You really should check out Sidetrack as it fully customizes the trackpad.
Almost a year ago now I was talking to a couple of Apple Employees (Powerbook and Powermac Product Managers and a Higher Education Representative) and not surprisingly this very issue came up. They were all throughly impressed by SideTrack and its usefullness in scrolling both vertically and horizontally and right-clicking. I tried to convince them that the powerbook trackpad button could have multiple sensors under the single button so that your average computer user would never need to know but that your tinkering geek would be able to set it up so that it could be a left/right(/middle?) button just by pressing different parts of it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it doesn't have multiple sensors, but they might be hardwired in parallel so that they cannot be detected individually.
I really miss reveal codes. For those of you who don't know, reveal codes in WordPerfect will show you the basic document source (think of it as similar to raw html; as IMO being able to view raw html when designing a website it incredibly useful, so is being able to "Reveal Codes" when working on a document). One can double click on a tag (say a Font:12pt tag) and the appropriate box pops up (in this example the Font box). Unfortunately, I cannot use WordPerfect anymore since I mostly use my Powerbook for everything (and VPC is not worth it) so I would really love reveal codes in OOo, even more than a native Mac OS X version.
For those of you who have never used WordPerfect, you're missing out and I suggest you go find a demo or something and use it for a while. The newest version has a couple of different "modes" such as imitating Word and such that did not exist back in the old days so I cannot really comment on those. The vast majority of people I have found who have used both WordPerfect and Word prefer WordPerfect for a variety of reasons, I just suggest you try it out and if you decide to buy it, its much cheaper than Word.
Microsoft is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong....
Without the elipses it's:
Microsoft is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong yet in this specific case.
If you would like any evidence just look at the history of IE v. Netscape, WordPerfect v. Word, Windows v. OS/2, and MS-DOS (or should I say QDOS) v. the other OSes of the time.
Technology News' Report and PCWorld's Article on the new disc that will contain a backwards-compatible (4.6 GB) DVD layer and a higher definition (15 GB) HD-DVD layer of which production is planned to begin in October or November of next year.
This seems like this could be a major factor in the formatwar between HD-DVD and the higher capacity Blu-ray.
A couple of randomly placed magnets underneath the roulette wheel by the house could defeat this sort of technology, at least for a while - but they'd have to be weak enough and placed not-quite-randomly to not be noticed by anything other than a computer. Force the computer to take too long to return a calculation so that bets cannot be place.
Or they could use electromagnets on a randomly cycling pattern so that any given spin some of them are off and some are on, making the computer simply observe for a large number of spins before it can do anything - and then maybe change the pattern every hour.
Water vapor is not as bad as CO2 for one reason: there is already so much water vapor in the atmosphere that it absorbs 100% of the light coming through the atmosphere with frequencies around its absorption lines. So doubling the amount of water vapor in our atmosphere has 0 effect on the amount of energy radiated by our planet. CO2 at its present concentration, on the other hand, only absorbs a fraction of the light around its absorption lines. Therefore, increasing CO2 concentration increases the absorption of light being radiated from earth.
This explanation is 10x easier with pictures, but I'm too lazy and should be doing my physics set.
There have been many comments about using gamma/X-rays in order to write to discs and getting even better storage and people saying it's not possible because it would go right through any disc.
Last year in nuclear physics lab we did an experiment where we had a gamma ray source and a detector and took various measurements of how far they could go through various compounds (aluminum, copper, and lead). Let me say that 30 cm of aluminum blocked less than 10 cm of copper which blocked less than a cm of lead. I bet if they made the discs with gold* instead of whatever they use now they might reflect enough of low-frequency gamma or x-rays to read the discs, despite them being really expensive.
*I think too many people microwave discs to let people use lead.
**Techically gamma rays are produced from nuclear transition and X-rays are produced from high energy electronic transitions. I am pretty sure they would not use radioactive materials to obtain gamma rays and that they would use electricty to obtain X-rays but since this convention has been ignored so far, I didn't bother with correcting it in the actual interesting part of my post.
When I make that comparison I usually say it like this: what would you prefer?
1 kg (2 lbs) of Uranium, reprocessed and converted into 0.25 kg (roughly) of waste to be locked up somewhere and 0.75 kg reusable fuel
18 tons of coal, the byproducts of which are left in our atmosphere for us and our descendents to breathe
11,000 liters (3000 gal.) of oil, the byproducts of which are also left in our atmosphere
12,500 cubic meters (12.5 million liters) of natuaral gas, the byproducts of which you would never guess would just be left in our atmosphere for us to breathe.
I'd rather have the waste buried and affect those that generate the electricity than into the atmosphere and screwing over anyone in the southern hemisphere that dones't want to die of skin cancer and generally making people less healthy. (FYI, I live in Los Angeles, which is nowhere near as bad as it was, but still really sucks when there are days that one cannot see the mountains north of where I live and yet one could easily walk a couple miles to the base of the mountains and make it to the top in less than 6 hours -- it's sickening to know that we're breathing this stuff.)
The people with asthma? Or is asthma bullshit too? I know one girl with asthma in my hall that has to avoid smokers. Not only that, but she cannot be in a (motel) room that has had the smoke absorbed into everything. And spraying the room with perfume (so that most people don't notice the smoke) doesn't help at all, since the smoke is still there and gives her an asthma attack. So it kills asthmatics, do you really think it's not unhealthful for everyone else? Then why do people cough when they breathe in second-hand smoke? Because their body doesn't like it but it's really not harmful at all? Maybe I should make a cigarrette out of poison oak or something.
So the question is WHY didn't it make it out of the lab? Did it cost too much to produce? That's the only real possibility I can think of - I don't think Intel's Marketing Division had absolute power over the company in 1997 to push the MHz agenda.
I am only an ameteur astronomer but wouldn't a more valid comparison be to (the slightly lesser known) Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea? For those of you who are not familiar there are twin 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, which I'd be willing to be has infinitely better seeing (read: atmospheric conditions; the light is distorted less) than New Mexico.
In addition, one can add instrumentation and the like to ground based telescopes and not really to space based onces - hence, Keck would be a much better comparison.
Finally, I don't understand why such a big deal is made of the implied revolutionary methods that are used to combine the images from each scope. If anyone knows, is this different from any other dual telescope setup?
Or perhaps it does at this stage since I think Safari and Webcore are still officially "beta"
Safari is no longer in beta; it's version 1.2 now.
Simple test is to delete it (completely, including emptying the Trash) and see if apps that you know use the HTML components still work (Mail.app may well ahve its own HTML parser built-in).
I thought that they both used the same HTMl parser (webkit) but I could be wrong.
Not to mention, since when do Apple sell Macs with Netscape installed in leiu of Safari?
It has been a while since Mac OS shipped with Netscape. It does, however ship with IE AND Safari.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Just a side note: Safari is integrated into Mac OS X (share some GUI code with the rest of the OS and probably some HTMl rendering with Mail.app) and if a user decides that he doesn't want it installed all he has to do is delete it - why can't Microsoft make this work?
However the real question is not why can't one remove IE, but why can't there be a level playing field? Why does M$ get to use its OS monopoly to prevent OEMs from also installing Netscape, Mozilla, or any other browser? Anyway, is any of this a surprise? No; not at all.
Here goes my ability to mod this thread but let me explain something to you. Manned space programs are risky (Columbia, Challenger, Apollo 1, etc.) and really freaking expensive. Unmanned mission are cheap, safe (not always the most reliable since there are no human to fix things but there is also less stuff that can go wrong - Apollo 13), and bring back REAL SCIENTIFIC DATA. REAL SCIENTIFIC DATA! Don't get me wrong, I think manned missions are important. We need to be able to do things like service the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites.
What raw materials are we going to run out of in less than a century: oil, natural gas, and coal maybe (it's debateable but that isn't my point). We still have a HUGE source we can use to generate electricity: nuclear power plants. We aren't going to run out of uranium any time soon.
And, FYI, I haven't seen a big ball of bright flame in some time (and not because I do not go outside). The sun does not burn, and hence it does not have flames (feel free to look up the definition of the word flame. It is hot due to nuclear reactions mostly in the core and emits via standard blackbody radiation.
So what kind of apps (I mean, apart from Doom 3) do end users need this kind of grunt for? 3GHz? 3.6GHz? 4Ghz?! If Architects could use AutoCAD 2000 on a 950MHz cpu, without complaint, what has changed? Obviously a speed increase is nice, but three or four times that?
IDL, IRAF, Mathematica, Matlab, etc. In other words, physicsists and astrophysicists can always use faster computers for their everyday work. Even more so, (astro)physicists running fluid dynamical systems of galaxies need every bit of speed possible.
Granted going from 8GB to 16 GB of RAM is the largest benefit but increasing a CPU from 2 GHz to 4 GHz would also help out a lot (though 3.2->3.4 would not be worth it).
I also know some molecular biologists that run detailed simulations about, umm, molecular biology (excuse me but I am not a biologist) and are always looking to get all the speed they can as well.
While scientists certainly do not represent the average computer user, there is demand for fast computers in research.
I hope someone appreciates this as I am giving up my right to moderate but felt that I should mention it because I didn't see any mention of it.
You obviously havn't had the, err, "pleasure" or having watched The Core. If you have not seen it, I recommend you watch it (and make fun of it) and take into account that not a single thing in that movie is plausible in any world at all similar to ours.
Slashdot Mirror
You really should check out Sidetrack as it fully customizes the trackpad.
Almost a year ago now I was talking to a couple of Apple Employees (Powerbook and Powermac Product Managers and a Higher Education Representative) and not surprisingly this very issue came up. They were all throughly impressed by SideTrack and its usefullness in scrolling both vertically and horizontally and right-clicking. I tried to convince them that the powerbook trackpad button could have multiple sensors under the single button so that your average computer user would never need to know but that your tinkering geek would be able to set it up so that it could be a left/right(/middle?) button just by pressing different parts of it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it doesn't have multiple sensors, but they might be hardwired in parallel so that they cannot be detected individually.
I really miss reveal codes. For those of you who don't know, reveal codes in WordPerfect will show you the basic document source (think of it as similar to raw html; as IMO being able to view raw html when designing a website it incredibly useful, so is being able to "Reveal Codes" when working on a document). One can double click on a tag (say a Font:12pt tag) and the appropriate box pops up (in this example the Font box). Unfortunately, I cannot use WordPerfect anymore since I mostly use my Powerbook for everything (and VPC is not worth it) so I would really love reveal codes in OOo, even more than a native Mac OS X version.
For those of you who have never used WordPerfect, you're missing out and I suggest you go find a demo or something and use it for a while. The newest version has a couple of different "modes" such as imitating Word and such that did not exist back in the old days so I cannot really comment on those. The vast majority of people I have found who have used both WordPerfect and Word prefer WordPerfect for a variety of reasons, I just suggest you try it out and if you decide to buy it, its much cheaper than Word.
Microsoft is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong....
Without the elipses it's:
Microsoft is doing nothing legally, technically, ethically, morally or wrong yet in this specific case.
If you would like any evidence just look at the history of IE v. Netscape, WordPerfect v. Word, Windows v. OS/2, and MS-DOS (or should I say QDOS) v. the other OSes of the time.
Could someone tell me how all of these Desktop search tools compare to things like Launchbar, Butler, and Quicksilver?
Thanks.
This article first appeared in the Landscape magazine, Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 1989. And the event the article was about was almost a century ago!
So I have some more links for y'all.
Technology News' Report and PCWorld's Article on the new disc that will contain a backwards-compatible (4.6 GB) DVD layer and a higher definition (15 GB) HD-DVD layer of which production is planned to begin in October or November of next year.
This seems like this could be a major factor in the format war between HD-DVD and the higher capacity Blu-ray.
A couple of randomly placed magnets underneath the roulette wheel by the house could defeat this sort of technology, at least for a while - but they'd have to be weak enough and placed not-quite-randomly to not be noticed by anything other than a computer. Force the computer to take too long to return a calculation so that bets cannot be place.
Or they could use electromagnets on a randomly cycling pattern so that any given spin some of them are off and some are on, making the computer simply observe for a large number of spins before it can do anything - and then maybe change the pattern every hour.
1 calorie = thermal energy required to change the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree (Celsius).
100 degrees between freezing and boiling, a bit easier than 212-32=180, wtf?!
Note that both of these advantages are present for Kelvin, which has the added bonus that zero = 0.
Plus, most of the world uses it, so why use something different. (Yes, I am an American, but I think often in metric.)
Water vapor is not as bad as CO2 for one reason: there is already so much water vapor in the atmosphere that it absorbs 100% of the light coming through the atmosphere with frequencies around its absorption lines. So doubling the amount of water vapor in our atmosphere has 0 effect on the amount of energy radiated by our planet. CO2 at its present concentration, on the other hand, only absorbs a fraction of the light around its absorption lines. Therefore, increasing CO2 concentration increases the absorption of light being radiated from earth.
This explanation is 10x easier with pictures, but I'm too lazy and should be doing my physics set.
There have been many comments about using gamma/X-rays in order to write to discs and getting even better storage and people saying it's not possible because it would go right through any disc.
Last year in nuclear physics lab we did an experiment where we had a gamma ray source and a detector and took various measurements of how far they could go through various compounds (aluminum, copper, and lead). Let me say that 30 cm of aluminum blocked less than 10 cm of copper which blocked less than a cm of lead. I bet if they made the discs with gold* instead of whatever they use now they might reflect enough of low-frequency gamma or x-rays to read the discs, despite them being really expensive.
*I think too many people microwave discs to let people use lead.
**Techically gamma rays are produced from nuclear transition and X-rays are produced from high energy electronic transitions. I am pretty sure they would not use radioactive materials to obtain gamma rays and that they would use electricty to obtain X-rays but since this convention has been ignored so far, I didn't bother with correcting it in the actual interesting part of my post.
why not just use X-Rays?
Because I want to have kids.
When I make that comparison I usually say it like this: what would you prefer?
1 kg (2 lbs) of Uranium, reprocessed and converted into 0.25 kg (roughly) of waste to be locked up somewhere and 0.75 kg reusable fuel
18 tons of coal, the byproducts of which are left in our atmosphere for us and our descendents to breathe
11,000 liters (3000 gal.) of oil, the byproducts of which are also left in our atmosphere
12,500 cubic meters (12.5 million liters) of natuaral gas, the byproducts of which you would never guess would just be left in our atmosphere for us to breathe.
I'd rather have the waste buried and affect those that generate the electricity than into the atmosphere and screwing over anyone in the southern hemisphere that dones't want to die of skin cancer and generally making people less healthy. (FYI, I live in Los Angeles, which is nowhere near as bad as it was, but still really sucks when there are days that one cannot see the mountains north of where I live and yet one could easily walk a couple miles to the base of the mountains and make it to the top in less than 6 hours -- it's sickening to know that we're breathing this stuff.)
The people with asthma? Or is asthma bullshit too? I know one girl with asthma in my hall that has to avoid smokers. Not only that, but she cannot be in a (motel) room that has had the smoke absorbed into everything. And spraying the room with perfume (so that most people don't notice the smoke) doesn't help at all, since the smoke is still there and gives her an asthma attack. So it kills asthmatics, do you really think it's not unhealthful for everyone else? Then why do people cough when they breathe in second-hand smoke? Because their body doesn't like it but it's really not harmful at all? Maybe I should make a cigarrette out of poison oak or something.
So the question is WHY didn't it make it out of the lab? Did it cost too much to produce? That's the only real possibility I can think of - I don't think Intel's Marketing Division had absolute power over the company in 1997 to push the MHz agenda.
Becuase when written like this it holds for relativistic (crotch)rockets. Weeee! (If you look really hard you can even see Hawking.)
I am only an ameteur astronomer but wouldn't a more valid comparison be to (the slightly lesser known) Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea? For those of you who are not familiar there are twin 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, which I'd be willing to be has infinitely better seeing (read: atmospheric conditions; the light is distorted less) than New Mexico.
In addition, one can add instrumentation and the like to ground based telescopes and not really to space based onces - hence, Keck would be a much better comparison.
Finally, I don't understand why such a big deal is made of the implied revolutionary methods that are used to combine the images from each scope. If anyone knows, is this different from any other dual telescope setup?
Or perhaps it does at this stage since I think Safari and Webcore are still officially "beta"
Safari is no longer in beta; it's version 1.2 now.
Simple test is to delete it (completely, including emptying the Trash) and see if apps that you know use the HTML components still work (Mail.app may well ahve its own HTML parser built-in).
I thought that they both used the same HTMl parser (webkit) but I could be wrong.
Not to mention, since when do Apple sell Macs with Netscape installed in leiu of Safari?
It has been a while since Mac OS shipped with Netscape. It does, however ship with IE AND Safari.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Just a side note: Safari is integrated into Mac OS X (share some GUI code with the rest of the OS and probably some HTMl rendering with Mail.app) and if a user decides that he doesn't want it installed all he has to do is delete it - why can't Microsoft make this work?
However the real question is not why can't one remove IE, but why can't there be a level playing field? Why does M$ get to use its OS monopoly to prevent OEMs from also installing Netscape, Mozilla, or any other browser? Anyway, is any of this a surprise? No; not at all.
-Scott
You are aware that there is a nuclear power plant on property owned by Camp Pendelton? Please stay away. Go to Hawaii or something.
Yes they do.
Here goes my ability to mod this thread but let me explain something to you. Manned space programs are risky (Columbia, Challenger, Apollo 1, etc.) and really freaking expensive. Unmanned mission are cheap, safe (not always the most reliable since there are no human to fix things but there is also less stuff that can go wrong - Apollo 13), and bring back REAL SCIENTIFIC DATA. REAL SCIENTIFIC DATA! Don't get me wrong, I think manned missions are important. We need to be able to do things like service the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites.
What raw materials are we going to run out of in less than a century: oil, natural gas, and coal maybe (it's debateable but that isn't my point). We still have a HUGE source we can use to generate electricity: nuclear power plants. We aren't going to run out of uranium any time soon.
And, FYI, I haven't seen a big ball of bright flame in some time (and not because I do not go outside). The sun does not burn, and hence it does not have flames (feel free to look up the definition of the word flame. It is hot due to nuclear reactions mostly in the core and emits via standard blackbody radiation.
Maybe I just should have modded you flamebait.
So what kind of apps (I mean, apart from Doom 3) do end users need this kind of grunt for? 3GHz? 3.6GHz? 4Ghz?! If Architects could use AutoCAD 2000 on a 950MHz cpu, without complaint, what has changed? Obviously a speed increase is nice, but three or four times that?
IDL, IRAF, Mathematica, Matlab, etc. In other words, physicsists and astrophysicists can always use faster computers for their everyday work. Even more so, (astro)physicists running fluid dynamical systems of galaxies need every bit of speed possible.
Granted going from 8GB to 16 GB of RAM is the largest benefit but increasing a CPU from 2 GHz to 4 GHz would also help out a lot (though 3.2->3.4 would not be worth it).
I also know some molecular biologists that run detailed simulations about, umm, molecular biology (excuse me but I am not a biologist) and are always looking to get all the speed they can as well.
While scientists certainly do not represent the average computer user, there is demand for fast computers in research.
I hope someone appreciates this as I am giving up my right to moderate but felt that I should mention it because I didn't see any mention of it.
I have a gmail invite....let me know (scottDOTmedlingATgmail) if she doesn't get one by this afternoon or so and I can invite her.
-scott
You obviously havn't had the, err, "pleasure" or having watched The Core. If you have not seen it, I recommend you watch it (and make fun of it) and take into account that not a single thing in that movie is plausible in any world at all similar to ours.
MS Word's skip of 4 version numbers.
-scott