber and seeing the paths of radioactive particles is really quite amazing the first time you see it.
We did this experiement during A-Level physics, with small chambers using dry ice, alcohol and some of the small alpha and beta sources that schools are allowed to use.
A quick google seach will turn up lots of instructions for making your own, for example :
although without a radioactive source you'll have to sit around and wait until some cosmic rays create some ionizing radiation that hits your experiment.
PostgreSQL also comes with some great documentation (probably the best I've yet seen with any software I've used (the only contender I can think of offhand might be the Devpac assembler on the AtariST many years ago))
(This is also of course online, e.g. the 7.1 version is up at http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.1/postgres/ , or interactivly the interactive version http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/)
So how do we encourage other projects to develop such documentation, which I assume is very time consuming and difficult, as well as being for very little reward (How often do we see posts appreciating new software features compared to those acknowleding the associated documentation?)
re:
> They're:
> | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
> | \-- Re: Foo
> \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
This highlights the problem that Email is not really the best medium for threaded discussions involving more than two people, whereas news groups are designed with exactly this in mind.
However convincing people to actually _use_ news groups is very difficult, as people don't seem to have the client software (well, for windows users Outlook Express is O.K, but for corporate users, there is no real integration of news groups in Outlook), specifically ones that give notifications of new messages arriving in threads of interest in the same way as Email notifications work.
In my previous job I tried very hard to encourage people to use internal news groups, especially for those "has anybody (fwd'd to 10 people) got any comments on this 30 page document" type messages, with not much success (not total failure, but not much success either: bizarrely the one area where it did work was in a group for each person to submit a weekly status report, even though they stimulated very little (or no) correspondance)
As an aside, the next problem after that for that case is actually getting authors to make the corrections that are suggested, my only solution to which has been to force people to put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as HTML, rather than binary /.doc files. (and also having CVS auto-update on commit every document onto an internal web server so that everybody has easy access to the current committed docs. (this is still a work in progress, so maybe I'll make a mini-howto of the system one day to explain how easy it is to set up))
Other than that, the only other problem with using news groups that I can think of is that the users cannot select an arbitrary list of receipients (it is fixed on a per-group basis, making administration a bit awkward)
Edmund.
Sorry about all the parenthesis, I fear I have a hidden desire for Lisp.
I saw that article too a year or so ago. I think it was in one of the astrophysics journals (can't find a link, anyone else out there?), though I'd have thought it would have been on slashdot too.
It really is true (if you can't upgrade the equipment whilst the calculation is underway). Say you've got a problem that would take 10 years to solve on todays computers, and computers double in power every 18 months. If you wait 36 months and then start you could finish the problem in only 5.5 years total! (the optimum time to wait with these figures is a little more, just under 40 months)
Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?
Of course, what with processor speeds increasing exponentially with time (although in this case you're looking at the rather dangerous overclocked speed, rather than the rated speed of the chip)
Now there's a great idea, we could have true 3D mice with accelerometers (With enough sensors you could detect rotation as well as lateral 3D movement). Imagine playing a flight sim (or Descent etc.) with a mouse which you could pick up off the desk and fly around like a kid with a toy plane!
We'd need to combine it with some kind of wireless technology, both so that the wire doesn't get ties up in knots and to make it even more indestructible (As well as the rolling mechanism getting gunged up or the button mechanism breaking I've seen mice fail because their leads break internally)
Although even 24fps films are perfectly watchable to the human eye, I think you need the much higher framerates when there is any kind of feedback such as in a computer game because one wants to get the latency between user input and visual feedback to as near zero as possible. Otherwise it feels laggy or jerky to play.
Even though human reaction times are something like a couple of hundred milliseconds you can still annoyingly perceive a delay of much much less than this (AFAIK, This is not my subject area at all) because you've already anticipated what you should see (particularly if you go so far as using a VR headset).
Wouldn't it help matters then if one instead soldered (or better yet welded) the heatsink on to the top of the CPU? (although it would of course be almost impossible to do without overheating and destroying the CPU).
However it might be possible to do at the manufacturing stage?
The wavelength of visible light is already larger than the feature size of current generation electronics, so if we were to move over to opto-electrical computers they would actually be a lot larger (and thus slower because of the time taken for signals to travel anywhere). However using small lasers to communicate between chips could have some potential. Also as the other reply states, any useful optical device actually involves electrons transitions anyway to provide some kind of nonlinearity (you can't build anything useful such as a NAND gate out of linear componants).
So has anybody found a URL which explains what advances IBM have actually made which makes this better than the E-Beam lithography that's been around for ages?
Edmund Green. Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory, The University of Birmingham, U.K.
Indeed, The iMac keyboard (which unfortunately I am forced to use to type this message in our office) does seem to have gone a little too far in its quest for compactness. What genius came up with the idea of saving space by losing a few of those infrequently used keys that real computer users obviously don't need, such as the 'del' key, or the hash symbol. Did they do some kind of survey and decide that these were the least used and thus best candidates to remove, whilst "±" and "" were deemed vital enough to remain?
Anyway, enough ranting from me, my serious comment is that surely the distress caused by having a keyboard that is a few centimetres larger and a few grams heavier with some redundant keys that only one user in many will want to use on the second Tuesday of each millenium is well worth it if it prevents users from wanting to tear their hair out as their scour the keyboard for that all important first character of their shell script, C programs etc. Or if it stops users from starting a hate campaign against the MS Excel help wizard when having spent 20 minutes trying to delete a legend from a graph one finally gives in and asks the wizard only to be told to 'Simply select the item to be removed and press the delete key' Sometimes those odd looking keys that I find on many keyboards turn out to be quite usefull. I have developed quite a fondness for the 'front' key on my Sun when I have a cluttered desktop, Or when using windows keyboards one can do pretty much anything without ever needing to touch the mouse, thanks to the extra keys. Once one plucks up the courage to try out those odd looking windows keys or menu keys that they have placed next to the space bar surely you will forgive the designers for shortening your space bar a little?
On a completely different note to finish off, has anybody ever put any thought into keyboard layouts for programming? I once spent (wasted?) a few months learning to type using the Dvorak keyboard layout and while I found it very nice for typing English (And yes, I think I could type faster using it), it was pretty hopeless for programming, because all those odd symbols like "[]^{}/\.|&~(and hash)" and even "+-/*()" seemind to be put in such inaccesible places as to make it quite painful to use. Has anybody done a study of the usage of the keyboard for these tasks other than word processing or spreadsheets, Whilst in these applications the opening and closing brackets for example are never used, in C++ or something they are probably on par with vowels (well almost)
Slashdot Mirror
This article on the bbc news site maybe explains a little more.
Quoting one of their paragraphs :
This suggests that similar craters are found only in non-rocky places, such as Jupiters icy moons Callisto and Europa.
I guess I had similar problems:
First of all the binary downloads of PostgreSQL don't seem to include the enterprise jdbc drivers (implementations of the interfaces in javax.sql.*) which I wanted to use to implement connection pooling in an application using jdk1.4.
Downloading the latest PostgreSQL from cvs (a few months ago) did appear to include the source for this, however they wouldn't build with jdk1.4 due to many new methods having been added to the interfaces since the implementation was last updated (and even many of those that were there will just throw an org.postgresql.Driver.notImplemented exception).
By modifying the source to add implementations of the missing methods to also throw notImplemented exceptions I have successfully built some drivers which appear to work correctly with my connection pool manager (and having since then got a proper internet connection have gathered from the mailing lists and news groups that other people have done the same thing).
The problem with this is that you no longer have a program that just works out of the box. (and building from source also entails either creating or suitably modifying some init.d scripts)
OTOH it was an educational experience, and made me seriously consider learning more about PostgreSQL and maybe trying to join the development effort (though I haven't actually done so yet, too many other things have come up)
I have also used the C++ interface, which seems to work O.K, but it is much less powerfull than the jdbc implementation could be if it were to implement some of the cool features such as writable result sets and prepared statements that the java interfaces declare (but which PostgreSQL doesn't yet implement)
I probably saw the same thing: just found it here (and google found me another page on fully split keyboards).
However the reason for my suggestion of two keyboards was to make some (ie the middle columns), or even all, of the keys available to both hands, for those of us who don't touch type by the book
I find myself not keeping my hands in the recommended typing positions mostly because all of the symbols which form a large percentage of the source code of most computer languages would be rather uncomfortable to type, notably the }, )and Tab (if you're using emacs or anything with tab completion) characters one a qwerty keyboard which have very high frequencies in java and c++ (and the problem is even worse on a dvorak layout, which is great for typing English, but terrible for c++).
With the whole keyboard repeated, I'd be able to type like back in the bad old days of non-split keyboards and let the other hand drift over momentarily whilst typing a back-tick, Escape or a } (or worst of all a "Page Up" (well not quite the worst, when some software forces you to have to reach for the mouse .... grrrrrr)) rather than having to either stretch excessivly or wait for the correct hand to get back in place.
Using a USB keyboard solves the problem of needing some kind of ps2 Y splitter.
re: ... hands sort of float over the keyboard and move back and forth
never learned to touch type
I had the same problem when I got my very first split keyboard, but after a couple of weeks I mostly got used to it and am now a convert, although I do still occasionally go for the "y" key with the left hand etc., and they do slow down one-handed typing considerably (ie if you're on the phone, or using the mouse)
A trivial solution for us untrained typists would be for split keyboards to be manufactured with the middle columns of keys duplicated, so that for example both the 6 and the 7 keys would be available for both the left and the right hands. It doesn't sound like a difficult thing to do, apart from increasing the seperation of the two keyboard halfs slightly, but I've not yet seen such a device
One could try taking this to an extreme and purchase two non-split USB keyboards and use one for each hand! (If anyone has tried this I'd be interested to hear whether its worth it or not, I don't have any USB keyboards available to give it a go)
common utilities
1) tar
2) ar
3) grep
4) ps
and not so common
5) rep (well its installed on my system, but I'd never heard of it, further investigation reveals it to be a standalone lisp interpretter from the librep package (see "info librep", I am indeed learning something new every day))
Whilst you're reading up on this you'll probably find that most electronics text books include chapters on computers.
My personal favourite "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill walks you through an example of incorporating a 68008 (I think, I haven't actually got my copy of it available at the moment) into an instrument (ie. specialized rather then general purpose computer) they construct in chapter 11.
If you want to start off really simple (think more of really simple programable calculator kind of level) then something more along the lines of a PIC 16fxx microcontroller from Microchip is a good starting point, as you can have something up and running very quickly with just a breadboard, the microcontroller and a handful of discrete components (and maybe some LED's for output) using a PC to program the device, and then slowly add to the base design with some external memory, and LCD display, a numeric keypad for input, and so on ...
The Dinorwig pump storage station in Wales.
I'd guess that hyrdogen cells have an even faster startup time than the claimed 12 seconds of Dinorwig though
Get a roundabout (don't know where you buy them from, but all kids playgrounds have them....) and put it in your computer room, then mount your computer in the middle of it, and spin it up ....
You should be able to get an extra 50 RPM out of it, but you might have trouble with your mouse moving due to centrifugal force...
Surely just like the ".com" tld, this is going to cause problems for both consumers and suppliers of accounting / law services with a lack of localization (if anybody takes them up on the £300 offer of course).
I think that the tld's should be reserved for global things only, e.g. java.sun.com seems good, sun is a multinational company, and the same java is used the world over. (and as a counter-example, I've seen people looking for the U.K safeway chain caught out by www.safeway.com, using the store locator and being given an address in Florida).
It does however seem a good idea for governments (or some other authority) to try to set up "authoritive" sources of information that people are more aware of, and with suitable degrees of localization.
For example if I want accurate information on Tax or benifits in the U.K, I'll start of with a google search including "site: .gov.uk", as I'm pretty sure that they don't let just anybody have a .gov.uk domain, or for non-crackpot theories of relativity, limit to "site: .ac.uk" or "site: .edu", or to find a local doctor, something under ".nhs.uk" for the national health service seems a good bet.
Back to the ".pro" idea, this is already partially implemented with for example the ".co.uk", ".com", ".ltd.uk" domains, except that:
Though not particularly revolutionary, creating a cloud chamber and seeing the paths of radioactive particles is really quite amazing the first time you see it.
We did this experiement during A-Level physics, with small chambers using dry ice, alcohol and some of the small alpha and beta sources that schools are allowed to use.
A quick google seach will turn up lots of instructions for making your own, for example :
- some instructions from cornell
- or an article from Scientific America
although without a radioactive source you'll have to sit around and wait until some cosmic rays create some ionizing radiation that hits your experiment.PostgreSQL also comes with some great documentation (probably the best I've yet seen with any software I've used (the only contender I can think of offhand might be the Devpac assembler on the AtariST many years ago))1 /postgres/ , or interactivly the interactive version http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/)
(This is also of course online, e.g. the 7.1 version is up at http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.
So how do we encourage other projects to develop such documentation, which I assume is very time consuming and difficult, as well as being for very little reward (How often do we see posts appreciating new software features compared to those acknowleding the associated documentation?)
re:
.doc files. (and also having CVS auto-update on commit every document onto an internal web server so that everybody has easy access to the current committed docs. (this is still a work in progress, so maybe I'll make a mini-howto of the system one day to explain how easy it is to set up))
> They're:
> | Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> |--| Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
> | \--| Foo (was: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa)
> | \-- Re: Foo
> \-- Re: Bla Wibble Wobble Wa
This highlights the problem that Email is not really the best medium for threaded discussions involving more than two people, whereas news groups are designed with exactly this in mind.
However convincing people to actually _use_ news groups is very difficult, as people don't seem to have the client software (well, for windows users Outlook Express is O.K, but for corporate users, there is no real integration of news groups in Outlook), specifically ones that give notifications of new messages arriving in threads of interest in the same way as Email notifications work.
In my previous job I tried very hard to encourage people to use internal news groups, especially for those "has anybody (fwd'd to 10 people) got any comments on this 30 page document" type messages, with not much success (not total failure, but not much success either: bizarrely the one area where it did work was in a group for each person to submit a weekly status report, even though they stimulated very little (or no) correspondance)
As an aside, the next problem after that for that case is actually getting authors to make the corrections that are suggested, my only solution to which has been to force people to put documents in CVS instead, prefereably as HTML, rather than binary /
Other than that, the only other problem with using news groups that I can think of is that the users cannot select an arbitrary list of receipients (it is fixed on a per-group basis, making administration a bit awkward)
Edmund.
Sorry about all the parenthesis, I fear I have a hidden desire for Lisp.
I saw that article too a year or so ago. I think it was in one of the astrophysics journals (can't find a link, anyone else out there?), though I'd have thought it would have been on slashdot too.
It really is true (if you can't upgrade the equipment whilst the calculation is underway). Say you've got a problem that would take 10 years to solve on todays computers, and computers double in power every 18 months. If you wait 36 months and then start you could finish the problem in only 5.5 years total! (the optimum time to wait with these figures is a little more, just under 40 months)
A quick look at DABS reveals that one can at least order 128MB sticks here in the U.K. for the princely sum of but £280.82 after V.A.T.
The wording of your question however is almost begging for someone to reply with some rather unsavoury trollish links though isn't it?
Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?
Of course, what with processor speeds increasing exponentially with time (although in this case you're looking at the rather dangerous overclocked speed, rather than the rated speed of the chip)
Now there's a great idea, we could have true 3D mice with accelerometers (With enough sensors you could detect rotation as well as lateral 3D movement). Imagine playing a flight sim (or Descent etc.) with a mouse which you could pick up off the desk and fly around like a kid with a toy plane!
We'd need to combine it with some kind of wireless technology, both so that the wire doesn't get ties up in knots and to make it even more indestructible (As well as the rolling mechanism getting gunged up or the button mechanism breaking I've seen mice fail because their leads break internally)
Its no problem making the file longer (I've just tested this), do something like:
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=10000 >> mymusicfile.mp3
to make the file 10000 bytes longer for example.
Although even 24fps films are perfectly watchable to the human eye, I think you need the much higher framerates when there is any kind of feedback such as in a computer game because one wants to get the latency between user input and visual feedback to as near zero as possible. Otherwise it feels laggy or jerky to play.
Even though human reaction times are something like a couple of hundred milliseconds you can still annoyingly perceive a delay of much much less than this (AFAIK, This is not my subject area at all) because you've already anticipated what you should see (particularly if you go so far as using a VR headset).
Edmund Green.
Wouldn't it help matters then if one instead soldered (or better yet welded) the heatsink on to the top of the CPU? (although it would of course be almost impossible to do without overheating and destroying the CPU).
However it might be possible to do at the manufacturing stage?
thoughts/flames welcome.
Edmund.
The wavelength of visible light is already larger than the feature size of current generation electronics, so if we were to move over to opto-electrical computers they would actually be a lot larger (and thus slower because of the time taken for signals to travel anywhere). However using small lasers to communicate between chips could have some potential.
Also as the other reply states, any useful optical device actually involves electrons transitions anyway to provide some kind of nonlinearity (you can't build anything useful such as a NAND gate out of linear componants).
So has anybody found a URL which explains what advances IBM have actually made which makes this better than the E-Beam lithography that's been around for ages?
Edmund Green.
Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory, The University of Birmingham, U.K.
Indeed, The iMac keyboard (which unfortunately I am forced to use to type this message in our office) does seem to have gone a little too far in its quest for compactness.
What genius came up with the idea of saving space by losing a few of those infrequently used keys that real computer users obviously don't need, such as the 'del' key, or the hash symbol. Did they do some kind of survey and decide that these were the least used and thus best candidates to remove, whilst "±" and "" were deemed vital enough to remain?
Anyway, enough ranting from me, my serious comment is that surely the distress caused by having a keyboard that is a few centimetres larger and a few grams heavier with some redundant keys that only one user in many will want to use on the second Tuesday of each millenium is well worth it if it prevents users from wanting to tear their hair out as their scour the keyboard for that all important first character of their shell script, C programs etc. Or if it stops users from starting a hate campaign against the MS Excel help wizard when having spent 20 minutes trying to delete a legend from a graph one finally gives in and asks the wizard only to be told to 'Simply select the item to be removed and press the delete key'
Sometimes those odd looking keys that I find on many keyboards turn out to be quite usefull. I have developed quite a fondness for the 'front' key on my Sun when I have a cluttered desktop, Or when using windows keyboards one can do pretty much anything without ever needing to touch the mouse, thanks to the extra keys. Once one plucks up the courage to try out those odd looking windows keys or menu keys that they have placed next to the space bar surely you will forgive the designers for shortening your space bar a little?
On a completely different note to finish off, has anybody ever put any thought into keyboard layouts for programming? I once spent (wasted?) a few months learning to type using the Dvorak keyboard layout and while I found it very nice for typing English (And yes, I think I could type faster using it), it was pretty hopeless for programming, because all those odd symbols like "[]^{}/\.|&~(and hash)" and even "+-/*()" seemind to be put in such inaccesible places as to make it quite painful to use. Has anybody done a study of the usage of the keyboard for these tasks other than word processing or spreadsheets, Whilst in these applications the opening and closing brackets for example are never used, in C++ or something they are probably on par with vowels (well almost)