I have the feeling that we're arguing when we actually in about 99% agreement.
I like the idea of the compose key (as you describe it). It's a horrible weak point in OS X that Windows does a slightly better job at ( '+e is almost like composing the accent and the character). It sounds like your 'compose' key is what we all should have (where 'we' is defined as those of us who actually have some use for ligatures, accented characters, and Euro symbols).
(took me ages to figure out how to produce a pipe char on my iBook)
Doesn't the iBook have a \| key right above the return key like my PowerBook, or are you talking about something other than '|'?
In the case of oe (oe ligature), the US International keyboard just uses --, but, as you said, it looks like you have to do some weird keyboard voodoo , for other symbols, like æ (the ae ligature) - of course, you also have to do keyboard voodoo for those in OS X (in the case of æ, it's option + ' ).
I never noticed that 'e doesn't work in every Windows program (but then I've never had the need for accents outside of email and typed documents).
Since you brought it up, I just tried it in cmd.exe, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, Firefox, Mozilla, PyMol, Notepad, SSH, Google Earth, iTunes, and Eclipse and I couldn't find a program in Windows that wouldn't give me an ( é ) from 'e except for an x-term in Exceed (and if that's your definition of non-standard, then you'll be dismayed to learn that in X11.app on OS X, option+e followed by an e didn't work either).
Although option+e does the job (and I learned to use it long ago, thank you very much - I'm typing this on a Mac) it's awkward and slows me down - I have to move my thumb to the left under my palm, hit e and then move my thumb back to its default position on the space bar. It's annoying even in a case like option+c where it's the same number of keystrokes as 'c - though it's probably worse for me because I only use OS X in a PowerBook or a MacBook Pro and there's only one option key.
I know it doesn't sound like much, but it's a bump in the road that's not there in Windows. No matter how much I use option+e, it never became as natural as 'e for me.
In Windows... it's hellish to enter French text I always found that
I'm no fan of Windows but I've always found accents to be a breeze with the 'US-international' keyboard layout (Control Panel -> Regional Settings -> Languages -> Text Services Details -> Add Keyboard -> layout/IME = United States - International)
You just type ( 'c ) and you get ( ç ), or ( 'e ) to get é.
It's one of the few things I actually missed when I switched to a Mac.
Is it different with the French layout or is it just that I'm ignorant of important characters and accents in French?
Once one has both sets of tools, it ceases to matter what you're working on as you have the correct tool.
You say that as if having twice as many tools doesn't cost anything and doesn't take up twice as much space.
Also, how many bolts have been stripped because someone wasn't careful and tried to use an SAE wrench instead of a metric one? How much time has been wasted trying to figure out if you need SAE or metric?
there's really no advantage to either method
But there is a huge advantage to going with only one rather than both - and since everyone else in the world uses metric, why not use it too? And actually there is a pretty big advantage to metric - you don't have to remember that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and some other random number of yards in a mile. Pushing a decimal around is just so much easier.
I don't expect us to ever switch, but much more because we're obstinate than because of any sort of rational cost-benefit analysis.
But you say it does a crappy job of vacuuming. Worse than the roomba?
Well... it's definitely a lot louder and sounds more like a regular vacuum. It also moves slower, so that might make you think it's doing a better job.
I've never seen one run on a very dirty floor, so I can't really give you a fair comparison (if you do end up getting one, I'd appreciate it if you let me know).
Although it does a bit of mapping and has ultrasound sensors, it uses a similar search pattern as Roomba. It's also not going to get you much more than a room (so if you want your whole house cleaned, you'll probably still need more than one, or you'll need to shuttle it around manually).
Also, not everything shows up well on the ultrasound. If you've got shoes on the floor with a lace sticking out, both Roomba and Trilobite will both do a good job of finding the lace and getting stuck on it. Ditto socks / etc.
My Roomba doesn't have a problem picking up kibbles of dog food, rice, or stuffing from dog toys. That stuff fills the bin quickly and drains the battery, but it still works.
If you haven't tried one, I'd strongly recommend getting one with a return policy and letting it take care of a room or two for you. Run it once every few days - maybe even once a day for the first week, and I guarantee your floors will be cleaner that with regular use of an upright. If you like it, you can get 5 of them for the price of one Trilobite.
If you must try the Trilobite, I urge you to get a money back guarantee - I think you're likely to be disappointed. Let me know how it works out for you though (if you still remember this by the time you get one).
You might want several if you have more footage. Mapping solves this. The device needs to navigate better, and not repeat the same areas over and over. With that, you'd only need one.)
Mapping wouldn't solve that issue at all. It's more about battery life, stairs and other obstacles. Covering the same areas a few times isn't a bug, it's a feature - I don't know how you vacuum but when I'm using an upright, I also go over the same area more than once.
Also, mapping isn't a trivial problem. I've done a little bit of work with wheeled robots myself and unless you have a good way of finding fixed reference points, you need to do some sophisticated and tricky stuff to compensate for sensor drift. It's not insoluble, but it'd take a lot more development than the current form.
it's not great for heavy duty cleaning (Right... Why accept a need for a manual step? It should be a better vacuum.) Batteries just aren't there. To make it a heavy duty vac, you'd either need a very long extension cord or to break the cleaning up into periods lasting only a minute or two.
Why? It's your house. The device should know what it has cleaned and what it hasn't and work on areas it can get to when it can get to them. It should tell what's not available because of mats, socks, etc, and navigate around, then later come back to those, when the floor clears.)
It can do that already - for the most part. It will eat your socks and get stuck, but performs well around shoes, chairs, boxes, and most other obstacles.
Also, it is your house - that's the nice thing about it. With Roomba, I have a compelling reason to keep things marginally tidy and not to let entropy take hold. I'm not a neat person by nature but I still appreciate not having a bunch of crap on my floors.
If the price doubled to that of a good upright (as you point out), the roomba could eliminate vacuuming by hand. Period.
Not even close. This monstrosity gives you most of the things you think you want (subject to the limitations of today's technology). It's inelegant, expensive, complicated, and does an amazingly bad job. Despite all of its extra sensors, power, and mapping, it has almost all of the limitations of Roomba - at 5x the price.
Based on what you said, what you really want is a general purpose bipedal servant robot. I'd like one myself. It sounds like Bill Gates may be able to help us out with that in a few years (well... maybe quite a few years).
In the meantime, I'm happy with a clever, relatively cheap 90% solution.
I was pretty skeptical when I got one but Roomba does an amazing job of covering space without resorting to mapping. Also, it only costs about as much as a normal upright (though you might want to get a few if you've got very much square footage).
My only real complaint is having to manually empty it and clean the filter every time it runs (if iRobot could just automate that, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone).
Sure, it's not great for heavy duty cleaning, but if run through your place once with a normal vac then send Roomba out once or twice a week, it's remarkable. It also has the added benefit of forcing a bit of discipline as far as just keeping the floor tidy.
Before they went tits up, FingerWorks made 2-D touchpads that did a pretty good job with gestures.
I still lament the company's demise - and that of my Mac-n-Touch. Took a little while to get used to, but it was awesome and a great conversation starter.
Far be it from me to defend the atrocity of that spelling mistake, but I blame this on inconsistencies in English spelling (or, at best, regional differences in pronunciation).
Repeat after me - 'nose', 'rose', 'hose', 'lose'
and then 'floozie', 'doozie', 'choose', 'loose'.
Now explain to me why lose is spelled 'lose' instead of 'loose'.
Maybe I'm just a horrible speller, but when I see 'lose' it doesn't even look like a real word because I think 'lõz' and not 'loõz' and when I see 'choose', I think 'choõz' and for 'loose', I think 'loõz' and not 'loõs' (of course, then moose is 'moõs', so I think you just can't win; that's why I'm switching to Esperanto from now on).
Please just imagine that the 'õ's up there are 'o's with overbars.
The simple, small gas engines in lawnmowers and scooters use a two-stroke cycle whereas most car engines use a four-stroke cycle. Two stroke engines, by their very nature, output a lot more incomplete combustion products.
This thing is a gas turbine. Even if you fueled it with gas, I would expect that most of its output would CO2 and H2O (and, I'd imagine, that in normal use these things would be burning methanol, making the exhaust even cleaner).
Most likely, running one of these wouldn't be that different than adding another person's O2 consumption and CO2/H2O production to the office (in other words, negligible).
Some applications will make use of it, some won't.
I hear that argument all the time.
What I don't get about it is that most of us are running OSes that have more than one process running at the same time. Even if none of those processes is coded to support SMP and they were all single threaded, it's very useful to be able to run more than one process at the same time.
Even if only one or two are gobbling up the bulk of CPU usage and they're stuck using a single core, it's nice to have the UI remain responsive and to be able to do something else while the hogs are running in the background.
I'm not so convinced about the health benefits, but I'd like to see less EM
pollution just so that my wireless network isn't disrupted by my 12 neighbors who are downloading movies, talking on their 2.4 GHz phones and running their jury-rigged microwaves with the door open.
Anybody want to speculate that this was really a "controlled" leak to drum up interest and anticipation for Leopard, or am I all wet?
I'm willing to bet it's not. The release is still ~7 months away and any hype that comes out of this leak will have died down by then. Also, I don't see Apple splitting it over 93 files rather than a single disk image (unless that's 92 technotes and 1 disk image, and I'd seriously doubt that).
Seems like cowscows is just applying Occam's razor - there's no need for a conspiracy when it's something that's bound to happen spontaneously, even if Apple wanted it leaked (and I don't think it's even remotely given that they do).
Also, if Apple did leak it, don't you think they'd do it in a single disk image rather than split over 93 files?
Stuff like this Forbes article is the reason I hate the popular press's presentation of research - especially when those doing the research are interested in self-aggrandizing (for fun or profit).
Yeah - deleting it prevents them from becoming diabetic and from developing asthma - because without it endoytosis doesn't work right, the immune response is hampered and and so some autoimmune diseases don't happen.
Deleting it also screws with absorption of lipids, hence no fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis or obesity.
In addition, it's involved in recycling of presynapric vesicle membranes so it wouldn't surprise me if deleting / blocking it had cognitive / behavioral effects.
So, yeah, it sounds like getting rid of it is a miracle cure, but (as others have pointed out), it's there for a reason.
Come on, does anyone really believe that knocking out a single protein would make a 'metabolic super-mouse'?
Slashdot Mirror
I have the feeling that we're arguing when we actually in about 99% agreement.
I like the idea of the compose key (as you describe it). It's a horrible weak point in OS X that Windows does a slightly better job at ( '+e is almost like composing the accent and the character). It sounds like your 'compose' key is what we all should have (where 'we' is defined as those of us who actually have some use for ligatures, accented characters, and Euro symbols).
(took me ages to figure out how to produce a pipe char on my iBook)Doesn't the iBook have a \| key right above the return key like my PowerBook, or are you talking about something other than '|'?
That does sound like a pain.
In the case of oe (oe ligature), the US International keyboard just uses --, but, as you said, it looks like you have to do some weird keyboard voodoo , for other symbols, like æ (the ae ligature) - of course, you also have to do keyboard voodoo for those in OS X (in the case of æ, it's option + ' ).
I never noticed that 'e doesn't work in every Windows program (but then I've never had the need for accents outside of email and typed documents).
Since you brought it up, I just tried it in cmd.exe, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, Firefox, Mozilla, PyMol, Notepad, SSH, Google Earth, iTunes, and Eclipse and I couldn't find a program in Windows that wouldn't give me an ( é ) from 'e except for an x-term in Exceed (and if that's your definition of non-standard, then you'll be dismayed to learn that in X11.app on OS X, option+e followed by an e didn't work either).
Although option+e does the job (and I learned to use it long ago, thank you very much - I'm typing this on a Mac) it's awkward and slows me down - I have to move my thumb to the left under my palm, hit e and then move my thumb back to its default position on the space bar. It's annoying even in a case like option+c where it's the same number of keystrokes as 'c - though it's probably worse for me because I only use OS X in a PowerBook or a MacBook Pro and there's only one option key.
I know it doesn't sound like much, but it's a bump in the road that's not there in Windows. No matter how much I use option+e, it never became as natural as 'e for me.
I'm no fan of Windows but I've always found accents to be a breeze with the 'US-international' keyboard layout (Control Panel -> Regional Settings -> Languages -> Text Services Details -> Add Keyboard -> layout/IME = United States - International)
You just type ( 'c ) and you get ( ç ), or ( 'e ) to get é.
It's one of the few things I actually missed when I switched to a Mac.
Is it different with the French layout or is it just that I'm ignorant of important characters and accents in French?
You say that as if having twice as many tools doesn't cost anything and doesn't take up twice as much space.
Also, how many bolts have been stripped because someone wasn't careful and tried to use an SAE wrench instead of a metric one? How much time has been wasted trying to figure out if you need SAE or metric?
there's really no advantage to either methodBut there is a huge advantage to going with only one rather than both - and since everyone else in the world uses metric, why not use it too? And actually there is a pretty big advantage to metric - you don't have to remember that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and some other random number of yards in a mile. Pushing a decimal around is just so much easier.
I don't expect us to ever switch, but much more because we're obstinate than because of any sort of rational cost-benefit analysis.
Well... it's definitely a lot louder and sounds more like a regular vacuum. It also moves slower, so that might make you think it's doing a better job.
I've never seen one run on a very dirty floor, so I can't really give you a fair comparison (if you do end up getting one, I'd appreciate it if you let me know).
Although it does a bit of mapping and has ultrasound sensors, it uses a similar search pattern as Roomba. It's also not going to get you much more than a room (so if you want your whole house cleaned, you'll probably still need more than one, or you'll need to shuttle it around manually).
Also, not everything shows up well on the ultrasound. If you've got shoes on the floor with a lace sticking out, both Roomba and Trilobite will both do a good job of finding the lace and getting stuck on it. Ditto socks / etc.
My Roomba doesn't have a problem picking up kibbles of dog food, rice, or stuffing from dog toys. That stuff fills the bin quickly and drains the battery, but it still works.
If you haven't tried one, I'd strongly recommend getting one with a return policy and letting it take care of a room or two for you. Run it once every few days - maybe even once a day for the first week, and I guarantee your floors will be cleaner that with regular use of an upright. If you like it, you can get 5 of them for the price of one Trilobite.
If you must try the Trilobite, I urge you to get a money back guarantee - I think you're likely to be disappointed. Let me know how it works out for you though (if you still remember this by the time you get one).
Mapping wouldn't solve that issue at all. It's more about battery life, stairs and other obstacles. Covering the same areas a few times isn't a bug, it's a feature - I don't know how you vacuum but when I'm using an upright, I also go over the same area more than once.
Also, mapping isn't a trivial problem. I've done a little bit of work with wheeled robots myself and unless you have a good way of finding fixed reference points, you need to do some sophisticated and tricky stuff to compensate for sensor drift. It's not insoluble, but it'd take a lot more development than the current form.
it's not great for heavy duty cleaning (Right... Why accept a need for a manual step? It should be a better vacuum.) Batteries just aren't there. To make it a heavy duty vac, you'd either need a very long extension cord or to break the cleaning up into periods lasting only a minute or two. Why? It's your house. The device should know what it has cleaned and what it hasn't and work on areas it can get to when it can get to them. It should tell what's not available because of mats, socks, etc, and navigate around, then later come back to those, when the floor clears.)It can do that already - for the most part. It will eat your socks and get stuck, but performs well around shoes, chairs, boxes, and most other obstacles.
Also, it is your house - that's the nice thing about it. With Roomba, I have a compelling reason to keep things marginally tidy and not to let entropy take hold. I'm not a neat person by nature but I still appreciate not having a bunch of crap on my floors.
If the price doubled to that of a good upright (as you point out), the roomba could eliminate vacuuming by hand. Period.Not even close. This monstrosity gives you most of the things you think you want (subject to the limitations of today's technology). It's inelegant, expensive, complicated, and does an amazingly bad job. Despite all of its extra sensors, power, and mapping, it has almost all of the limitations of Roomba - at 5x the price.
Based on what you said, what you really want is a general purpose bipedal servant robot. I'd like one myself. It sounds like Bill Gates may be able to help us out with that in a few years (well... maybe quite a few years).
In the meantime, I'm happy with a clever, relatively cheap 90% solution.
Probably someone like this guy.
Really? I think they already are pretty good.
I was pretty skeptical when I got one but Roomba does an amazing job of covering space without resorting to mapping. Also, it only costs about as much as a normal upright (though you might want to get a few if you've got very much square footage).
My only real complaint is having to manually empty it and clean the filter every time it runs (if iRobot could just automate that, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone).
Sure, it's not great for heavy duty cleaning, but if run through your place once with a normal vac then send Roomba out once or twice a week, it's remarkable. It also has the added benefit of forcing a bit of discipline as far as just keeping the floor tidy.
Before they went tits up, FingerWorks made 2-D touchpads that did a pretty good job with gestures. I still lament the company's demise - and that of my Mac-n-Touch. Took a little while to get used to, but it was awesome and a great conversation starter.
dit-dit dit-dit-dit-dit dit-dah dit-dit-dit-dah dit dah-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit dah-dit-dit dit dit-dah dit-dah-dah dit-dit-dit-dit dit-dah dah dah-dit-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dah dah-dah-dit dit-dit-dah dah-dit-dah-dah dit-dit-dit dit-dah dit-dah-dit dit dit-dit-dit dit-dah dah-dit-dah-dah dit-dit dah-dit dah-dah-dit
Far be it from me to defend the atrocity of that spelling mistake, but I blame this on inconsistencies in English spelling (or, at best, regional differences in pronunciation).
Repeat after me - 'nose', 'rose', 'hose', 'lose'
and then 'floozie', 'doozie', 'choose', 'loose'.
Now explain to me why lose is spelled 'lose' instead of 'loose'.
Maybe I'm just a horrible speller, but when I see 'lose' it doesn't even look like a real word because I think 'lõz' and not 'loõz' and when I see 'choose', I think 'choõz' and for 'loose', I think 'loõz' and not 'loõs' (of course, then moose is 'moõs', so I think you just can't win; that's why I'm switching to Esperanto from now on).
Please just imagine that the 'õ's up there are 'o's with overbars.That's not really a fair comparison.
The simple, small gas engines in lawnmowers and scooters use a two-stroke cycle whereas most car engines use a four-stroke cycle. Two stroke engines, by their very nature, output a lot more incomplete combustion products.
This thing is a gas turbine. Even if you fueled it with gas, I would expect that most of its output would CO2 and H2O (and, I'd imagine, that in normal use these things would be burning methanol, making the exhaust even cleaner).
Most likely, running one of these wouldn't be that different than adding another person's O2 consumption and CO2/H2O production to the office (in other words, negligible).
Heat production is another matter.
I hear that argument all the time.
What I don't get about it is that most of us are running OSes that have more than one process running at the same time. Even if none of those processes is coded to support SMP and they were all single threaded, it's very useful to be able to run more than one process at the same time.
Even if only one or two are gobbling up the bulk of CPU usage and they're stuck using a single core, it's nice to have the UI remain responsive and to be able to do something else while the hogs are running in the background.
Also a shame I can't edit and didn't hit the preview button before submitting that.
Shame I don't have any mod points - that that made me laugh my ass off.
I'm not so convinced about the health benefits, but I'd like to see less EM pollution just so that my wireless network isn't disrupted by my 12 neighbors who are downloading movies, talking on their 2.4 GHz phones and running their jury-rigged microwaves with the door open.
I got the same impression.
It'll be sad to see it go, but it's had a good run and it hasn't been the same since Richard Dean Anderson left.
I'm willing to bet it's not. The release is still ~7 months away and any hype that comes out of this leak will have died down by then. Also, I don't see Apple splitting it over 93 files rather than a single disk image (unless that's 92 technotes and 1 disk image, and I'd seriously doubt that).
Seems like cowscows is just applying Occam's razor - there's no need for a conspiracy when it's something that's bound to happen spontaneously, even if Apple wanted it leaked (and I don't think it's even remotely given that they do).
Also, if Apple did leak it, don't you think they'd do it in a single disk image rather than split over 93 files?
... but spare them the horrible burden of knowing about the bulbus glandis.
Stuff like this Forbes article is the reason I hate the popular press's presentation of research - especially when those doing the research are interested in self-aggrandizing (for fun or profit).
Yeah - deleting it prevents them from becoming diabetic and from developing asthma - because without it endoytosis doesn't work right, the immune response is hampered and and so some autoimmune diseases don't happen.
Deleting it also screws with absorption of lipids, hence no fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis or obesity.
In addition, it's involved in recycling of presynapric vesicle membranes so it wouldn't surprise me if deleting / blocking it had cognitive / behavioral effects.
So, yeah, it sounds like getting rid of it is a miracle cure, but (as others have pointed out), it's there for a reason.
Come on, does anyone really believe that knocking out a single protein would make a 'metabolic super-mouse'?
You've hit on something there that I don't understand why we don't hear more often - a small risk of terrorism is part of the price of freedom.