They also do this with multiple product numbers/SKUs within the same brand.
Those ads in the sunday paper where they promise to give you the product free/10% cash back/whatever if you find the same product at a competitor for less? They can do this because the manufacturers make essentially identical products but sell them with different model numbers to competing electronics stores -- so the models are unique to the chain carrying them. Usually this is called price protection and it's something the supplier will often guarantee in a specific market.
This stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as companies that cash in on their brand name with inferior products -- I've had a couple major-label DVD players that barf during playback about 50% of my DVD collection, yet no-name imports (and my PCs) seem to have no problems at all.
I'm building a vacation house in nearly the middle of nowhere (though "somewhere" keeps getting closer) in the high deserts of northeastern Arizona.
It's completely off grid. When I started building in 1999 I had to use a 3W motorola "bag" phone with a RJ11 converter to dial in to the server at the office -- 4800bps max. Power supplied thanks to the sun.
By 2002 I could use the analog modem built into a Kyocera palm-based phone. Still 4800bps
By 2003 I could use a native IP link over a new phone, thanks to a major infrastructure upgrade in the area. (Unfortunately now I have too good of a line of sight to a very visible 500-1000' tower about 3 miles away.) Probably about 30kbps.
In mid 2004 I found out I can now get a faster fixed wireless connection in "the middle of nowhere" (~1Mbps) than I can get a wired connection at my place on the extreme outskirts of Phoenix.
It's been interesting watching the development of the 'net this way.
Actually they're doing some, but not all, of the chipset cores. VIA still ships a substantial number of chip sets that still use the Trident core (or variations of that core done by engineers that left Trident and joined VIA a few years ago, before XGI acquired Trident's remaining graphics operation).
Most of the current Mini-ITX boards, for example, use the Trident-derived cores.
VIA brands the S3-based core chipsets with the "Savage" name, so it's easier to pick out the higher performance integrated chip sets in their product line.
A couple points to consider: as the NSA likely scans email for intelligence, spam has likely lowered the signal-to-noise ratio for them. Working to reduce spam improves the intelligence value of searching emails. So while it's doubtful there's any direct NSA involvement in this, the previous treaty arrangements developed for NSA/Echelon etc no doubt are being used -- and the action would likely have at least moral support from intelligence agencies.
The other point is it's long been rumored that part of the way UKUSA/Echelon works from a legal standpoint is while the NSA can't intercept (legally) US traffic, other members of Echelon can intercept domestic US traffic and provide this intelligence back to the US legally. Perhaps this is the case with spam as well, since so much of it originates/is controlled by US spammers even though it's coming from proxies worldwide?
Although once it's shown to break the law many of the restrictions inside the US to tracking them down are probably removed, I'm sure external evidence from other countries is still quite helpful.
My '98 Jeep Grand Cherokee beats EPA by about 2MPG, probably 50/50 highway v. city.
I used to have an '86 Pontiac Fiero. It blew the doors off the EPA rating, which was 24 city. At the time I was only doing city driving and routinely got 35 MPG; after I had a major tune up that involved a new oxygen sensor and repacking the wheel bearings, I saw 42 MPG for nearly a full year.
Pretty impressive that 18-year old technology pretty much matches what the hybrid electrics do today; the car was clearly far ahead of its time. (I still miss it.)
From what I've read of the affidavits so far (and IANAL) it looks like this move was made to prevent NAC from totally screwing over a customer.
If the claims of the customer are true (and that's what the court is to decide) NAC basically raised the rates for both bandwidth and power (so presumably this is a co-lo situation) well beyond the market rates, then started unilaterally changing terms in their contract as a method of forcing the customer out of business so that NAC could take over their apparently pretty profitable web-hosting business.
So the ruling sounds more like a requirement to forward traffic and prevent NAC from shutting them down while they relocate to a new facility. From the affidavit it appears that the customer continued to pay the unilaterally inflated rates in order to keep themselves in business while they relocated -- and when the rate increase didn't put them under, NAC started changing terms like requiring payments within five days and requiring payment in a NAC-specified form (it appears the customer was paying with a credit card, perhaps for protection, hard to say, but the bills are $93K a month).
I don't think the judge acted inappropriately given the stakes of the case and the level of bad faith the customer is claiming NAC has.
Amplifying on why some emergency services are staying with HF and are NOT moving to the newer UHF/Microwave stuff, and why high-frequency/shortwave communications are important:
A number of services use a technique known as NVIS (Near-Vertical-Incidence-Skywave.) NVIS is basically sending your signals nearly straight up, with a well-chosen frequency that gets reflected almost straight back down by the ionosphere. These frequencies are nearly always in the HF bands (~3-30 MHz).
This particular mode of communications is really helpful in situations where there is no infrastructure and no line of sight. A classic example is forest fires -- the fire often knocks out communications repeaters, and often mountains/hills isolate pockets of firefighters with no line of site communications; NVIS overcomes this as the signals are usually coming in from directly above. It also works well for islands or really any regional communications with limited support infrastructure.
As mentioned elsewhere, you can run pretty much any modulation scheme (digital data, voice, whatever) using NVIS. But both sides need to hear the signals, and the concern is that BPL could prevent one side (likely the home base/communications center side rather than those in the field) from being able to hear, thus preventing any useful communications.
Hide in plain sight, they say. There was probably prior art sitting on the examiner's wrist.
I think just about every digital watch I've ever owned has had multi-mode pushbuttons that work EXACTLY this way. To set the time on my Timex I've had for ~ ten years, I hold down one button an extended duration. Two pushes sets a different timing mode.
It's definitely resource limited.
It's an application-specific digital computing device.
Seems to meet the patent criteria. Maybe someone should call Timex to dust off their patent portfolio.
The insecurity can be demonstrated quite easily. A peer of mine at another research firm was well known for traveling with a silicone finger during the heydey of fingerprint based biometric chip introductions. Seldom did he encounter a "secure" reader, as most were defeated with just an imprint on some caulk from home depot. I've heard in some cases people have sucessfully lifted the imprint from the sensors themselves -- the biometric equivalent of writing your ATM PIN on your card.
The BIG downside to biometric-only systems: once the system in compromised, then what do you do? Not being lizards, few of us can grow new, unique digits, and if one finger has already been proven insecure, the others aren't likely to be any better.
I agree, they're fast enough for most tasks. As an experiment I moved all my work to a VIA Epia 533 Fanless motherboard (with 1 GB of RAM, which helps a lot) for three months. This is the slowest motherboard VIA sells, and I think the slowest on the market that's still in active sales as opposed to used/inventory sales. I ran both XP and Slackware 9 on the box.
CPU loading was idle most of the time. It was acceptable for email, web browsing, and word processing. There were a few places it bogged down: recalculating large spreadsheets, websites with Flash animated ads, printing, displaying PDFs (ghostview pretty much choked the system whenever it would run) and running compression (gzip tar backups would max out the load instantly.)
I upgraded to a fanless Pentium M ITX box because I could, but still use the VIAs for web/mail service, which work fine -- one box's uptime reached 240+ days before I needed to take it down for hardware maintenance.
They're not gaming systems or workstations, but otherwise completely acceptable for most uses -- and the fanless ones are pretty much silent (the loudest thing the VIA 533 PC was the hard disk seeking. Really.)
A really fast way to tell good from bad is if two diametrically opposed companies/issues use the same analyst. Usually, (but not always) this means the research is sufficiently objective or accurate that both sides concede to use it. The few times this isn't true it means the analyst has taken selling out to a new level.
I've been an analyst for 16 years. I'm in one of the two camps mentioned. You decide.
I've had several online friends die over the course of the years (being online since 1979 has a way of doing that.)
In every single case, regardless of planning, I have recieved messages -- originally email, more recently IM -- from the survivors. If you use a work email account, for example, usually there's a broadcast email about being deceased, and then a custom bounce message saying the same.
In the case of IM it has been relatives. A lot of folks leave their systems set to "log me on automatically."
It's very strange getting IMs from a dead person's account, but helpful in that you can usually talk briefly with a family member and express you condolences.
More intereting is that the people I know who have died recently made use of yahoo/MSN's mobile messaging as well. They're still on my buddy list as "mobile" even a year later.
My company, Mercury Research, does computer and chip research and trademarked its name in my home state. We then went for a national trademark.
FTD, the florist company, has an internal computer system named Mercury, and Mercury is the greek god on one of their logos, but not mentioned by name. They fought the trademark.
It took about five years and ~ $15K in legal fees before we gave up. It was obvious both FTD's lawyer and ours were gaming the system to make money. As long as they keep the paper flowing, fees get made. Simply getting to court would clearly have cost at least double this.
Way too true. I have my email back to 1994, and I work in the technical and marketing sides of the PC industry. Over 12GB of mail there -- and that's after pruning the really big offenders (back in 1997 pretty much every graphics chip supplier (50 or so) emailed me every rev of their windows drivers -- had I not zapped those I'm sure I'd be pushing into fractional TB.)
The good news? Those marketing types are switching in droves to PDF from PPT files, and the savings in disk space is HUGE. It's like having 50:1 compression.
Actually it's no so clear this has to do with "price cuts" on the graphics chips per se.
ATI negotiated the deal in a radically different way from Nvidia -- they sold IP, not chips at a specific price.
The gamble in chip manufacturing is usually that you price the chips at a (near) loss at the start, and improvements in manufacturing result in cost reductions and profits later on in the process.
Nvidia used this model for the original X-box deal, but the design wasn't finalized and additional complexity was added, raising manufacturing costs (this is what triggered the arbitration between Nvidia and Microsoft over the last couple years.)
In any case, the X-box chips Nvidia sold weren't terribly profitable to them. I seriously doubt any chip manufacturer would accept a repeat of the arrangement. Obviously ATI didn't -- and had Nvidia negotiated a deal like ATI's on the original X-box the present situation would have probably been different -- the trade off being the potential profits would likely have been lower had the manufacturing cost reductions actually worked out.
If you read Schwartz' other articles, you will find that the "insightful" mod on this post is spot on.
I'll clarify "commie" here by saying old-school, central-planning-decides-everything-for-you communism. [which quite a few don't consider true communism]
I thought the name of the professor sounded familiar, and sure enough, it was who I thought it was. His position is not agenda-free (not that anyone's is.)
Schwartz wrote a paper for the January, 2000 edition of the Journal of the America Psychological Association, American Psychologist, titled "Self-Determination, the Tyranny of Freedom."
The artical basically lays the groundwork for restricting freedom for people's own good, and to force beliefs on people for their own good. Coming from a libertarian viewpoint myself, the entire article was disturbing in a very subtle way -- and it was clear that a political or social agenda was a subtext.
This was demonstrated at the fall 2003 Intel Developer Forum. They operated two virtual machines, one running linux and one running windows, and rebooted one of the machines with the other unaffected.
I'm not sure which one they rebooted but I have a pretty good guess.
I know when I was growing up I was mystified by a lot of social behavior. It wasn't until I was exposed to psychology, different personality types and the concept of group behavior that gave reasons for why certain social institutions exist (be it church, dating, etc) that anything made sense.
Most geeks I know all come from the same place individuality-wise, and none of us ever got the group-think, herd behavior thing that predominates larger social groups of people until we were well into college; I think we all would have been better off knowing more, so your actions are commendable. Since geeks seem to live on the question of "Why?" having some answers here helps get the point across.
I agree with the other posters of making it an intellectual exercise -- for example, being able to grok various roles people play and mimic them back (acting), or making it another system to learn (social engineering). I'd also suggest some social psychology studies (or even animal behavior studies -- once you get the idea of packs, leadership challenges, etc, it maps all too well into human behavior, and he might even see the humor in this.) I know I would have been greatly better off in my dating had I been exposed to some of the current theories on evolutionary psychology at a younger age as well.
Also -- while it got modded as funny -- point out it'll get him laid is pretty valid, motivation-wise.
It's not a glove but this does most of what you mentioned. They do have a two-handed version.
I got mine about a month ago. There's a bit of a learning curve and it's hard to get single-pixel accuracy, but I really like it and don't think I'd choose to go back to a mouse. (Since I have a USB mouse and it's USB, they coexist under X nicely and I can switch to the mouse the few times I need to be that precise... or when my fingers are covered in oil from the snack food de jour).
It will open files with a twist, you position the mouse pointer with two fingers... use one finger and it inputs arrow keycodes for the correct direction, so text editing and spreadsheets are very cool. Cut/paste/copy gestures as well, and you can edit in your own gestures into the programming (though I have not tried this yet.)
Several years ago I had been using Visual Basic and a lot of very ugly hacks (for example, one task we had required drawing a diagram from a database -- the VB app used the dangerous SENDKEYS function to activate and send simulated keystrokes to coreldraw to perform the drawing. Similar kludges existed for making CDs, etc.)
The problem I had with Windows/VB was there was so little command line support by common windows applications. With Linux it's actually been the opposite -- you're far more likely to be able to get the job done on the command line than by somehow communicating with the GUI. Most applications -- be it burning CDs, printing files of a particular format, processing databases, etc -- are controlled by command line unless you absolutely need full GUI to get the job done.
I've found a combination of bash shell scripts and Python code can do pretty much anything I can imagine. Some things that were virtually impossible in the windows environment can be done very easily under linux due to the great command line support for most applications. Also, since file formats are open, it's possible to do things like generate XML under Python that is a formated spreadsheet readable by Gnumeric -- something you just could not do in the Windows environment without essentially running Excel by remote control to build things cell-by-cell.
The big plus was the scripting code was far simpler, much shorter, and since it didn't depend on wierd hacks like sendkeys, more reliable. (I still use Windows and VB, but now it's just all nice, in-application scripts rather than trying to integrate everything.)
I will say that scripting a GUI apps is a bit harder than VB on windows, primarily because the VB-Office integration is much better. But I'm more than happy to trade a few pretty buttons for "dothistask -a -b -c" on the command line.
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They also do this with multiple product numbers/SKUs within the same brand.
Those ads in the sunday paper where they promise to give you the product free/10% cash back/whatever if you find the same product at a competitor for less? They can do this because the manufacturers make essentially identical products but sell them with different model numbers to competing electronics stores -- so the models are unique to the chain carrying them. Usually this is called price protection and it's something the supplier will often guarantee in a specific market.
This stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as companies that cash in on their brand name with inferior products -- I've had a couple major-label DVD players that barf during playback about 50% of my DVD collection, yet no-name imports (and my PCs) seem to have no problems at all.
I'm building a vacation house in nearly the middle of nowhere (though "somewhere" keeps getting closer) in the high deserts of northeastern Arizona.
It's completely off grid. When I started building in 1999 I had to use a 3W motorola "bag" phone with a RJ11 converter to dial in to the server at the office -- 4800bps max. Power supplied thanks to the sun.
By 2002 I could use the analog modem built into a Kyocera palm-based phone. Still 4800bps
By 2003 I could use a native IP link over a new phone, thanks to a major infrastructure upgrade in the area. (Unfortunately now I have too good of a line of sight to a very visible 500-1000' tower about 3 miles away.) Probably about 30kbps.
In mid 2004 I found out I can now get a faster fixed wireless connection in "the middle of nowhere" (~1Mbps) than I can get a wired connection at my place on the extreme outskirts of Phoenix.
It's been interesting watching the development of the 'net this way.
Actually they're doing some, but not all, of the chipset cores. VIA still ships a substantial number of chip sets that still use the Trident core (or variations of that core done by engineers that left Trident and joined VIA a few years ago, before XGI acquired Trident's remaining graphics operation).
Most of the current Mini-ITX boards, for example, use the Trident-derived cores.
VIA brands the S3-based core chipsets with the "Savage" name, so it's easier to pick out the higher performance integrated chip sets in their product line.
You're probably not that far off from reality.
A couple points to consider: as the NSA likely scans email for intelligence, spam has likely lowered the signal-to-noise ratio for them. Working to reduce spam improves the intelligence value of searching emails. So while it's doubtful there's any direct NSA involvement in this, the previous treaty arrangements developed for NSA/Echelon etc no doubt are being used -- and the action would likely have at least moral support from intelligence agencies.
The other point is it's long been rumored that part of the way UKUSA/Echelon works from a legal standpoint is while the NSA can't intercept (legally) US traffic, other members of Echelon can intercept domestic US traffic and provide this intelligence back to the US legally. Perhaps this is the case with spam as well, since so much of it originates/is controlled by US spammers even though it's coming from proxies worldwide?
Although once it's shown to break the law many of the restrictions inside the US to tracking them down are probably removed, I'm sure external evidence from other countries is still quite helpful.
My '98 Jeep Grand Cherokee beats EPA by about 2MPG, probably 50/50 highway v. city.
I used to have an '86 Pontiac Fiero. It blew the doors off the EPA rating, which was 24 city. At the time I was only doing city driving and routinely got 35 MPG; after I had a major tune up that involved a new oxygen sensor and repacking the wheel bearings, I saw 42 MPG for nearly a full year.
Pretty impressive that 18-year old technology pretty much matches what the hybrid electrics do today; the car was clearly far ahead of its time. (I still miss it.)
From what I've read of the affidavits so far (and IANAL) it looks like this move was made to prevent NAC from totally screwing over a customer.
If the claims of the customer are true (and that's what the court is to decide) NAC basically raised the rates for both bandwidth and power (so presumably this is a co-lo situation) well beyond the market rates, then started unilaterally changing terms in their contract as a method of forcing the customer out of business so that NAC could take over their apparently pretty profitable web-hosting business.
So the ruling sounds more like a requirement to forward traffic and prevent NAC from shutting them down while they relocate to a new facility. From the affidavit it appears that the customer continued to pay the unilaterally inflated rates in order to keep themselves in business while they relocated -- and when the rate increase didn't put them under, NAC started changing terms like requiring payments within five days and requiring payment in a NAC-specified form (it appears the customer was paying with a credit card, perhaps for protection, hard to say, but the bills are $93K a month).
I don't think the judge acted inappropriately given the stakes of the case and the level of bad faith the customer is claiming NAC has.
Amplifying on why some emergency services are staying with HF and are NOT moving to the newer UHF/Microwave stuff, and why high-frequency/shortwave communications are important:
A number of services use a technique known as NVIS (Near-Vertical-Incidence-Skywave.) NVIS is basically sending your signals nearly straight up, with a well-chosen frequency that gets reflected almost straight back down by the ionosphere. These frequencies are nearly always in the HF bands (~3-30 MHz).
This particular mode of communications is really helpful in situations where there is no infrastructure and no line of sight. A classic example is forest fires -- the fire often knocks out communications repeaters, and often mountains/hills isolate pockets of firefighters with no line of site communications; NVIS overcomes this as the signals are usually coming in from directly above. It also works well for islands or really any regional communications with limited support infrastructure.
As mentioned elsewhere, you can run pretty much any modulation scheme (digital data, voice, whatever) using NVIS. But both sides need to hear the signals, and the concern is that BPL could prevent one side (likely the home base/communications center side rather than those in the field) from being able to hear, thus preventing any useful communications.
It would be more appropriate to use "Cambrian Explosion" instead of big bang. It might even be what they were thinking.
Hide in plain sight, they say. There was probably prior art sitting on the examiner's wrist.
I think just about every digital watch I've ever owned has had multi-mode pushbuttons that work EXACTLY this way. To set the time on my Timex I've had for ~ ten years, I hold down one button an extended duration. Two pushes sets a different timing mode.
It's definitely resource limited.
It's an application-specific digital computing device.
Seems to meet the patent criteria. Maybe someone should call Timex to dust off their patent portfolio.
The insecurity can be demonstrated quite easily. A peer of mine at another research firm was well known for traveling with a silicone finger during the heydey of fingerprint based biometric chip introductions. Seldom did he encounter a "secure" reader, as most were defeated with just an imprint on some caulk from home depot. I've heard in some cases people have sucessfully lifted the imprint from the sensors themselves -- the biometric equivalent of writing your ATM PIN on your card.
The BIG downside to biometric-only systems: once the system in compromised, then what do you do? Not being lizards, few of us can grow new, unique digits, and if one finger has already been proven insecure, the others aren't likely to be any better.
I agree, they're fast enough for most tasks. As an experiment I moved all my work to a VIA Epia 533 Fanless motherboard (with 1 GB of RAM, which helps a lot) for three months. This is the slowest motherboard VIA sells, and I think the slowest on the market that's still in active sales as opposed to used/inventory sales. I ran both XP and Slackware 9 on the box.
CPU loading was idle most of the time. It was acceptable for email, web browsing, and word processing. There were a few places it bogged down: recalculating large spreadsheets, websites with Flash animated ads, printing, displaying PDFs (ghostview pretty much choked the system whenever it would run) and running compression (gzip tar backups would max out the load instantly.)
I upgraded to a fanless Pentium M ITX box because I could, but still use the VIAs for web/mail service, which work fine -- one box's uptime reached 240+ days before I needed to take it down for hardware maintenance.
They're not gaming systems or workstations, but otherwise completely acceptable for most uses -- and the fanless ones are pretty much silent (the loudest thing the VIA 533 PC was the hard disk seeking. Really.)
A lot, but not all.
A really fast way to tell good from bad is if two diametrically opposed companies/issues use the same analyst. Usually, (but not always) this means the research is sufficiently objective or accurate that both sides concede to use it. The few times this isn't true it means the analyst has taken selling out to a new level.
I've been an analyst for 16 years. I'm in one of the two camps mentioned. You decide.
I've had several online friends die over the course of the years (being online since 1979 has a way of doing that.)
In every single case, regardless of planning, I have recieved messages -- originally email, more recently IM -- from the survivors. If you use a work email account, for example, usually there's a broadcast email about being deceased, and then a custom bounce message saying the same.
In the case of IM it has been relatives. A lot of folks leave their systems set to "log me on automatically."
It's very strange getting IMs from a dead person's account, but helpful in that you can usually talk briefly with a family member and express you condolences.
More intereting is that the people I know who have died recently made use of yahoo/MSN's mobile messaging as well. They're still on my buddy list as "mobile" even a year later.
Apropo in a way.
Only on slashdot would a statement like this get modded as insightful.
Not true.
My company, Mercury Research, does computer and chip research and trademarked its name in my home state. We then went for a national trademark.
FTD, the florist company, has an internal computer system named Mercury, and Mercury is the greek god on one of their logos, but not mentioned by name. They fought the trademark.
It took about five years and ~ $15K in legal fees before we gave up. It was obvious both FTD's lawyer and ours were gaming the system to make money. As long as they keep the paper flowing, fees get made. Simply getting to court would clearly have cost at least double this.
I realize the the CB craze pre-dates most slashdot subscribers (and perhaps technical evangelists)...
On CB radios, channel 9 is the channel used for emergencies. Pretty interesting double entendre.
OK, there's a downside. But how many kernel patches did you complete? That's gotta count for something!
Way too true. I have my email back to 1994, and I work in the technical and marketing sides of the PC industry. Over 12GB of mail there -- and that's after pruning the really big offenders (back in 1997 pretty much every graphics chip supplier (50 or so) emailed me every rev of their windows drivers -- had I not zapped those I'm sure I'd be pushing into fractional TB.)
The good news? Those marketing types are switching in droves to PDF from PPT files, and the savings in disk space is HUGE. It's like having 50:1 compression.
Actually it's no so clear this has to do with "price cuts" on the graphics chips per se.
ATI negotiated the deal in a radically different way from Nvidia -- they sold IP, not chips at a specific price.
The gamble in chip manufacturing is usually that you price the chips at a (near) loss at the start, and improvements in manufacturing result in cost reductions and profits later on in the process.
Nvidia used this model for the original X-box deal, but the design wasn't finalized and additional complexity was added, raising manufacturing costs (this is what triggered the arbitration between Nvidia and Microsoft over the last couple years.)
In any case, the X-box chips Nvidia sold weren't terribly profitable to them. I seriously doubt any chip manufacturer would accept a repeat of the arrangement. Obviously ATI didn't -- and had Nvidia negotiated a deal like ATI's on the original X-box the present situation would have probably been different -- the trade off being the potential profits would likely have been lower had the manufacturing cost reductions actually worked out.
If you read Schwartz' other articles, you will find that the "insightful" mod on this post is spot on.
I'll clarify "commie" here by saying old-school, central-planning-decides-everything-for-you communism. [which quite a few don't consider true communism]
I thought the name of the professor sounded familiar, and sure enough, it was who I thought it was. His position is not agenda-free (not that anyone's is.)
Schwartz wrote a paper for the January, 2000 edition of the Journal of the America Psychological Association, American Psychologist, titled "Self-Determination, the Tyranny of Freedom."
The artical basically lays the groundwork for restricting freedom for people's own good, and to force beliefs on people for their own good. Coming from a libertarian viewpoint myself, the entire article was disturbing in a very subtle way -- and it was clear that a political or social agenda was a subtext.
It appears he is simply continuing on this theme.
This was demonstrated at the fall 2003 Intel Developer Forum. They operated two virtual machines, one running linux and one running windows, and rebooted one of the machines with the other unaffected.
I'm not sure which one they rebooted but I have a pretty good guess.
I know when I was growing up I was mystified by a lot of social behavior. It wasn't until I was exposed to psychology, different personality types and the concept of group behavior that gave reasons for why certain social institutions exist (be it church, dating, etc) that anything made sense.
Most geeks I know all come from the same place individuality-wise, and none of us ever got the group-think, herd behavior thing that predominates larger social groups of people until we were well into college; I think we all would have been better off knowing more, so your actions are commendable. Since geeks seem to live on the question of "Why?" having some answers here helps get the point across.
I agree with the other posters of making it an intellectual exercise -- for example, being able to grok various roles people play and mimic them back (acting), or making it another system to learn (social engineering). I'd also suggest some social psychology studies (or even animal behavior studies -- once you get the idea of packs, leadership challenges, etc, it maps all too well into human behavior, and he might even see the humor in this.) I know I would have been greatly better off in my dating had I been exposed to some of the current theories on evolutionary psychology at a younger age as well.
Also -- while it got modded as funny -- point out it'll get him laid is pretty valid, motivation-wise.
It's not a glove but this does most of what you mentioned. They do have a two-handed version.
I got mine about a month ago. There's a bit of a learning curve and it's hard to get single-pixel accuracy, but I really like it and don't think I'd choose to go back to a mouse. (Since I have a USB mouse and it's USB, they coexist under X nicely and I can switch to the mouse the few times I need to be that precise... or when my fingers are covered in oil from the snack food de jour).
It will open files with a twist, you position the mouse pointer with two fingers... use one finger and it inputs arrow keycodes for the correct direction, so text editing and spreadsheets are very cool. Cut/paste/copy gestures as well, and you can edit in your own gestures into the programming (though I have not tried this yet.)
My business is utterly dependent on automation.
Several years ago I had been using Visual Basic and a lot of very ugly hacks (for example, one task we had required drawing a diagram from a database -- the VB app used the dangerous SENDKEYS function to activate and send simulated keystrokes to coreldraw to perform the drawing. Similar kludges existed for making CDs, etc.)
The problem I had with Windows/VB was there was so little command line support by common windows applications. With Linux it's actually been the opposite -- you're far more likely to be able to get the job done on the command line than by somehow communicating with the GUI. Most applications -- be it burning CDs, printing files of a particular format, processing databases, etc -- are controlled by command line unless you absolutely need full GUI to get the job done.
I've found a combination of bash shell scripts and Python code can do pretty much anything I can imagine. Some things that were virtually impossible in the windows environment can be done very easily under linux due to the great command line support for most applications. Also, since file formats are open, it's possible to do things like generate XML under Python that is a formated spreadsheet readable by Gnumeric -- something you just could not do in the Windows environment without essentially running Excel by remote control to build things cell-by-cell.
The big plus was the scripting code was far simpler, much shorter, and since it didn't depend on wierd hacks like sendkeys, more reliable. (I still use Windows and VB, but now it's just all nice, in-application scripts rather than trying to integrate everything.)
I will say that scripting a GUI apps is a bit harder than VB on windows, primarily because the VB-Office integration is much better. But I'm more than happy to trade a few pretty buttons for "dothistask -a -b -c" on the command line.