Same here - I've had two Toshibas (an A15 and an A75) and both ran out of steam way too early. I had to replace the hard drive and the cooling system literally days after the warranty ran out on the A15 (before the screen eventually crapped out), and then had to have EVERYTHING replaced on the A75. It's nearly all new components - only the keyboard and chassis are original. It's terribly frustrating, because I love the displays and keyboards on Toshibas. But like you, it's the last one I'm buying until Toshiba (at the very least) steps up and fixes these kinds of things at the manfacturing stage. The nice lady at the licensed Toshiba repair center had so many of them stacked up in the shop when I brought it in, she actually gave me the wrong one when I picked it up. Apparently all of them had the same problems.
And I agree with someone else in the thread - their phone support people are argumentative and contradict themselves. I was told I could arrange a swap on the A75 - that Toshiba could overnight me a voucher for the machine, I'd send them the old one, and then go get a new one at any store that carries comparable Toshibas. Cool, right? Sadly, this was apparently simply a lie to make me happy. The next person I talked to just laughed. Lordy.
So I guess it's Powerbooks for me. Or for that money, maybe a ThinkPad. Nice keyboards on those.
So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
All good, as far as I'm concerned. MSN's search has been proven time and time again to be flawed, if not flat-out biased (not that Google hasn't had allegations on that front, too), and as long as a war is fought in the trenches with innovation to attract users and not in the courtroom with lawyers, the end-user generally benefits.
I hear you, but 15,000,000 is a lot of computers. If a given finite area is blanketed with enough of them to basically negate their monetary value, they go back to being simply tools instead of currency.
Additionally, the countries listed here (Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa) all have very destitute areas but are by no means uniformly desperately poor. Whether this means that there's infrastructure to equitably distribute these computers or that the lowest tier of families will still be ignored in a state-administered program for the same cultural or economic bias reasons that keep them down otherwise is probably still up in the air.
All griping and negative guessing aside, this is still a VERY cool thing and should be encouraged. If 15,000,000 get distributed successfully, they'll make another 15,000,000. And so on. Moreover, accessibility to computers helps people learn to build them (probably by first learning to repair them) - it's a very self-fulfilling thing that just needs a gentle push to start rolling.
So even if the first pass doesn't solve the world's problems, it's certainly a step in a better direction and beats hell out of not doing it.
According to our very careful examination of Mary Poppins (we have a very diligent daughter), Mary Poppins carries a floor lamp in her carpet bag. This kind of takes all the magic out of that, no?
As I think of it, though, she DOES also carry a plant. This innovation could be used as a grow light for all kinds of, er, lucrative and preferably quickly moveable crops. Why, oh why, didn't something like this come out when I was in a position to use my entrepreneurial side less morally?
Indeed. I just went and strolled through their entire site - as another poster suggested, they seem to have an interestingly un-academic focus, and an almost alarming preoccupation with very angry cat-like things of some sort. I had quite a hard time finding any images to load - it's pretty sparse, over all. My main goal, of course, was to assist the/. masses in "hacking" their site.
These kids did something wrong - as was mentioned in another post, it kind of IS like leaving your keys in the car, and it IS wrong for someone else to come along and take your car because of it. Just because the school was dumb does not excuse the behavior of the students.
HOWEVER, the school was profoundly, fantastically, comically dumb. Changing grades or altering the school site or looking at porn or whatever would be more clearly against policy - if TFA is accurate, I can see how this could happen simply by realizing that they had admin privs and nosing around a bit with them.
It's getting to the point where you can't roll your eyes and say, "kids!" anymore. But "administrators and authority figures!" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily and dismissively.
More to the point, let's look at who is going to take this little "quiz" - people who are generally disatisfied with their employers. Taking that into account, this little FastCompany survey/quiz/test/whatever is silly at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. Show me anyone who doesn't like their boss who wouldn't answer yes to most of these questions. Perhaps there should be another bank of questions like, "do you feel anger toward your boss when he/she tells you to stop posting acerbic vitriol on Slashdot about surveys and get back to work?"
I hate to take such a likely intentionally light-hearted thing so seriously (as that kind of behavior is, of course, never tolerated on Slashdot!), but this kind of stuff gets me all riled up. There are probably a thousand employees around the world RIGHT NOW taking this little quiz for themselves and skewing their own results by virtue of being the type of person who suspects his or her boss of lunacy enough to take the little quiz for themselves. And they will all go out drinking with their co-workers and proudly state as fact that the boss is a nutjob of the most dangerous caliber based on scientific results.
Okay, I'll simmer down. I know I'm getting all frothy, and maybe this isn't the best example of the circumstances that piss me off so much. But there's already so much negative, adversarial stuff out there, why do something silly and sensationalist couched in a story that seems to give it scientific authority?
I think I would have asked him whether he felt responsible for the bad things on the Web. I don't think the interviewer beat THAT dead horse enough.
Honestly, the Web has turned into its own viable organism, and I seem to hear a lot of people tracing back to Berners-Lee (or Al Gore, depending on who you believe) as the person responsible for dirty pictures on their son's computer (Mom, if you're reading this, I swear that picture of the lady and the horse just appeared on my screen).
I do wish someone who gets some time with someone like Tim Berners-Lee would ask MORE questions (or followup questions) on the "web in 30 years" philosophical/futurist front (after all, they have access to the mind of the person who started the ball rolling) and fewer repetitive questions about the lurid underbelly of humanity, which is really all that the "bad" sites are reflecting.
It just seems ironic and pointless to waste as many lines on that particular Web page asking the father of the Web whether he feels responsible for the other dirty Web pages out there.
Wow - that's got to be the fastest reply with comfortingly humorous cartoon renderings of Slashdotter's speculations that I've ever seen!
Personally, these would drive me batty. But I can certainly see the value in them.
Mostly, though, I like the sea of blinking LEDs when I walk through my dark office on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night (don't worry - I work at home) - I find it very Star Trekkie and makes me feel like more of a cool dude than I do when the lights are on and you can see my stacks of work and empty Mountain Dew cans. These lights would blow my one moment of self-envy. So I respectfully say, "no thank you," to innovation.
'Course, in the event of a terrorist attack on my house (which seems to be a disproportionate source of concern around here), my one-man office will be a blind madhouse of chaotic fervor. Good thing it's near the kitchen where I keep a flashlight.
Or maybe this anti-terrorism application doesn't really apply to me...
I don't think I did any such thing. What I did say, however, is that schools should have dedicated computer departments rather than trying to tack it on to the curriculum with existing staff. The reason I think this is that most teachers are stretched so thin as it is that focus on individual students' educational needs is impractical and too detrimental to other students to be possible.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear - I feel that teachers are being double-booked by underfunded school systems and therefore kids aren't getting the full benefit of a department dedicated to computer science. This is going to be essential to their future success - as full an understanding as possible of how computers work and how they can be used is going to define one of the major components in their employability and flexibility later on. And being taught computer science by a teacher who was handed the task late in the game isn't going to do them any extra favors.
Also, what you're talking about is taking an academic teacher and asking him or her to add a coaching gig (and before anyone else barks at me, please understand that I do appreciate the intelligence necessary to coach sports - it's just a different mindframe than computer science or mathematics). It would be different to take, say, the 70-year-old football coach from my high school (that and coaching JV and varsity wrestling were his full-time job) and ask him to teach computer science. He's not up to the task, never having taken the course himself (or as far as I know, ever had anything but contempt for computers - but that could just be this one guy).
So really, I don't think I'm dogging anyone - in fact, I think I'm pointing out that there are several things that cannot be simply added to a teacher's task list without detrimental results, and that I personally think that for numerous sociological and practical reasons it is not inaccurate to say that doing this in one direction (academic to athletic) is slightly more likely to be feasible than the other (athletic to academic).
So flame away, all - I don't know if there is a way to phrase what I'm trying to say without pissing one side or the other off (or both if I'm good), but I really didn't mean to dog either side.
Then we moved away to a different city, different school system. Supposedly this one was much better, but there were no longer any teachers who'd go out of their way to recruit college students into letting me hang out with them for a while. They expected me to go through the exact same hoops as anyone else. I wasn't even allowed to take Programming in BASIC at the high school level. No more LISP Machines for me. From '86 to '92, I had no access to any machines more powerful than an Apple IIgs, and no languages more powerful than Basic. I wouldn't get access to a LISP environment again until I got to college in '94.
I agree with what you're saying, but I wonder if it wasn't a bit more complicated than that. Geographic location, understaffing, all kinds of things can contribute to overworked teachers not being able to focus on individual students' needs or potential. I'm not a teacher, don't really know any teachers personally, and so on, so my only real experience with this is that I went to school (mostly - there was a stretch there in high school where I frequently liberated myself from the confines of the attendance policy. But I digress...).
I had a moderate to severe stutter (still do) and very advanced artistic skills, and my parents simply had to augment my schooling with classes outside of the system because there was only so much attention to go around, and most of what teachers wanted or had to work on with me was related to my speech.
Frankly, I was quite fortunate to have a school system that hired teachers who would take that extra time for whatever reason. As were you - I always wonder how many kids here in the Chicago school system have remarkable skills that are going unnoticed because the teachers are woefully understaffed.
I'm sorry about David - sounds like he was a great guy. That's a particularly ironic and cruel way for him to go, too.
And kudos to this little girl - Microsoft track or not, that's quite an accomplishment and quite a wakeup call to companies like MS that there are loyalties to be won. I mean, I don't want more kids running about with MS all over their brains, but if this encourages some of the other companies and organizations (Apple, Redhat, Adobe, Apache, etc.) to provide supplemental education to kids in order to encourage educated purchasing decisions and development trends ten years from now, it would be an improvement over the current system of kids on nearly-dead computers learning computer science from the shop teacher or buggy computer learning games (no offense to shop teachers - it's just that there really should be a dedicated teacher for this kind of stuff). I'm sure they all provide some of this in various schools, but I'm talking about a full-on frontal assault with major resources.
An unbiased tech education would be better, of course, but given where the money is, any extra tech ed would be an improvement.
That enter key would drive me buggy, as it seems to be one key too far to the right - other than that, though, I'd definitely want one of these if it worked reliably. I'd be interested to know if I could type comfortably on more flat-topped keys, though, too. Anyhow, I switch back and forth between Mac and Windows for lots of different uses all the time (Quark AND Adobe CS apps, not to mention editors and such for web development), and I'd love to have a visual of my keyboard shortcuts. Imagine a keyboard where the labels would dynamically change for quasimodes and so forth. That's darn cool if it can work.
And it might be a good way to learn Dvorak without having to commit to a dual-labeled keyboard.
And as for the pricing questions people are posting, I gotta figure if people are buying $400 digitizer tablets, there's a market for a more expensive but much more flexible keyboard.
Now if they can build it with that IBM buckling spring click-touch feel...
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have opinions about my neighbor's dog that make this whole process very appealing. Although the fact that he barks at EVERY DAMNED BIRD AND SQUIRREL LIKE IT'S THE FIRST ONE HE'S EVER SEEN makes me wonder how much mind is really in jeopardy.
You know, as much as I like to be right all the time (ask my wife, she'll tell you), I'm glad to hear this. While I hold no great love in my heart for firearm manufacturers (or tobacco manufacturers, for that matter), I just hate to think that people can actually stoop as low as the stories in the name of money. I'm sure some of the stories are true and some people CAN stoop that low, but I can't help but find a little hope whenever some story about Very Bad People turns out to be inflated.
It's the very small optimist in me getting very tired of the incessant whining and yammering of the very large pessimist in me.
I agree - though as a side note, there have been instances where gun manufacturers were marketing very odd things. For example, one of the manufacturers was selling a gun that had as one of its selling points the fact that the grip was fingerprint-resistant. Hm. This was remarked upon by then-President Bill Clinton in a press conference in these or almost these exact words: 'you don't have to be broke out in brilliance to figure out what that's all about.'
Now I'm not arguing that the gun situation isn't inherently different from the bittorent situation which isn't inherently different from the Grokster situation. But to say that the gun manufacturers aren't marketing to gangs or other ne'er-do-wells may not be entirely accurate. It may not be overt, but it's there, like it is in tobacco and alcohol marketing. (This steps dangerously close to the argument that we all need to be less influenced by advertising, but that's obviously an argument for another group session.)
Anyhow, I just get worried when the court or Congress get involved in anything having to do with technology - I just don't trust them to get it right. This time seems fairly right to me, though. The hard part will be preventing abuse or oversimplification of the ruling in the future by lawmakers, judges, or hungry attorneys for the over-zealous defenders of intellectual property. And there will always be Grokster-like products that will now simply hire marketing firms to push to the edge of legal marketing language and further muddy the waters.
Good God, no! Given the effect of radiation AND the reproductive capacity of bunnies, I foresee a blue million little drumming bunnies with mutant characteristics ("you wouldn't like me when I'm angry... thump thump thump").
And I don't even want to think about fifty-foot-tall short-tempered, hairless, and impotent Robert Conrads with huge batteries on their shoulders.
It's all too terrible to consider. I'll stick with my potato clock, thank you very much.
There's enough of the accusations already with the mandatory checking of bags as you leave. They watch me check out, and then ask to see in my bag. They do this because I may be buddies with the checkout person and may be carrying stolen merchandise out with me on their behalf. So with this policy tastefully and responsibly implemented as only American retailers can, I now am supposed to submit to a search because they don't trust the people they have manning the registers.
I bring this up not just to gripe. These people, in one potential scenario using this new technology, would be the ones collecting fingerprint or retinal data. So Best Buy, for example, is worried that an employee may slip me something small enough to fit in my bag, but is willing to have that same employee collect my fingerprint data. I would have to disrespectfully decline.
My parents, average consumers in their own way, certainly would balk at this (with some rant about how back in their day they never had to do fingerprint validation for 33s), and I would too. I just don't see it being something that consumers will put up with, particularly in light of one story after another about companies misplacing confidential data of all of their customers.
Got it - I didn't realize what exactly was at stake here. All disparaging comments about the self-perpetuating and legal system aside, you're right - if that's how the law works, they'd be fools to let it go.
Now, is this the kind of thing that a judge could deem to be irrelevant? I mean, TigerDirect (as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments about this article) isn't really known publicly as "Tiger" - seems to me that it might get dismissed anyway (though would that not be precedent, too, establishing a distance between Tiger and TigerDirect that serves both sides in the future?).
Obviously, IANAL. Or a judge. Or even adequately educated in the basic workings of my own country's legal system. But I'm curious about this - if someone comes along using a name very similar to mine (for which I have completed all the requirements: dba postings, and so on) for THEIR business, am I required to sue them if I want to keep using my business name?
Because, you know, I come to Slashdot for all my legal advice. I am curious about this stuff, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here - I've had two Toshibas (an A15 and an A75) and both ran out of steam way too early. I had to replace the hard drive and the cooling system literally days after the warranty ran out on the A15 (before the screen eventually crapped out), and then had to have EVERYTHING replaced on the A75. It's nearly all new components - only the keyboard and chassis are original. It's terribly frustrating, because I love the displays and keyboards on Toshibas. But like you, it's the last one I'm buying until Toshiba (at the very least) steps up and fixes these kinds of things at the manfacturing stage. The nice lady at the licensed Toshiba repair center had so many of them stacked up in the shop when I brought it in, she actually gave me the wrong one when I picked it up. Apparently all of them had the same problems.
And I agree with someone else in the thread - their phone support people are argumentative and contradict themselves. I was told I could arrange a swap on the A75 - that Toshiba could overnight me a voucher for the machine, I'd send them the old one, and then go get a new one at any store that carries comparable Toshibas. Cool, right? Sadly, this was apparently simply a lie to make me happy. The next person I talked to just laughed. Lordy.
So I guess it's Powerbooks for me. Or for that money, maybe a ThinkPad. Nice keyboards on those.
It's the army of bicycling paper clips, ready to do my bidding, that I look forward to.
... oh, never mind.
I, for one, welcome our
All good, as far as I'm concerned. MSN's search has been proven time and time again to be flawed, if not flat-out biased (not that Google hasn't had allegations on that front, too), and as long as a war is fought in the trenches with innovation to attract users and not in the courtroom with lawyers, the end-user generally benefits.
Wow, between this and the silent power supply yesterday, the only thing that's left is a silent sound card!
I hear you, but 15,000,000 is a lot of computers. If a given finite area is blanketed with enough of them to basically negate their monetary value, they go back to being simply tools instead of currency.
Additionally, the countries listed here (Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa) all have very destitute areas but are by no means uniformly desperately poor. Whether this means that there's infrastructure to equitably distribute these computers or that the lowest tier of families will still be ignored in a state-administered program for the same cultural or economic bias reasons that keep them down otherwise is probably still up in the air.
All griping and negative guessing aside, this is still a VERY cool thing and should be encouraged. If 15,000,000 get distributed successfully, they'll make another 15,000,000. And so on. Moreover, accessibility to computers helps people learn to build them (probably by first learning to repair them) - it's a very self-fulfilling thing that just needs a gentle push to start rolling.
So even if the first pass doesn't solve the world's problems, it's certainly a step in a better direction and beats hell out of not doing it.
According to our very careful examination of Mary Poppins (we have a very diligent daughter), Mary Poppins carries a floor lamp in her carpet bag. This kind of takes all the magic out of that, no?
As I think of it, though, she DOES also carry a plant. This innovation could be used as a grow light for all kinds of, er, lucrative and preferably quickly moveable crops. Why, oh why, didn't something like this come out when I was in a position to use my entrepreneurial side less morally?
How can they use a pentop computer from inside the pen? Something about this doesn't make sense.
Indeed. I just went and strolled through their entire site - as another poster suggested, they seem to have an interestingly un-academic focus, and an almost alarming preoccupation with very angry cat-like things of some sort. I had quite a hard time finding any images to load - it's pretty sparse, over all. My main goal, of course, was to assist the /. masses in "hacking" their site.
These kids did something wrong - as was mentioned in another post, it kind of IS like leaving your keys in the car, and it IS wrong for someone else to come along and take your car because of it. Just because the school was dumb does not excuse the behavior of the students.
HOWEVER, the school was profoundly, fantastically, comically dumb. Changing grades or altering the school site or looking at porn or whatever would be more clearly against policy - if TFA is accurate, I can see how this could happen simply by realizing that they had admin privs and nosing around a bit with them.
It's getting to the point where you can't roll your eyes and say, "kids!" anymore. But "administrators and authority figures!" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily and dismissively.
More to the point, let's look at who is going to take this little "quiz" - people who are generally disatisfied with their employers. Taking that into account, this little FastCompany survey/quiz/test/whatever is silly at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. Show me anyone who doesn't like their boss who wouldn't answer yes to most of these questions. Perhaps there should be another bank of questions like, "do you feel anger toward your boss when he/she tells you to stop posting acerbic vitriol on Slashdot about surveys and get back to work?"
... ?!?!?
I hate to take such a likely intentionally light-hearted thing so seriously (as that kind of behavior is, of course, never tolerated on Slashdot!), but this kind of stuff gets me all riled up. There are probably a thousand employees around the world RIGHT NOW taking this little quiz for themselves and skewing their own results by virtue of being the type of person who suspects his or her boss of lunacy enough to take the little quiz for themselves. And they will all go out drinking with their co-workers and proudly state as fact that the boss is a nutjob of the most dangerous caliber based on scientific results.
Okay, I'll simmer down. I know I'm getting all frothy, and maybe this isn't the best example of the circumstances that piss me off so much. But there's already so much negative, adversarial stuff out there, why do something silly and sensationalist couched in a story that seems to give it scientific authority?
Where's that flippin' Tylenol
I think I would have asked him whether he felt responsible for the bad things on the Web. I don't think the interviewer beat THAT dead horse enough.
Honestly, the Web has turned into its own viable organism, and I seem to hear a lot of people tracing back to Berners-Lee (or Al Gore, depending on who you believe) as the person responsible for dirty pictures on their son's computer (Mom, if you're reading this, I swear that picture of the lady and the horse just appeared on my screen).
I do wish someone who gets some time with someone like Tim Berners-Lee would ask MORE questions (or followup questions) on the "web in 30 years" philosophical/futurist front (after all, they have access to the mind of the person who started the ball rolling) and fewer repetitive questions about the lurid underbelly of humanity, which is really all that the "bad" sites are reflecting.
It just seems ironic and pointless to waste as many lines on that particular Web page asking the father of the Web whether he feels responsible for the other dirty Web pages out there.
Frankly, I think something like this will allow the "normally less assertive" to remain quiet, and the assertively less normal to be louder still.
Wow - that's got to be the fastest reply with comfortingly humorous cartoon renderings of Slashdotter's speculations that I've ever seen!
...
Personally, these would drive me batty. But I can certainly see the value in them.
Mostly, though, I like the sea of blinking LEDs when I walk through my dark office on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night (don't worry - I work at home) - I find it very Star Trekkie and makes me feel like more of a cool dude than I do when the lights are on and you can see my stacks of work and empty Mountain Dew cans. These lights would blow my one moment of self-envy. So I respectfully say, "no thank you," to innovation.
'Course, in the event of a terrorist attack on my house (which seems to be a disproportionate source of concern around here), my one-man office will be a blind madhouse of chaotic fervor. Good thing it's near the kitchen where I keep a flashlight.
Or maybe this anti-terrorism application doesn't really apply to me
Sarchasm: the gaping social abyss created between people who can detect irony and those who can't.
I don't think I did any such thing. What I did say, however, is that schools should have dedicated computer departments rather than trying to tack it on to the curriculum with existing staff. The reason I think this is that most teachers are stretched so thin as it is that focus on individual students' educational needs is impractical and too detrimental to other students to be possible.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear - I feel that teachers are being double-booked by underfunded school systems and therefore kids aren't getting the full benefit of a department dedicated to computer science. This is going to be essential to their future success - as full an understanding as possible of how computers work and how they can be used is going to define one of the major components in their employability and flexibility later on. And being taught computer science by a teacher who was handed the task late in the game isn't going to do them any extra favors.
Also, what you're talking about is taking an academic teacher and asking him or her to add a coaching gig (and before anyone else barks at me, please understand that I do appreciate the intelligence necessary to coach sports - it's just a different mindframe than computer science or mathematics). It would be different to take, say, the 70-year-old football coach from my high school (that and coaching JV and varsity wrestling were his full-time job) and ask him to teach computer science. He's not up to the task, never having taken the course himself (or as far as I know, ever had anything but contempt for computers - but that could just be this one guy).
So really, I don't think I'm dogging anyone - in fact, I think I'm pointing out that there are several things that cannot be simply added to a teacher's task list without detrimental results, and that I personally think that for numerous sociological and practical reasons it is not inaccurate to say that doing this in one direction (academic to athletic) is slightly more likely to be feasible than the other (athletic to academic).
So flame away, all - I don't know if there is a way to phrase what I'm trying to say without pissing one side or the other off (or both if I'm good), but I really didn't mean to dog either side.
I agree with what you're saying, but I wonder if it wasn't a bit more complicated than that. Geographic location, understaffing, all kinds of things can contribute to overworked teachers not being able to focus on individual students' needs or potential. I'm not a teacher, don't really know any teachers personally, and so on, so my only real experience with this is that I went to school (mostly - there was a stretch there in high school where I frequently liberated myself from the confines of the attendance policy. But I digress ...).
I had a moderate to severe stutter (still do) and very advanced artistic skills, and my parents simply had to augment my schooling with classes outside of the system because there was only so much attention to go around, and most of what teachers wanted or had to work on with me was related to my speech.
Frankly, I was quite fortunate to have a school system that hired teachers who would take that extra time for whatever reason. As were you - I always wonder how many kids here in the Chicago school system have remarkable skills that are going unnoticed because the teachers are woefully understaffed.
I'm sorry about David - sounds like he was a great guy. That's a particularly ironic and cruel way for him to go, too.
And kudos to this little girl - Microsoft track or not, that's quite an accomplishment and quite a wakeup call to companies like MS that there are loyalties to be won. I mean, I don't want more kids running about with MS all over their brains, but if this encourages some of the other companies and organizations (Apple, Redhat, Adobe, Apache, etc.) to provide supplemental education to kids in order to encourage educated purchasing decisions and development trends ten years from now, it would be an improvement over the current system of kids on nearly-dead computers learning computer science from the shop teacher or buggy computer learning games (no offense to shop teachers - it's just that there really should be a dedicated teacher for this kind of stuff). I'm sure they all provide some of this in various schools, but I'm talking about a full-on frontal assault with major resources.
An unbiased tech education would be better, of course, but given where the money is, any extra tech ed would be an improvement.
That enter key would drive me buggy, as it seems to be one key too far to the right - other than that, though, I'd definitely want one of these if it worked reliably. I'd be interested to know if I could type comfortably on more flat-topped keys, though, too. Anyhow, I switch back and forth between Mac and Windows for lots of different uses all the time (Quark AND Adobe CS apps, not to mention editors and such for web development), and I'd love to have a visual of my keyboard shortcuts. Imagine a keyboard where the labels would dynamically change for quasimodes and so forth. That's darn cool if it can work.
...
And it might be a good way to learn Dvorak without having to commit to a dual-labeled keyboard.
And as for the pricing questions people are posting, I gotta figure if people are buying $400 digitizer tablets, there's a market for a more expensive but much more flexible keyboard.
Now if they can build it with that IBM buckling spring click-touch feel
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have opinions about my neighbor's dog that make this whole process very appealing. Although the fact that he barks at EVERY DAMNED BIRD AND SQUIRREL LIKE IT'S THE FIRST ONE HE'S EVER SEEN makes me wonder how much mind is really in jeopardy.
How long before I can do this to my neighbor's dog without getting out of bed? Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, here I come!
You know, as much as I like to be right all the time (ask my wife, she'll tell you), I'm glad to hear this. While I hold no great love in my heart for firearm manufacturers (or tobacco manufacturers, for that matter), I just hate to think that people can actually stoop as low as the stories in the name of money. I'm sure some of the stories are true and some people CAN stoop that low, but I can't help but find a little hope whenever some story about Very Bad People turns out to be inflated.
It's the very small optimist in me getting very tired of the incessant whining and yammering of the very large pessimist in me.
I agree - though as a side note, there have been instances where gun manufacturers were marketing very odd things. For example, one of the manufacturers was selling a gun that had as one of its selling points the fact that the grip was fingerprint-resistant. Hm. This was remarked upon by then-President Bill Clinton in a press conference in these or almost these exact words: 'you don't have to be broke out in brilliance to figure out what that's all about.'
Now I'm not arguing that the gun situation isn't inherently different from the bittorent situation which isn't inherently different from the Grokster situation. But to say that the gun manufacturers aren't marketing to gangs or other ne'er-do-wells may not be entirely accurate. It may not be overt, but it's there, like it is in tobacco and alcohol marketing. (This steps dangerously close to the argument that we all need to be less influenced by advertising, but that's obviously an argument for another group session.)
Anyhow, I just get worried when the court or Congress get involved in anything having to do with technology - I just don't trust them to get it right. This time seems fairly right to me, though. The hard part will be preventing abuse or oversimplification of the ruling in the future by lawmakers, judges, or hungry attorneys for the over-zealous defenders of intellectual property. And there will always be Grokster-like products that will now simply hire marketing firms to push to the edge of legal marketing language and further muddy the waters.
Torah, first edition. Some wear and tear to tablets. Shipping not included. Call 555-1234, ask for Indy.
Good God, no! Given the effect of radiation AND the reproductive capacity of bunnies, I foresee a blue million little drumming bunnies with mutant characteristics ("you wouldn't like me when I'm angry ... thump thump thump").
And I don't even want to think about fifty-foot-tall short-tempered, hairless, and impotent Robert Conrads with huge batteries on their shoulders.
It's all too terrible to consider. I'll stick with my potato clock, thank you very much.
There's enough of the accusations already with the mandatory checking of bags as you leave. They watch me check out, and then ask to see in my bag. They do this because I may be buddies with the checkout person and may be carrying stolen merchandise out with me on their behalf. So with this policy tastefully and responsibly implemented as only American retailers can, I now am supposed to submit to a search because they don't trust the people they have manning the registers.
I bring this up not just to gripe. These people, in one potential scenario using this new technology, would be the ones collecting fingerprint or retinal data. So Best Buy, for example, is worried that an employee may slip me something small enough to fit in my bag, but is willing to have that same employee collect my fingerprint data. I would have to disrespectfully decline.
My parents, average consumers in their own way, certainly would balk at this (with some rant about how back in their day they never had to do fingerprint validation for 33s), and I would too. I just don't see it being something that consumers will put up with, particularly in light of one story after another about companies misplacing confidential data of all of their customers.
T
Wow - MS seems to be hiring their ad copy writers from the Bass-O-Matic School of Persuasivist Languaging.
Is bad thing A happening to you? Is bad thing B happening to you? THEN xxxx IS FOR YOU! I can almost smell the plaid.
Got it - I didn't realize what exactly was at stake here. All disparaging comments about the self-perpetuating and legal system aside, you're right - if that's how the law works, they'd be fools to let it go. Now, is this the kind of thing that a judge could deem to be irrelevant? I mean, TigerDirect (as is mentioned elsewhere in the comments about this article) isn't really known publicly as "Tiger" - seems to me that it might get dismissed anyway (though would that not be precedent, too, establishing a distance between Tiger and TigerDirect that serves both sides in the future?). Obviously, IANAL. Or a judge. Or even adequately educated in the basic workings of my own country's legal system. But I'm curious about this - if someone comes along using a name very similar to mine (for which I have completed all the requirements: dba postings, and so on) for THEIR business, am I required to sue them if I want to keep using my business name? Because, you know, I come to Slashdot for all my legal advice. I am curious about this stuff, though.