I have seen trackballs on arcade cabinets since the early 80s at least but I've yet to find one with a mouse.
Before I bought my trackball, I tried to find info about trackballs on the internet and they explained the reason for trackballs in heavy-use applications (arcade, industry, military): Reason #1 is that they're less prone to damage because of collecting dirt. Now with optical mice this problem is more or less delt with. But still you keep the problem that you'll need a wire or batteries, where the wire can get stuck, in the way, or break. And the wireless option can have batteries go empty, or have the mouse stolen/lost. Another big advantage of trackballs is that the mouseball/surface contact is always known. I currently have the optical mouseball from logitech, and this never hops, try that with an optical mouse, I always get hops or strange effects depending on the surface where it's on.
So in summary, can you imagine a sturdid arcade machine with a wired mouse, or some wireless device? It'll just break too often, getting a repair man is such an immense cost that it won't happen, even now.
I want to thank the parent and grandparent for showing these amazingly interesting contributions. It's amazing how little money there is for the actual artists at the end. Seen it this way, there is no way you can screw the artists by downloading their songs from some pirate site, as they were already screwed a thousand times more by their own record company. And I get really sad realizing that these scumbags of the RIAA dare to ask milions of dollars from music listeners who actually do want something good for their artists, and will actually buy original cd's from the artist when they like their music. But after these calculations, I don't see any incentive for anyone to actually buy the cd. No artist will sleep less because of that, they didn't even earn any money from their work to begin with. And maybe it'll be a good thing when the big money-eating record label machinery gets grounded to a halt.
Let's hope that enough artists will be able to start on the smaller, completely individual, labels, and the new ways for distribution can help them get at the top without selling their souls and their works.
I recently bought a trackball as I was interested how it would work, it took a while to figure out how to use it, but I'm really comfortable with it now. It's very nice for 3D viewing of molecules, the molecule actually rotates the same way as you rotate the ball, and also you can do rotations that would require 2 separate mouse movements in one go, very nice. When I'll get really rich I'll buy the spacemouse 3D or whatever it is called:)
Still I couldn't imagine using the trackball for gaming, though, it really requires a lot more practice to do fast, precise, movements than a normal mouse I'd guess (but then again I'm not a gamer anyway).
Not much of a review, is it? Some pics, the scroll wheel is also a button (duh), and other useless statements. Not even good as a slashvertisement, as they give no real reason to buy the thing.
As a left-hand mouse user it's nice to see that symmetric mice are still around, though.
Has a big plus on the educational side as well, but is most probably more expensive. I wonder if you could build such a thing yourself by the way, with a normal projector and a filter to deform the pictures to fit on a circular screen.
Well, I've been to planetaria as a kid, to the big ones with Zeiss projectors even saw the inflatable one at my elementary school once. I can't remember the quality of the inflatable one, but the Zeiss planetaria are really cool, and they can make presentations with it that teach you a lot about the galay and galactic effects. Also I guess this thing is ment for learning, or just as a cool toy of course. Sleep in your bedroom with real stars, yay!! As such, it's a really very cool toy.
I was only hoping that this thing, being in the digital age, would be more interactive, so you could switch the lines showing the galaxies on and off, but for that you'd have to change cards. Or that you could show meteorites or comets, like they do in a real planetarium. Well, maybe in a few years we can view that in our own home:)
I hope this never happens to aunt Tilly. I wonder when XP will really be ready for the desktop.
And if it happens to aunt Tilly, you'll be the one spending part of your free time to fix it. Is this taken into account for in the Total Cost of Ownership studies of Microsoft? XP is not ready for the desktop. From windows 98 it "advanced/regressed" to something that has less direct stability issues is more complicated to maintain as a whole. Furthermore it has lots of amazingly distracting features, just these pop-up balloons that mention if a network cable is plugged/unplugged, an upgrade should be installed or whatever. Most non-tech people I know really start panicking when these things occur. Actually a friend told me once that out of nothing she got a pop-up saying that an update had been installed, and the computer needed to be rebooted. I tried to find out afterwards what it could have been, it might have been a malicious website, program, or something legitimate. Normal "desktop users" have lots of troubles handling all this crap, and even the techies have.
I don't own OS X, but from what I've seen of it it's probably the closest to "OS ready for the desktop" as you can get. The most elegant thing of it all is how you can combine easy and consistent GUI interfaces with command lines for solutions that need more coding. Genious!
Most people that I know only own a notebook, and just use it at one place, max. 2 places. It's just because they don't want the bulky PC case and all the cable mess that comes with it. So for that (PC substitute) it might be a nice thing, but then one thing becomes most important: the keyboard.
FTA:
Another issue with the keyboard is that there is such a huge expanse of chassis in front of it - for someone like me who has small hands, I end up with my forearms resting on what would otherwise be a wrist rest.
From the looks of that, it'll be an ergonomic disaster. You could add an additional keyboard, but then you're almost at the imac again:)
Hmm, I played test drive on the C64 and even bought test drive 2 aftwerwards. It had a shiny picture of a 959 on the cover and you could immediately play with the cool porsche 959 (and some ferrari I guess, but who bothers) in test drive 2, and damn I had a lot and lot of fun doing so:) Ok, it wouldn't matter a bit, as there was no 3d view of the car and you could only see the steering console, but in my imagination, it really was the 959. That's what a game should give!
Sad thing is, this was the standard for a long time! But I have the impression big corporations very happy with standards, as it enables the consumers to buy media players from other producers as well, etc. etc. Think the fuss M$ makes about OpenDocument, java, etc. It's a general trend, but the smaller corporations do win from standards, so there is some hope.
CD specific, there isn't much change the big producers will go back to the old standard, as it's so easily copied, and a new standard won't be here as well, as any copy-protection standard will have to be replaced by another because it will be obsolete in a few months.
Nice way to put it, I really wonder what happens if Russia won't follow here, joining the WTO might be interesting because of the vast amounts of oil and gas they have. Will be the IP vs oil problem for the US, I wonder what will win? If IP will be more important, then when will a country be invaded and 'liberated' just for interfering with the US' IP politics?
I've been pondering a lot about this, the costumer costs don't seem to depend on wether something is outsourced or not, so in the end it'll go to stock holders/CEO, etc. I'm much in favor for spreading wealth neatly over the whole world, and it will go this way at least a bit, but the biggest effect of this world-market-economy will be widening the gap between rich and poor and eroding the middle income group. We need some sort of an 'enrichment protection' to make sure this won't happen. Impossible in the US, but also the EU is more and more going away from this unfortunately.
The fact that you mention the Netherlands here is very appropriate. They had their bureaucratic system so very well optimized that all personal information (age, family ties, religion, etc) was neatly registered at the city halls, much better than in any other country. It was indeed no effort to misuse this information, in Holland more jews were killed more than anywhere else. The best thing the resistence good do was to destroy these registers at the city halls, I wonder if this will repeat itself with DNA registers like these.
I really find this difficult business. Recent example: In Germany there is a toll collect system that automatically registers all trucks on the autobahn, for the sake of collecting tax. Some months ago a police officer was driven offer by a truck and killed. The law wouldn't allow using the data of this toll collect system for helping to find the criminal, though. Unfortunate this may be for the family of this police officer (or for us all, if these criminals are still free), but I think in the end I'm happy about this, because the system doesn't allow us to be registered as 'prospective criminals'. Digital records allow for ease of automation and combination of everything (combine mobile phone location data with DNA and criminal records, draw this in the google map API, etc.), and it is really now that we need to get a clear protection by law for us, personal, people, maybe by now we even need to be protected for the police, instead of by the police.
Put it in another way: how effective did actually all these databases help us solve crimes? Is it really better than 10, 20, 30 years ago?
Don't forget thin clients are also good for lowering noise and heath production. We have offices with more people in there, if everyone had their own full pc it would be way too hot and noisy! Increasing the airco power isn't going to make things cheaper as well. At my work we have therefore IGEL thin clients, size of a set-top box, and just as expensive as the workstations we use, but they're worth every penny for making life in the office more durable.
£ 3.50 for a doner kebab, it's pretty clear where he got his inspiration from in trying to sell overpriced stuff. Jeez man, more than 5 euro for a doner, what a scam!!! And it doesn't really look like a top location to ask for such prices. Or maybe if it's a doner plate and they add extra fries and salad and stuff, but it's hard to see on the picture. Or maybe these are normal prices in the UK/london, and I will wonder even more how normal working-class people can survive out there as the income doesn't really seem to scale along with the prices.
Re:Two possibilites..
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Both the possibilities you mention are valid in this case.
1:) All the people here talking about deleting contents of your harddrive get the point wrong. This guy sold his laptop because it broke and he was too stupid to consider mounting the HD in an other PC and moving the contents before selling it. The HD was still fully functioning, and it took the buyer no effort to get the contents of it, which he was eager to do as he was screwed by buying a broken laptop which status was mentioned as "refurbished".
2:) The buyer is an unreasonable dick, because he could have known that this was not a serious seller. The buyer posts screenshots of the e-bay auction, that make this clear here and here. Just read the text the seller wrote, and you know that this is a no-go. Still, the buyer goes on ranting that the seller described himself as a businessman, yeah, idiot, did he really believe that?
Nasty people will try to screw you when selling material over the internet (and not only there), and stupid people will get screwed at obvious scams. Any interference by law representatives or even the media is just a waste of time in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, your analogy is the clear winner :)
Satire becoming reality, I'm not sure wether I should laugh or cry about it.
Before I bought my trackball, I tried to find info about trackballs on the internet and they explained the reason for trackballs in heavy-use applications (arcade, industry, military): Reason #1 is that they're less prone to damage because of collecting dirt. Now with optical mice this problem is more or less delt with. But still you keep the problem that you'll need a wire or batteries, where the wire can get stuck, in the way, or break. And the wireless option can have batteries go empty, or have the mouse stolen/lost. Another big advantage of trackballs is that the mouseball/surface contact is always known. I currently have the optical mouseball from logitech, and this never hops, try that with an optical mouse, I always get hops or strange effects depending on the surface where it's on.
So in summary, can you imagine a sturdid arcade machine with a wired mouse, or some wireless device? It'll just break too often, getting a repair man is such an immense cost that it won't happen, even now.
Let's hope that enough artists will be able to start on the smaller, completely individual, labels, and the new ways for distribution can help them get at the top without selling their souls and their works.
Still I couldn't imagine using the trackball for gaming, though, it really requires a lot more practice to do fast, precise, movements than a normal mouse I'd guess (but then again I'm not a gamer anyway).
Isn't a (nuclear) weapon unsafe to begin with?
As a left-hand mouse user it's nice to see that symmetric mice are still around, though.
Has a big plus on the educational side as well, but is most probably more expensive. I wonder if you could build such a thing yourself by the way, with a normal projector and a filter to deform the pictures to fit on a circular screen.
I was only hoping that this thing, being in the digital age, would be more interactive, so you could switch the lines showing the galaxies on and off, but for that you'd have to change cards. Or that you could show meteorites or comets, like they do in a real planetarium. Well, maybe in a few years we can view that in our own home :)
And if it happens to aunt Tilly, you'll be the one spending part of your free time to fix it. Is this taken into account for in the Total Cost of Ownership studies of Microsoft? XP is not ready for the desktop. From windows 98 it "advanced/regressed" to something that has less direct stability issues is more complicated to maintain as a whole. Furthermore it has lots of amazingly distracting features, just these pop-up balloons that mention if a network cable is plugged/unplugged, an upgrade should be installed or whatever. Most non-tech people I know really start panicking when these things occur. Actually a friend told me once that out of nothing she got a pop-up saying that an update had been installed, and the computer needed to be rebooted. I tried to find out afterwards what it could have been, it might have been a malicious website, program, or something legitimate. Normal "desktop users" have lots of troubles handling all this crap, and even the techies have.
I don't own OS X, but from what I've seen of it it's probably the closest to "OS ready for the desktop" as you can get. The most elegant thing of it all is how you can combine easy and consistent GUI interfaces with command lines for solutions that need more coding. Genious!
FTA:
Another issue with the keyboard is that there is such a huge expanse of chassis in front of it - for someone like me who has small hands, I end up with my forearms resting on what would otherwise be a wrist rest.
From the looks of that, it'll be an ergonomic disaster. You could add an additional keyboard, but then you're almost at the imac again :)
Hmm, I played test drive on the C64 and even bought test drive 2 aftwerwards. It had a shiny picture of a 959 on the cover and you could immediately play with the cool porsche 959 (and some ferrari I guess, but who bothers) in test drive 2, and damn I had a lot and lot of fun doing so :) Ok, it wouldn't matter a bit, as there was no 3d view of the car and you could only see the steering console, but in my imagination, it really was the 959. That's what a game should give!
Sad thing is, this was the standard for a long time! But I have the impression big corporations very happy with standards, as it enables the consumers to buy media players from other producers as well, etc. etc. Think the fuss M$ makes about OpenDocument, java, etc. It's a general trend, but the smaller corporations do win from standards, so there is some hope.
CD specific, there isn't much change the big producers will go back to the old standard, as it's so easily copied, and a new standard won't be here as well, as any copy-protection standard will have to be replaced by another because it will be obsolete in a few months.
ah, indeed. Then I guess that already more than half of what we pay for a lot of goods is just advertising (e.g. pepsi, mineral water, nike et al.).
Nice way to put it, I really wonder what happens if Russia won't follow here, joining the WTO might be interesting because of the vast amounts of oil and gas they have. Will be the IP vs oil problem for the US, I wonder what will win? If IP will be more important, then when will a country be invaded and 'liberated' just for interfering with the US' IP politics?
Probably we'll already paying for adverts anyway, I just didn't find out the mechanism yet...
I've been pondering a lot about this, the costumer costs don't seem to depend on wether something is outsourced or not, so in the end it'll go to stock holders/CEO, etc. I'm much in favor for spreading wealth neatly over the whole world, and it will go this way at least a bit, but the biggest effect of this world-market-economy will be widening the gap between rich and poor and eroding the middle income group. We need some sort of an 'enrichment protection' to make sure this won't happen. Impossible in the US, but also the EU is more and more going away from this unfortunately.
I really find this difficult business. Recent example: In Germany there is a toll collect system that automatically registers all trucks on the autobahn, for the sake of collecting tax. Some months ago a police officer was driven offer by a truck and killed. The law wouldn't allow using the data of this toll collect system for helping to find the criminal, though. Unfortunate this may be for the family of this police officer (or for us all, if these criminals are still free), but I think in the end I'm happy about this, because the system doesn't allow us to be registered as 'prospective criminals'. Digital records allow for ease of automation and combination of everything (combine mobile phone location data with DNA and criminal records, draw this in the google map API, etc.), and it is really now that we need to get a clear protection by law for us, personal, people, maybe by now we even need to be protected for the police, instead of by the police.
Put it in another way: how effective did actually all these databases help us solve crimes? Is it really better than 10, 20, 30 years ago?
had exactly the same thought, but no mod points unfortunately :)
look at his nickname, it's a joke!
nothing to do with anti-amd sentiments!
(just stating the obvious here, as it seems to be necessary)
Don't forget thin clients are also good for lowering noise and heath production. We have offices with more people in there, if everyone had their own full pc it would be way too hot and noisy! Increasing the airco power isn't going to make things cheaper as well. At my work we have therefore IGEL thin clients, size of a set-top box, and just as expensive as the workstations we use, but they're worth every penny for making life in the office more durable.
feedback is offline now? I got an error page.
amazingly funny! thanx!
£ 3.50 for a doner kebab, it's pretty clear where he got his inspiration from in trying to sell overpriced stuff. Jeez man, more than 5 euro for a doner, what a scam!!! And it doesn't really look like a top location to ask for such prices. Or maybe if it's a doner plate and they add extra fries and salad and stuff, but it's hard to see on the picture. Or maybe these are normal prices in the UK/london, and I will wonder even more how normal working-class people can survive out there as the income doesn't really seem to scale along with the prices.
1:) All the people here talking about deleting contents of your harddrive get the point wrong. This guy sold his laptop because it broke and he was too stupid to consider mounting the HD in an other PC and moving the contents before selling it. The HD was still fully functioning, and it took the buyer no effort to get the contents of it, which he was eager to do as he was screwed by buying a broken laptop which status was mentioned as "refurbished".
2:) The buyer is an unreasonable dick, because he could have known that this was not a serious seller. The buyer posts screenshots of the e-bay auction, that make this clear here and here. Just read the text the seller wrote, and you know that this is a no-go. Still, the buyer goes on ranting that the seller described himself as a businessman, yeah, idiot, did he really believe that?
Nasty people will try to screw you when selling material over the internet (and not only there), and stupid people will get screwed at obvious scams. Any interference by law representatives or even the media is just a waste of time in this case.