The problem is the material dictates much of the design. For FTIR to function, the curvature of the clear material must be such that the angle of refraction causes the light inside it to bounce back from the surface internally instead of escaping, like a superball in a narrow hallway. This means you need both a material with a high refractive index (i.e. Poly Methyl MethAcrylate aka Lucite/Plexiglas) and a shape that propigates the light beam. This then will dicate the overall design of the mouse.
Which means features such as handedness ergonomics will be difficult to do with this design. All the existing designs on the market would need to be modified to accomodate it. The process and materials involved in attaching the lightpipe to the base may not be easy or cheap. The shape they use at least in this demo will have issues with the front wanting to drag from the low area of contact with the desk relative to the pressure. And since it's a brittle material, I'm betting that thin arch with nothing supporting it will crack from stress as it ages, rendering the mouse useless in a much shorter time than users fine satisfactory.
Buy an acrylic cup from the supermarket and use it. See how long it takes it to develop the first cracks. Now assume any crack over 1mm will cause a diffraction of the light beam rendering the whole thing useless. I'm betting an optimistic 6 month product life is not ideal for a mouse.
Oh and the fad for "green" everything will hate it, since PMMA takes twice its weight in petroleum to produce.
Ok, I did. The FTIR seems to have this issue, so does the side mouse. The orb clearly DOES NOT, as you can see from the sensor image that his fingers are on it most of the time. The cap mouse is tricky to tell due to the video length and quality but if you look at 2:24 it seems like his fingers are on it while moving the pointer to the window before clicking to drag, just like a regular mouse. Arty also does not have this issue.
Now, please go and actually use a touchpad. They work like I've described. The hovering finger problem can be solved in drivers by coding for differential activation. Which behavior do you think will be in a final product, the one that's in a lab prototype that causes discomfort, or the one that's been an established industry standard for a decade?
I just realized something. If the "orb" mouse becomes common, it's going to need a tactile indicator for hand alignment. Like the little raised bumps keyboards usually have on the home keys so you can find the default position by feel.
If it doesn't get named the boob mouse after that, I'll eat one.
Not true. Put your finger on a touchpad and hold it there. Does the mouse move continuously? Does it continually click from the double-tap function?
No, because it works on a differential. So resting your fingers on the mouse as normal is fine. There may be a bit of an issue about registering clicks, which will take either pressure sensitivity at a basic (binary) level, or a change in user habits to lift the mouse and put it down again as the click action instead of the reverse.
But I think most likely some smart manufacturer will just put the capacitive surface over existing mouse buttons, which are wired to their normal function. People will still want the tactile click feedback, and this does not impair the functionality of the capacitive surface.
If there's no reason the choice must be exclusive, then the choice will be both.
Nope, there have been keyboards with trackpads for quite a long time now. Also, how are sales of USB trackpads for desktops? I remember buying a 9 pin serial port based one back when they just came out and were the hot new things. But I found it wasn't all that great.
The main reason I don't see touchpads taking over desktops is a simple one. A touchpad requires you to use fingers for both positioning AND clicking. It's an overloaded operation. What was one of the earliest improvements to touchpad design? The ability to tap to emulate a left click. Because it's a royal pain to position with fingers and click with the thumb, it makes common operations like dragging difficult and imprecise. Then throw in scrollwheel functionality and ugh! The reason it flourishes in laptops is because it doesn't require any space to operate, and most people wouldn't use a laptop they couldn't use on a lap. The eraser nub mice lost out because their control precision was even worse than the touchpad.
If people aren't buying aftermarket touchpads for their desktops in significant numbers let alone more than mice, I don't see the evidence for an actual user preference of the touchpad over the mouse. The market's had more than long enough for that kind of bias to assert itself and it hasn't.
The natural extension of multi-button mania is infinite buttons, i.e. a continuous surface. So is it a surprise that it's come to this?
I agree that the flat panel to mouse mapping may be akward since the mouse isn't flat. It's the main reason I favor the orb-shape on they showed, since it's got its own potential for a lot of interesting things, and has enough area that you could fit a lot of control functionality on it. But I think it will lose out on appeal and cost. I'd love it if at least one gets to market though, it looks like someone took the old SpaceOrb controller and did it right.
Yes but it's easy to compensate for the motor control by reducing mouse sensitivity. In general I find people who opt for the finger controlled mouse posture are used to needing to vary sensitivity to perform precise tasks (like CAD or sniping in games). Before the advent of mice with adjustable resolution controls, the only really practical way to change sensitivity was the analog one - to use arm movements for the big changes and fingers for the fine tuning. The opposing pressure to this was in the cases where people valued access to higher numbers of buttons over adjustable precision control, resulting in a different mouse holding posture that emphasises functionality at the exexpense of precision.
It's pretty easy to change mouse sensitivity to adjust for finer control, especially on modern mice. It's really hard to grow extra fingers to push more buttons. Therefore it's possible for one of these systems to compensate for its lack (by adding sensitivity controls on the mouse), but the reverse is not true. So I'm predicting you and the other guy will be in the minority on this since younger users tend to be more comfortable with extra buttons than us fossils who grew up with 2 and 3 button mice with cords and balls.
There are two general classes of mouse posture: finger-based and palm-based. There's also the "claw" one, which people contend the standard finger based posture is a subset of just less optimal for clicking response time. There's a heated contention between them among gamers who take things like this too seriously. Razer designs mice to fit the various styles, which they describe in their ergonomics guide: http://www2.razerzone.com/MouseGuide/html/palmgrip.php
Some people prefer to use the fingers for fine motor control, as you mention. Others prefer to just use a lower sensitivity and arm motion for positioning, freeing up finger control for more buttons. These inventions aren't aiming at a specific ergonomic target, they're adding functionality. If anything, a prevalence of multi-touch support in the future will dictate the common mouse holding posture, and I suspect you may be in for some grumbling about it for the forseeable future as it does not fit your natural tendency.
Your kids will wonder how the hell you can hold a mouse like that and still use it though.
Well change seems inevitable because developers want the same multi-touch apps for all the new phones to work on desktops without redoing the interface. So the PC is going to need multitouch. So either the screen goes multitouch (which it has in some cases), or the input devices do. Since touchscreens have issues with things like smearing and comfort distance, that leaves the interface devices. Multitouch pads have been done, but most people still prefer mice. They're more precise due to the size of the working area, and easier for certain tasks like dragging because of the extra degrees of freedom on the arm/elbow which frees up the fingers for clicking instead of overloading them for both position and input.
Of these candidates, the cap mouse is most likely to win out, followed by the orb mouse, which may see a competing run in the high end. Why? Let's see:
FTIR mouse: This is basically an internal reflecting material like a lightpipe or fiberoptic cable. The problem is it limits the mouse because it requires this kind of material (think the demo uses acrylic), and design such that the camera can always see it. The shape has poor balance, CG, and drag properties, and will probably result in breaking or issues sliding for many people. The restrictions to mouse design will annoy existing manufacturers, unlike say optical sensors, which were just drop in replacements for mouse balls.
Articulated mouse (Arty): Not happening, for a simple reason - people won't want to readjust to left/right click being thumb/forefinger instead of index/middle. It sounds stupid, but believe me it will be a showstopper. Plus the design is a bit fragile, and I'm not sure on the ergonomics of having to extend the finger and thumb like that, seems like an RSI issue waiting to happen.
Side mouse: This has some potential, but it will be plagued by unintentional inputs. Any time you drum your fingers impatiently, drop a pen on the desk, move the camera too close to something sitting on the desk, it will go nuts. It might be useful in cases where you can't build a touchpad into a device, but in most of those cases the device is so small you want to hold it not rest it on a desk anyway, so there'd be no surface for the side mouse to track on.
Now for the showdown between the two serious contenders.
Orb mouse: Really nice input image. Can easily do a variety of applications with it, since there's so much area. Datacenters sometimes use illuminated vein pattern recognition for biometrics, which can be efficiently integrated with this, and it's a better solution than those stupid touchpad fingerprint readers. But for more conventional apps it's got the most area, the best shape to exploit the use of all fingers, and in deference to the mention of clock-based positioning on the Gizmodo article about it, will probably be the easiest for people to extend thinking to. The main showstoppers are cost (not sure) and bulk/shape issues. People may not find the bulgy shape appealing though I suspect it will test well with male audiences.
Cap mouse: Probably going to win, despite the low resolution sensor image. Why? That "$1 gesture recognition" on the video says it all. Not the gesture support part, the $1 part. Cost wise it's probably cheapest, and it seemed to work sufficient for the apps in the demo. It's also just a bolt-on to existing mouse designs. No need to modify the existing shape or ergonomics to accommodate it, which means it's the path of least resistance. If it's also the path of least cost, which given most of the rest need a camera-quality sensor it most likely is, then the winner seems pretty obvious.
No, they dislike it, but much less than the average human male heterosexual.
No, we like it as much as the average human male heterosexual, which is to say more than the average female heterosexual due to anatomical differences (see prostate). The primary difference is we've accepted or adapted to the implied dominance association males struggle to divorce from sexual acts (much like how women attach love to sexual acts), so we're not afraid that having someone do something that feels so nice somehow makes us inferior. Secure heterosexual males generally enjoy the same kind of stimulation from their partners but few seem to ever get over their hangups, despite the high percentage that "experiment" early on. Many wind up seeking it out secretly on the side, usually on craigslist.
How bout the 4.0Ghz Core 2 Duo I paid $10 for last month?
No really, Newegg was selling E5200s for $10 extra on bundle with a Lexmark X4850, and I needed a printer. So hey, $10 CPU, how bad can it be? So I throw it in a P45 board and shake some DDR2 out of the box o random dimms, and it turns out it really likes 12x333 at stock voltage with a cheap heatsink. Since the board supports the 333/1333fsb officially, the rest of it runs at stock speeds like ddr2 1066. Prime95 and HyperPi run all day without crashing so I figure it's good.
Not sure exactly what Mr. Single Core is doing wrong, but I would think anyone who could afford the cameras for a REDOne setup would be able to afford a big GPU accelerated setup for their HD rendering and not worry so much about CPUs anymore.
I found DMT did not produce any of those effects for me personally. Instead in my case it disabled my synaesthesia for about 15 minutes or so. This was extremely disconcerting at first but once I understood the effect a bit better (and realized I was still breathing despite not receiving the normal feedback from my lungs) it was more interesting than alarming.
While I'd been aware that I have multiple forms of synaesthesia, ranging from the common ones like grapheme-color, to more rare like lexical-gustatory, to just outright weird like numeric-topology, there were quite a few more subtle ones I hadn't taken into account. Some standouts in particular were synaesthesic mixes from channels like emotional state, internal sense (from organs), facial recognition, and temperature. It can be a hard thing to explain because to me that's just how the world is.
Before I saw a documentary on it in my 20s I thought everyone experienced things this way. Then I learned otherwise. After experiencing things without it for a little while, I feel kinda bad for everyone else. But on a positive note, I was able to understand how I was generating social anxiety in a feedback loop (emotional-visual overlay with complex things like facial recognition bias) and haven't needed anything for anxiety since the experience with DMT.
Having dealt with the very specific headache of having to use and modify an FFT function before, one problem that is difficult to avoid is the fact that most coders who write math libraries and things like FFT functions tend to write them in math terminology. I.e. there are lots and lots and lots of confusing little single letter variables that are obvious in purpose to a math major (or someone who's done the math for engineering/physics/CS) but completely obscure to anyone else. Sometimes x or w or n or k as a variable choice is just a lazy programmer. Other times it's mathematically significant. And if you don't have the experience to know it's the latter and not the former, especially since many math programmers are very lazy about documentation since they assume everyone will either know the math or go look up the math, it can turn into a real headache real fast. And if you're somehow in the position of having to deal with functions written by programmers from different scientific disciplines (math + physics for example) you can just forget about consistent and descriptive variable naming. Because to them a single letter IS descriptive and not obscure at all, but to anyone else it's not, and the systems are not consistent to each other (too few letters for that).
No, the problem is that EA made a game out of a tool. Granted they picked the best person possible for doing this (Will Wright), but the fact remains that Spore was an R&D testbed for next-generation user and procedural content generation systems, and not a game.
I'm pretty sure that Spore started off as the Creature Editor on someone's desktop at EA and they showed their boss how they'd made "3D Studio Max For 8-Year-Olds." Which granted is a phenomenal achievement. I'll gladly give them credit for making a tool that is an absolute triumph of technology overcoming complexity and making advanced computing accessible to the mainstream. But it's not a game.
So after seeing this fantastic tool, EA calls in "That guy who made the awesome tool-based games." i.e., Will Wright, and said "Ok we're going to throw an entire game worth of money at R&D on these new tools, because they'll let us make all our other games in the future far cheaper (and we can fire all the redundant texture artists and animators). But to justify it we need it to become a game. So your job is to make these tools into a game, so that users will buy it and beta test it before we use it seriously in a real game."
This is why Spore got delayed and delayed and delayed and "reworked because it just isn't fun according to testers." Wright basically promoted it as Sim Earth 2.0 and tossed in the rest of his bag of tricks and I would say did a reasonably good job at making a boring production tool into a fun game. But you can see the rough edges (city/civ stage is laughably simplistic for example) on it where the game was kinda pasted into the gaps between tools. And just to make people not feel cheated they were nice enough to throw an entire mediocre real game (the space stage a.k.a. Sim Earth 2.0: Sim Earth In Reverse) on top so it feels like you actually played something instead of just designing content for them.
So gee think I'm surprised that suddenly they're outsourcing the API interface testing to the mainstream as a "contest" too?
But to be fair, EA sees the production costs of games skyrocketing, and they knew something would have to be done sooner or later. That "something" is likely to be procedural asset generation and user content generation, and everyone in the industry knows that's where the time and money bottlenecks are, asset and content generation. So producing something like the modeling, texture, and animation systems Spore first means they're a generation ahead of their competitors.
P.S. I still love Spore, but I also still wish for a more technical Sim Earth 2.0. At least he was smart to put the hard part (terraforming) at the end this time instead of the beginning like it was in Sim Earth though.
Wow, you mean MS actually has one up on Apple for once? Needy windows (like new IMs) flash on the taskbar a few times and then become the solid "attention orange" if you ignore them. I only wish the name of the user/title of the window on the taskbar icon would change to reflect which one has updated last, rather that which one I interacted with last (i.e. sometimes it looks like someone has messaged but it's really another user's window in the group). I'm not sure if this falls upon the application (Pidgin, Google Talk) or the OS to update that info, since I don't know if the attention code just needs to be updated to change to the title of the updated window displayed on the taskbar as the representation for a group, or if it's actually the application deciding what to show in the taskbar.
Here's my most frequently bitched about UI complaint:
18. Faster access to High Performance power plan
Clicking on the battery flout from the taskbar notification area offers two different power plans: Balanced and Power saver. Windows 7 laptops are configured by default to use the Balanced plan since this setting best balances a good experience while promoting more environmentally friendly power use. However, some customers tell us they want to be able to quickly toggle between Balanced and High Performance (yet another power plan). Weâ(TM)ve taken a change to now show the latter in the flyout menu when it is enabled under the Power Options Control Panel.
This has been perhaps my biggest complaint (which goes to show you something) about Win7 beta on my laptop (Acer Aspire 6930). It takes 2 clicks to switch from high performance or power saver to balanced. But to switch from high performance to power saver or vice-versa takes 5. For no good reason. It involves clicking the taskbar icon, opening a window for "more power options", clicking "show additional plans" despite ample room to show the third plan, clicking the selection button, then closing the window. 5 clicks vs 2, because we can't handle a third power choice? I'm glad someone is awake over there.
And here's probably my second most bitched about UI complaint:
33. Reviving familiar entry points
Mando writes, âoeIn Win7 the Win+E shortcut opens an explorer window but the path is âoeLibrariesâ instead (which isnâ(TM)t where I want to go most of the time). Is there a way to configure the target folder of âoeWin+Eâ or is there an alternate shortcut that will get me to the âoeComputerâ path like it did in Vista?â RC reverts the behavior and now the shortcut will launch the âoeComputerâ Explorer. Also, we changed the link in Start Menu -> Username to match the Vista behavior.
Customers informed us that sometimes their audio streams did not properly move from the default speakers to their headphones. The fix required an update to the algorithm we use to detect new devices. In RC the transition works more reliably.
Most of the rest of the stuff sounds pretty good too. I'll admit I've been a bit skeptical about this whole pinning things on taskbar which is now also the quicklaunch at the same time type deal. Mostly because I'm used to all my quicklaunch apps being on the left and not having to hunt between open apps to launch a new one. But that win-# shortcut sounds like it will justify the whole deal for me, so I will withdraw my complaint on it pending testing of that feature.
#1: Acer Aspire 6930 bought on post-xmas sale from Staples. Core 2 Duo T5800, 4GB DDR2 667, 250GB SATA HD, Integrated Intel 4500MHD, Intel 5100 wireless.
Problems: Sometimes audio driver doesn't automatically detect headphones plugged in and switch speaker output to headphone jack. Oh and HDMI audio may have the same issue if turned on while hooked to a TV that's off.
#2: Piece of Junk (literally) desktop. Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 3.63GHz on Asus P5B, 2GB DDR2 1066, ATI HD4850, 400GB SATA HD.
Problems: None.
#3: Toshiba Portige 4010 (So old it came with Windows 2000 installed because XP wasn't even out yet): Intel Pentium III mobile 933MHz Low Voltage, 512MB RAM, 30GB IDE HD, Intel 2200BG wireless, Ali integrated video and MB chipset from hell.
Problems: Newest Video driver for integrated Trident Blade3D (DX7 class) video is circa 2002. Windows 7 build 7000 automatically detects the install issues and retries with compatibility settings and succeeds. The driver works, except when it tries to create an overlay surface it locks up. This is not a bluescreen, the chipset actually freaks out because it's crap and the driver is badly written. Same issue under XP (which the driver was written for) on this machine. Using the video in SVGA mode solves the crash problem but is too slow for video playback. Fine for browsing and word processing though.
Performance is slow, but usable on a 9 year old laptop. Checking memory usage with the default install of "Ultimate" edition using Win7's Resource Monitor shows it defaults to only using about 300MB of RAM, leaving about 200+ free for apps and cache. This is with all the bloated defaults running like Homegroup services etc. Despite the fact that it's still beta, it fares much better than Vista and I say even on par with XP in terms of running within limited resources, while delivering more features than XP.
So yeah, color me impressed. No it's not going to render Toy Story in realtime on a 386 with EGA while making toast and finding Sarah Conner, but still that's a decade old laptop (which means it's a steaming turd of proprietary crap) and Win7 is still usable on it, without a week of fiddling with settings first. Considering MS is talking about "Netbook versions" of Win7 I'd say there's definitely a chance of them producing a contender for the lower-spec hardware out there that fares much much better than Vista did.
Umm... and that's relevant how? "Fabrication process" isn't a valid object for future speculation? How about FTA:
"claiming that the process will enable the production of smaller, more powerful and energy-efficient devices "
Will enable? Not does enable? Now enables? Has enabled?
How about "unveiled their fabrication process"? Oh wait it's "unveiled their strategy" for the fabrication process. Not the same thing.
The entire thing is future tense. It's not out yet. Hence why I compared it to other things which are also not out yet. When does the article say this 22nm process will be out? Oh wait, it doesn't! It just says that Intel plans to have 32nm out in 2009, and then something about how "chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations" without really anything to back that claim up.
You seem to be the only one who missed "strategy to produce future chips" in the first line up there, and "'Computational scaling' will allow future production of 22nm circuits." at the start of the actual linked article.
Where exactly did they say this was in production?
What a joke of an article. Every semiconductor manufacturer has several generations of process in various states in the lab. Woo IBM's showing sneak peaks at 22nm!
I met with an Intel VP for an interview a while back and talked about where things are going. He had some nice lab-pr0n of what the photos claimed were 11nm transistors. I believe it was said that was "about 15 years out", and meant to offer reassurance that Moore's Law still had a bit more time left to go.
Actually here, let me go dig up my transcript so I can get a proper quote:
You're going to see that platforms are going to continue to evolve. We're moving to a faster cadence. The processor cadence is about a two year cadence, in terms of process technologies. By the way this is interesting. We know how to do Moore's Law for about another fifteen years which we've never had that kind of length of projection before....it sort of takes 3D transistors and all that, but we know how to do these things. It's all using standard silicon, it's CMOS it's extraordinarily well charictarized right? But we've got transistors running at 11 nanometers, I can show you photographs of them. We have the leakage issues but we've got a very good plan.
That was 2 years ago, early October 2006. Who leapfrogged what now?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the material dictates much of the design. For FTIR to function, the curvature of the clear material must be such that the angle of refraction causes the light inside it to bounce back from the surface internally instead of escaping, like a superball in a narrow hallway. This means you need both a material with a high refractive index (i.e. Poly Methyl MethAcrylate aka Lucite/Plexiglas) and a shape that propigates the light beam. This then will dicate the overall design of the mouse.
Which means features such as handedness ergonomics will be difficult to do with this design. All the existing designs on the market would need to be modified to accomodate it. The process and materials involved in attaching the lightpipe to the base may not be easy or cheap. The shape they use at least in this demo will have issues with the front wanting to drag from the low area of contact with the desk relative to the pressure. And since it's a brittle material, I'm betting that thin arch with nothing supporting it will crack from stress as it ages, rendering the mouse useless in a much shorter time than users fine satisfactory.
Buy an acrylic cup from the supermarket and use it. See how long it takes it to develop the first cracks. Now assume any crack over 1mm will cause a diffraction of the light beam rendering the whole thing useless. I'm betting an optimistic 6 month product life is not ideal for a mouse.
Oh and the fad for "green" everything will hate it, since PMMA takes twice its weight in petroleum to produce.
Ok, I did. The FTIR seems to have this issue, so does the side mouse. The orb clearly DOES NOT, as you can see from the sensor image that his fingers are on it most of the time. The cap mouse is tricky to tell due to the video length and quality but if you look at 2:24 it seems like his fingers are on it while moving the pointer to the window before clicking to drag, just like a regular mouse. Arty also does not have this issue.
Now, please go and actually use a touchpad. They work like I've described. The hovering finger problem can be solved in drivers by coding for differential activation. Which behavior do you think will be in a final product, the one that's in a lab prototype that causes discomfort, or the one that's been an established industry standard for a decade?
I just realized something. If the "orb" mouse becomes common, it's going to need a tactile indicator for hand alignment. Like the little raised bumps keyboards usually have on the home keys so you can find the default position by feel.
If it doesn't get named the boob mouse after that, I'll eat one.
Not true. Put your finger on a touchpad and hold it there. Does the mouse move continuously? Does it continually click from the double-tap function?
No, because it works on a differential. So resting your fingers on the mouse as normal is fine. There may be a bit of an issue about registering clicks, which will take either pressure sensitivity at a basic (binary) level, or a change in user habits to lift the mouse and put it down again as the click action instead of the reverse.
But I think most likely some smart manufacturer will just put the capacitive surface over existing mouse buttons, which are wired to their normal function. People will still want the tactile click feedback, and this does not impair the functionality of the capacitive surface.
If there's no reason the choice must be exclusive, then the choice will be both.
Nope, there have been keyboards with trackpads for quite a long time now. Also, how are sales of USB trackpads for desktops? I remember buying a 9 pin serial port based one back when they just came out and were the hot new things. But I found it wasn't all that great.
The main reason I don't see touchpads taking over desktops is a simple one. A touchpad requires you to use fingers for both positioning AND clicking. It's an overloaded operation. What was one of the earliest improvements to touchpad design? The ability to tap to emulate a left click. Because it's a royal pain to position with fingers and click with the thumb, it makes common operations like dragging difficult and imprecise. Then throw in scrollwheel functionality and ugh! The reason it flourishes in laptops is because it doesn't require any space to operate, and most people wouldn't use a laptop they couldn't use on a lap. The eraser nub mice lost out because their control precision was even worse than the touchpad.
If people aren't buying aftermarket touchpads for their desktops in significant numbers let alone more than mice, I don't see the evidence for an actual user preference of the touchpad over the mouse. The market's had more than long enough for that kind of bias to assert itself and it hasn't.
The natural extension of multi-button mania is infinite buttons, i.e. a continuous surface. So is it a surprise that it's come to this?
I agree that the flat panel to mouse mapping may be akward since the mouse isn't flat. It's the main reason I favor the orb-shape on they showed, since it's got its own potential for a lot of interesting things, and has enough area that you could fit a lot of control functionality on it. But I think it will lose out on appeal and cost. I'd love it if at least one gets to market though, it looks like someone took the old SpaceOrb controller and did it right.
Yes but it's easy to compensate for the motor control by reducing mouse sensitivity. In general I find people who opt for the finger controlled mouse posture are used to needing to vary sensitivity to perform precise tasks (like CAD or sniping in games). Before the advent of mice with adjustable resolution controls, the only really practical way to change sensitivity was the analog one - to use arm movements for the big changes and fingers for the fine tuning. The opposing pressure to this was in the cases where people valued access to higher numbers of buttons over adjustable precision control, resulting in a different mouse holding posture that emphasises functionality at the exexpense of precision.
It's pretty easy to change mouse sensitivity to adjust for finer control, especially on modern mice. It's really hard to grow extra fingers to push more buttons. Therefore it's possible for one of these systems to compensate for its lack (by adding sensitivity controls on the mouse), but the reverse is not true. So I'm predicting you and the other guy will be in the minority on this since younger users tend to be more comfortable with extra buttons than us fossils who grew up with 2 and 3 button mice with cords and balls.
There are two general classes of mouse posture: finger-based and palm-based. There's also the "claw" one, which people contend the standard finger based posture is a subset of just less optimal for clicking response time. There's a heated contention between them among gamers who take things like this too seriously. Razer designs mice to fit the various styles, which they describe in their ergonomics guide: http://www2.razerzone.com/MouseGuide/html/palmgrip.php
Some people prefer to use the fingers for fine motor control, as you mention. Others prefer to just use a lower sensitivity and arm motion for positioning, freeing up finger control for more buttons. These inventions aren't aiming at a specific ergonomic target, they're adding functionality. If anything, a prevalence of multi-touch support in the future will dictate the common mouse holding posture, and I suspect you may be in for some grumbling about it for the forseeable future as it does not fit your natural tendency.
Your kids will wonder how the hell you can hold a mouse like that and still use it though.
Well change seems inevitable because developers want the same multi-touch apps for all the new phones to work on desktops without redoing the interface. So the PC is going to need multitouch. So either the screen goes multitouch (which it has in some cases), or the input devices do. Since touchscreens have issues with things like smearing and comfort distance, that leaves the interface devices. Multitouch pads have been done, but most people still prefer mice. They're more precise due to the size of the working area, and easier for certain tasks like dragging because of the extra degrees of freedom on the arm/elbow which frees up the fingers for clicking instead of overloading them for both position and input.
Of these candidates, the cap mouse is most likely to win out, followed by the orb mouse, which may see a competing run in the high end. Why? Let's see:
FTIR mouse: This is basically an internal reflecting material like a lightpipe or fiberoptic cable. The problem is it limits the mouse because it requires this kind of material (think the demo uses acrylic), and design such that the camera can always see it. The shape has poor balance, CG, and drag properties, and will probably result in breaking or issues sliding for many people. The restrictions to mouse design will annoy existing manufacturers, unlike say optical sensors, which were just drop in replacements for mouse balls.
Articulated mouse (Arty): Not happening, for a simple reason - people won't want to readjust to left/right click being thumb/forefinger instead of index/middle. It sounds stupid, but believe me it will be a showstopper. Plus the design is a bit fragile, and I'm not sure on the ergonomics of having to extend the finger and thumb like that, seems like an RSI issue waiting to happen.
Side mouse: This has some potential, but it will be plagued by unintentional inputs. Any time you drum your fingers impatiently, drop a pen on the desk, move the camera too close to something sitting on the desk, it will go nuts. It might be useful in cases where you can't build a touchpad into a device, but in most of those cases the device is so small you want to hold it not rest it on a desk anyway, so there'd be no surface for the side mouse to track on.
Now for the showdown between the two serious contenders.
Orb mouse: Really nice input image. Can easily do a variety of applications with it, since there's so much area. Datacenters sometimes use illuminated vein pattern recognition for biometrics, which can be efficiently integrated with this, and it's a better solution than those stupid touchpad fingerprint readers. But for more conventional apps it's got the most area, the best shape to exploit the use of all fingers, and in deference to the mention of clock-based positioning on the Gizmodo article about it, will probably be the easiest for people to extend thinking to. The main showstoppers are cost (not sure) and bulk/shape issues. People may not find the bulgy shape appealing though I suspect it will test well with male audiences.
Cap mouse: Probably going to win, despite the low resolution sensor image. Why? That "$1 gesture recognition" on the video says it all. Not the gesture support part, the $1 part. Cost wise it's probably cheapest, and it seemed to work sufficient for the apps in the demo. It's also just a bolt-on to existing mouse designs. No need to modify the existing shape or ergonomics to accommodate it, which means it's the path of least resistance. If it's also the path of least cost, which given most of the rest need a camera-quality sensor it most likely is, then the winner seems pretty obvious.
No, they dislike it, but much less than the average human male heterosexual.
No, we like it as much as the average human male heterosexual, which is to say more than the average female heterosexual due to anatomical differences (see prostate). The primary difference is we've accepted or adapted to the implied dominance association males struggle to divorce from sexual acts (much like how women attach love to sexual acts), so we're not afraid that having someone do something that feels so nice somehow makes us inferior. Secure heterosexual males generally enjoy the same kind of stimulation from their partners but few seem to ever get over their hangups, despite the high percentage that "experiment" early on. Many wind up seeking it out secretly on the side, usually on craigslist.
You know, the whole phone-home every time you want to use the product model? Claiming it would be awesome for consumers. What was it called again?
Oh yeah, Divx.
Whatever happened to that?
I know the Ted Stevens quote. HT is commonly organized as tunnels though, hence the pun.
HyperTransport is not a big truck! It's a series of tunnels!
And suddenly my sig is relevant again. ;)
How bout the 4.0Ghz Core 2 Duo I paid $10 for last month?
No really, Newegg was selling E5200s for $10 extra on bundle with a Lexmark X4850, and I needed a printer. So hey, $10 CPU, how bad can it be? So I throw it in a P45 board and shake some DDR2 out of the box o random dimms, and it turns out it really likes 12x333 at stock voltage with a cheap heatsink. Since the board supports the 333/1333fsb officially, the rest of it runs at stock speeds like ddr2 1066. Prime95 and HyperPi run all day without crashing so I figure it's good.
Not sure exactly what Mr. Single Core is doing wrong, but I would think anyone who could afford the cameras for a REDOne setup would be able to afford a big GPU accelerated setup for their HD rendering and not worry so much about CPUs anymore.
I found DMT did not produce any of those effects for me personally. Instead in my case it disabled my synaesthesia for about 15 minutes or so. This was extremely disconcerting at first but once I understood the effect a bit better (and realized I was still breathing despite not receiving the normal feedback from my lungs) it was more interesting than alarming.
While I'd been aware that I have multiple forms of synaesthesia, ranging from the common ones like grapheme-color, to more rare like lexical-gustatory, to just outright weird like numeric-topology, there were quite a few more subtle ones I hadn't taken into account. Some standouts in particular were synaesthesic mixes from channels like emotional state, internal sense (from organs), facial recognition, and temperature. It can be a hard thing to explain because to me that's just how the world is.
Before I saw a documentary on it in my 20s I thought everyone experienced things this way. Then I learned otherwise. After experiencing things without it for a little while, I feel kinda bad for everyone else. But on a positive note, I was able to understand how I was generating social anxiety in a feedback loop (emotional-visual overlay with complex things like facial recognition bias) and haven't needed anything for anxiety since the experience with DMT.
Interfaces are often overrated like that.
Having dealt with the very specific headache of having to use and modify an FFT function before, one problem that is difficult to avoid is the fact that most coders who write math libraries and things like FFT functions tend to write them in math terminology. I.e. there are lots and lots and lots of confusing little single letter variables that are obvious in purpose to a math major (or someone who's done the math for engineering/physics/CS) but completely obscure to anyone else. Sometimes x or w or n or k as a variable choice is just a lazy programmer. Other times it's mathematically significant. And if you don't have the experience to know it's the latter and not the former, especially since many math programmers are very lazy about documentation since they assume everyone will either know the math or go look up the math, it can turn into a real headache real fast. And if you're somehow in the position of having to deal with functions written by programmers from different scientific disciplines (math + physics for example) you can just forget about consistent and descriptive variable naming. Because to them a single letter IS descriptive and not obscure at all, but to anyone else it's not, and the systems are not consistent to each other (too few letters for that).
No, the problem is that EA made a game out of a tool. Granted they picked the best person possible for doing this (Will Wright), but the fact remains that Spore was an R&D testbed for next-generation user and procedural content generation systems, and not a game.
I'm pretty sure that Spore started off as the Creature Editor on someone's desktop at EA and they showed their boss how they'd made "3D Studio Max For 8-Year-Olds." Which granted is a phenomenal achievement. I'll gladly give them credit for making a tool that is an absolute triumph of technology overcoming complexity and making advanced computing accessible to the mainstream. But it's not a game.
So after seeing this fantastic tool, EA calls in "That guy who made the awesome tool-based games." i.e., Will Wright, and said "Ok we're going to throw an entire game worth of money at R&D on these new tools, because they'll let us make all our other games in the future far cheaper (and we can fire all the redundant texture artists and animators). But to justify it we need it to become a game. So your job is to make these tools into a game, so that users will buy it and beta test it before we use it seriously in a real game."
This is why Spore got delayed and delayed and delayed and "reworked because it just isn't fun according to testers." Wright basically promoted it as Sim Earth 2.0 and tossed in the rest of his bag of tricks and I would say did a reasonably good job at making a boring production tool into a fun game. But you can see the rough edges (city/civ stage is laughably simplistic for example) on it where the game was kinda pasted into the gaps between tools. And just to make people not feel cheated they were nice enough to throw an entire mediocre real game (the space stage a.k.a. Sim Earth 2.0: Sim Earth In Reverse) on top so it feels like you actually played something instead of just designing content for them.
So gee think I'm surprised that suddenly they're outsourcing the API interface testing to the mainstream as a "contest" too?
But to be fair, EA sees the production costs of games skyrocketing, and they knew something would have to be done sooner or later. That "something" is likely to be procedural asset generation and user content generation, and everyone in the industry knows that's where the time and money bottlenecks are, asset and content generation. So producing something like the modeling, texture, and animation systems Spore first means they're a generation ahead of their competitors.
P.S. I still love Spore, but I also still wish for a more technical Sim Earth 2.0. At least he was smart to put the hard part (terraforming) at the end this time instead of the beginning like it was in Sim Earth though.
Wow, you mean MS actually has one up on Apple for once? Needy windows (like new IMs) flash on the taskbar a few times and then become the solid "attention orange" if you ignore them. I only wish the name of the user/title of the window on the taskbar icon would change to reflect which one has updated last, rather that which one I interacted with last (i.e. sometimes it looks like someone has messaged but it's really another user's window in the group). I'm not sure if this falls upon the application (Pidgin, Google Talk) or the OS to update that info, since I don't know if the attention code just needs to be updated to change to the title of the updated window displayed on the taskbar as the representation for a group, or if it's actually the application deciding what to show in the taskbar.
Here's my most frequently bitched about UI complaint:
18. Faster access to High Performance power plan
Clicking on the battery flout from the taskbar notification area offers two different power plans: Balanced and Power saver. Windows 7 laptops are configured by default to use the Balanced plan since this setting best balances a good experience while promoting more environmentally friendly power use. However, some customers tell us they want to be able to quickly toggle between Balanced and High Performance (yet another power plan). Weâ(TM)ve taken a change to now show the latter in the flyout menu when it is enabled under the Power Options Control Panel.
This has been perhaps my biggest complaint (which goes to show you something) about Win7 beta on my laptop (Acer Aspire 6930). It takes 2 clicks to switch from high performance or power saver to balanced. But to switch from high performance to power saver or vice-versa takes 5. For no good reason. It involves clicking the taskbar icon, opening a window for "more power options", clicking "show additional plans" despite ample room to show the third plan, clicking the selection button, then closing the window. 5 clicks vs 2, because we can't handle a third power choice? I'm glad someone is awake over there.
And here's probably my second most bitched about UI complaint:
33. Reviving familiar entry points
Mando writes, âoeIn Win7 the Win+E shortcut opens an explorer window but the path is âoeLibrariesâ instead (which isnâ(TM)t where I want to go most of the time). Is there a way to configure the target folder of âoeWin+Eâ or is there an alternate shortcut that will get me to the âoeComputerâ path like it did in Vista?â RC reverts the behavior and now the shortcut will launch the âoeComputerâ Explorer. Also, we changed the link in Start Menu -> Username to match the Vista behavior.
And bonus, here's my most bitched about hardware support complaint, which I mentioned in another slashdot thread a couple days ago:
29. Improving the headphone experience
Customers informed us that sometimes their audio streams did not properly move from the default speakers to their headphones. The fix required an update to the algorithm we use to detect new devices. In RC the transition works more reliably.
Most of the rest of the stuff sounds pretty good too. I'll admit I've been a bit skeptical about this whole pinning things on taskbar which is now also the quicklaunch at the same time type deal. Mostly because I'm used to all my quicklaunch apps being on the left and not having to hunt between open apps to launch a new one. But that win-# shortcut sounds like it will justify the whole deal for me, so I will withdraw my complaint on it pending testing of that feature.
#1: Acer Aspire 6930 bought on post-xmas sale from Staples. Core 2 Duo T5800, 4GB DDR2 667, 250GB SATA HD, Integrated Intel 4500MHD, Intel 5100 wireless.
Problems: Sometimes audio driver doesn't automatically detect headphones plugged in and switch speaker output to headphone jack. Oh and HDMI audio may have the same issue if turned on while hooked to a TV that's off.
#2: Piece of Junk (literally) desktop. Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 3.63GHz on Asus P5B, 2GB DDR2 1066, ATI HD4850, 400GB SATA HD.
Problems: None.
#3: Toshiba Portige 4010 (So old it came with Windows 2000 installed because XP wasn't even out yet): Intel Pentium III mobile 933MHz Low Voltage, 512MB RAM, 30GB IDE HD, Intel 2200BG wireless, Ali integrated video and MB chipset from hell.
Problems: Newest Video driver for integrated Trident Blade3D (DX7 class) video is circa 2002. Windows 7 build 7000 automatically detects the install issues and retries with compatibility settings and succeeds . The driver works, except when it tries to create an overlay surface it locks up. This is not a bluescreen, the chipset actually freaks out because it's crap and the driver is badly written. Same issue under XP (which the driver was written for) on this machine. Using the video in SVGA mode solves the crash problem but is too slow for video playback. Fine for browsing and word processing though.
Performance is slow, but usable on a 9 year old laptop. Checking memory usage with the default install of "Ultimate" edition using Win7's Resource Monitor shows it defaults to only using about 300MB of RAM, leaving about 200+ free for apps and cache. This is with all the bloated defaults running like Homegroup services etc. Despite the fact that it's still beta, it fares much better than Vista and I say even on par with XP in terms of running within limited resources, while delivering more features than XP.
So yeah, color me impressed. No it's not going to render Toy Story in realtime on a 386 with EGA while making toast and finding Sarah Conner, but still that's a decade old laptop (which means it's a steaming turd of proprietary crap) and Win7 is still usable on it, without a week of fiddling with settings first. Considering MS is talking about "Netbook versions" of Win7 I'd say there's definitely a chance of them producing a contender for the lower-spec hardware out there that fares much much better than Vista did.
Umm... and that's relevant how? "Fabrication process" isn't a valid object for future speculation? How about FTA:
"claiming that the process will enable the production of smaller, more powerful and energy-efficient devices "
Will enable? Not does enable? Now enables? Has enabled?
How about "unveiled their fabrication process"? Oh wait it's "unveiled their strategy" for the fabrication process. Not the same thing.
The entire thing is future tense. It's not out yet. Hence why I compared it to other things which are also not out yet. When does the article say this 22nm process will be out? Oh wait, it doesn't! It just says that Intel plans to have 32nm out in 2009, and then something about how "chipmakers have hit a problem in that current lithographic methods are not adequate for designs as small as 22nm owing to fundamental physical limitations" without really anything to back that claim up.
You seem to be the only one who missed "strategy to produce future chips" in the first line up there, and "'Computational scaling' will allow future production of 22nm circuits." at the start of the actual linked article.
Where exactly did they say this was in production?
What a joke of an article. Every semiconductor manufacturer has several generations of process in various states in the lab. Woo IBM's showing sneak peaks at 22nm!
...it sort of takes 3D transistors and all that, but we know how to do these things. It's all using standard silicon, it's CMOS it's extraordinarily well charictarized right? But we've got transistors running at 11 nanometers, I can show you photographs of them. We have the leakage issues but we've got a very good plan.
I met with an Intel VP for an interview a while back and talked about where things are going. He had some nice lab-pr0n of what the photos claimed were 11nm transistors. I believe it was said that was "about 15 years out", and meant to offer reassurance that Moore's Law still had a bit more time left to go.
Actually here, let me go dig up my transcript so I can get a proper quote:
You're going to see that platforms are going to continue to evolve. We're moving to a faster cadence. The processor cadence is about a two year cadence, in terms of process technologies. By the way this is interesting. We know how to do Moore's Law for about another fifteen years which we've never had that kind of length of projection before.
That was 2 years ago, early October 2006. Who leapfrogged what now?