Calling the nipple "ridiculously superior" as you struggle to scroll is a joke.
I'd hardly call holding down the scroll button with your thumb as you use your index finger to scroll with the nipple a struggle. And this is without having to remove your hands from the home row on the keyboard.
Wait... what planet do you live on? I mean seriously, I've never met a single person ever who prefers a nipple to a trackpad. Especially when it's one of apple's excellent multi-touch trackpads.
I have a Thinkpad T30 that I've owned for five years. It has the eraser nub and the trackpad. I've worked very hard to use the trackpad to try and get used to it. I even made a conscious effort to use only the trackpad for about a month and a half. It just doesn't work for me. At this point I've given up on it and just use the eraser nub for everything. When I purchase a new laptop, the presence of the eraser nub will be a primary selling point for me.
That's a great idea but one problem with it is that there's no way to differentiate between the computer doing work and someone not interactively using the computer. If you have to leave a program running overnight, say to do a many hour-long calculation, then the system is going to hibernate when you haven't used the computer for 30 minutes. When you get in in the morning, the calculation still needs to be run and you've lost that time the the computer could have been working overnight.
I've been using the Naturally Speaking 9 Medical for the last eight months. I bought it to reduce the amount of typing I have to do for lengthy papers and documentation because of RSI injuries. I have a few responses based on my own experience.
1. 99% accuracy rate is actually pretty bad in the real world. In a typical document, you might expect 12-15 words per line - so you have one error every 7 lines or so.
I make more mistakes than that just from typing. Of course, I catch and correct them faster when using the keyboard than I do when dictating. How many times do you have to use the backspace key every seven lines or so?
Part of reducing mistakes is learning that dictating clearly is a different skill than typing. Just because you can type well doesn't mean that you can speak and articulate your words clearly. Dictating to a computer has more in common with giving a presentation. If you litter your speech with "um," "ahh," and "ya know," then the program will dutifully represent that. Garbage in, garbage out. What's helped me is that I have a lot of experience with public speaking and narration. I've also produced a lot of training videos for companies that I've worked for which involves recording voice overs or presenting to the camera. So I'm comfortable "talking to myself" and learning to prepare what I want to say before I begin my delivery. These are useful skills that anyone can learn.
One of the first things I did when I got the program was try to read some of the documents that I had previously produced. There were some words that it wasn't recognizing correctly, and I later realized that these words were also in my custom dictionary in Word. You can train the software on individual words so I opened up my custom dictionary and taught it all of the words in there.
When dictating I don't worry too much about the mistakes because the dictation is just to get a first draft into the computer. Once I'm done, I proofread the document and use the keyboard to make corrections. Every now and then it'll hose some word, but if it's a word that I know that it knows, I'll just say the word "correction" and repeat the word clearly so that I know to fix that when editing the document. If it's a word that it just keeps getting stuck on I can select it and train it on the spot, or just type the correct word and then keep dictating. I usually take the latter approach so I don't get too distracted from dictating. But, this is a rare occurrence. As you keep tweaking its recognition, it gets better.
2. 99% accuracy rate is only achievable under ideal circumstances - ie. using a top quality microphone hooked up to a good soundcard in an environment with very little background noise and no echo. Basically, circumstances you only get in a half-decent recording studio. In the real world, you seldom get this.
Just such a microphone headset comes with the program when you buy it. It works well since it's a unidirectional mic and needs to be close to the sound source to pick up sound. I've used it in an environment with noise, including at work with other people around and at home with the TV on, and I haven't had any problem with it recognizing what I was saying.
3. Unless you happen to be blessed with amazing self-discipline (and/or can guarantee that nobody is going to approach you while you're working). Otherwise you get back to work after a distraction and find yourself having to delete a conversation you just had with a co-worker.
Or you just learn to say "microphone off" and it turns off the recognition engine. It can tell if you are saying it as a command or if it's part of a sentence that you are dictating and do the right thing. The program can recognize a bunch of different commands and apply them depending upon which program you are using. I must admit that I don't really use this feature. Browsing the
Curious enough to write 2 posts on Slashdot but not enough to type "7/7" into Google, unless of course you've never heard of Google.
If you had tried that, like I had before posting the first time, then you would have seen that Google thinks that you want to divide 7 by 7 and returns an answer of one. It's frustrating that people would rather respond and argue than just either answer or ignore my post that was made in good faith. Anyway, just forget it. I guess it's not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Did you even bother to read the post that he was responding to? Of course not. If you had, you would have seen that his point was spot on. The person he was responding to was advocating switching to a different operating system to run LyX. The person that you so rudely responded to was pointing out that people use their operating systems for more than just writing, even if they are professional writers. Switching for the sake of one program is an unlikely event.
Don't people read posts before responding anymore? He wasn't asking for the origin of the quote. He was wondering why this post and this post are modded up when they have the same lame joke in them.
Yeah, that didn't come out right. What my dad always says is that, "if you don't get it in writing, it doesn't mean squat." I didn't mean to imply that there can't be legal agreements between parties without having something in writing. But in general, if you don't know someone and they are promising a lot, it doesn't hurt to say "write that down and we have a deal" to see if they are serious or not. Both my dad and myself have run into numerous occasions with sales people who talk big and promise everything but then backpedal when you want to get everything documented before purchase.
He got his supervisor. She insisted that the drive belonged to Apple, even though I had paid an inflated price to buy a new one. She showed me the language on the reverse side of the form I signed. It was even worse than she had said. There was no guarantee that the drive they had just put in my Mac was new! It might have been someone else's defective drive.
I just can't sympathize with this guy. It's always important to read and understand the things you sign. He says "I think they should tell you up front, before they do the work, that you're not getting the old drive back." yet they did tell him up front. He didn't choose to listen, or in this case read. Who in their right mind signs a legal contract without understanding, or even knowing, what they are agreeing to? My parents taught me a lot of life lessons and two that come to mind here are:
If you don't have an agreement in writing, you don't really have an agreement.
Never sign anything without having read and understood what you are signing.
Making excuses about "fine print" is just a way for lazy people to justify their laziness when it comes to reading a contract. This guy has no one to blame but himself.
Please tag a story 'typo' when you see this. It'll alert us admins to a problem and it'll get fixed in probably less time than it takes to write a comment about it...
How about performing some QA on an article before posting it? If the approver, in this case CmdrTaco, had clicked on the link, they would have seen that it didn't work. Comments like yours show that the Slashdot management want to do as little work as possible. It's also a clear demonstration of why I still don't subscribe.
Looks like Dvorak--as many others--are totally missing the point of the OLPC program.
Dvorak isn't missing the point. He's trolling for ad dollars. He admits as much. Don't click on the link and feed the troll. Nothing to see here, just move along.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, that might be worth checking out.
What is a multi-touch trackpad?
That's a great idea but one problem with it is that there's no way to differentiate between the computer doing work and someone not interactively using the computer. If you have to leave a program running overnight, say to do a many hour-long calculation, then the system is going to hibernate when you haven't used the computer for 30 minutes. When you get in in the morning, the calculation still needs to be run and you've lost that time the the computer could have been working overnight.
I make more mistakes than that just from typing. Of course, I catch and correct them faster when using the keyboard than I do when dictating. How many times do you have to use the backspace key every seven lines or so?
Part of reducing mistakes is learning that dictating clearly is a different skill than typing. Just because you can type well doesn't mean that you can speak and articulate your words clearly. Dictating to a computer has more in common with giving a presentation. If you litter your speech with "um," "ahh," and "ya know," then the program will dutifully represent that. Garbage in, garbage out. What's helped me is that I have a lot of experience with public speaking and narration. I've also produced a lot of training videos for companies that I've worked for which involves recording voice overs or presenting to the camera. So I'm comfortable "talking to myself" and learning to prepare what I want to say before I begin my delivery. These are useful skills that anyone can learn.
One of the first things I did when I got the program was try to read some of the documents that I had previously produced. There were some words that it wasn't recognizing correctly, and I later realized that these words were also in my custom dictionary in Word. You can train the software on individual words so I opened up my custom dictionary and taught it all of the words in there.
When dictating I don't worry too much about the mistakes because the dictation is just to get a first draft into the computer. Once I'm done, I proofread the document and use the keyboard to make corrections. Every now and then it'll hose some word, but if it's a word that I know that it knows, I'll just say the word "correction" and repeat the word clearly so that I know to fix that when editing the document. If it's a word that it just keeps getting stuck on I can select it and train it on the spot, or just type the correct word and then keep dictating. I usually take the latter approach so I don't get too distracted from dictating. But, this is a rare occurrence. As you keep tweaking its recognition, it gets better.
Just such a microphone headset comes with the program when you buy it. It works well since it's a unidirectional mic and needs to be close to the sound source to pick up sound. I've used it in an environment with noise, including at work with other people around and at home with the TV on, and I haven't had any problem with it recognizing what I was saying.
Or you just learn to say "microphone off" and it turns off the recognition engine. It can tell if you are saying it as a command or if it's part of a sentence that you are dictating and do the right thing. The program can recognize a bunch of different commands and apply them depending upon which program you are using. I must admit that I don't really use this feature. Browsing the
Did you even bother to read the post that he was responding to? Of course not. If you had, you would have seen that his point was spot on. The person he was responding to was advocating switching to a different operating system to run LyX. The person that you so rudely responded to was pointing out that people use their operating systems for more than just writing, even if they are professional writers. Switching for the sake of one program is an unlikely event.
Slashdotted already. Here's a mirror: http://davisfreeberg.com.nyud.net:8090/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/
Don't people read posts before responding anymore? He wasn't asking for the origin of the quote. He was wondering why this post and this post are modded up when they have the same lame joke in them.
Yeah, that didn't come out right. What my dad always says is that, "if you don't get it in writing, it doesn't mean squat." I didn't mean to imply that there can't be legal agreements between parties without having something in writing. But in general, if you don't know someone and they are promising a lot, it doesn't hurt to say "write that down and we have a deal" to see if they are serious or not. Both my dad and myself have run into numerous occasions with sales people who talk big and promise everything but then backpedal when you want to get everything documented before purchase.
- If you don't have an agreement in writing, you don't really have an agreement.
- Never sign anything without having read and understood what you are signing.
Making excuses about "fine print" is just a way for lazy people to justify their laziness when it comes to reading a contract. This guy has no one to blame but himself.This is a good reason to use an encrypted filesystem if you can.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like REEM-A is giving me the finger.
While your link is informative, he asked why their home page isn't clean. Their home page still looks like something from 1998.
To be sure of what? The OP's comment made more sense.