Physicists are sloppy about causation almost everywhere except when they explicitly reason about it in areas such as time travel. It's because they can--causation in physics experiments is usually so trivial that it doesn't require a second thought. Biologists often have to consider that what looks like a simple outcome on the surface is caused by the complex and haphazard interplay of a lot of underlying mechanisms; most experimental interventions in biology require detailed experimental controls in order to ensure that the effect you are observing is actually caused by the intended variable.
Your comment applies to the summary, not the original paper. You can be certain that the original paper gets this right: biologists are sticklers for making sure statements about causation are correct in their papers (physicists, in contrast, are often quite sloppy about causation).
The thing to keep in mind for lay readers is that adding this gene to people won't automatically turn them into regenerating superheroes. However, indications are that understanding how this gene functions will tell us something useful about the mechanism by which stem cells are involved in regeneration, and that may have medical applications.
Yes, if all copyright holders agree, then they can alter the license. But the question was from someone who presumably didn't want to agree to such a change.
Incidentally, that discussion thread points out the reason Nessus has so few open source contributions in it: when people have submitted plug-ins, Tenable has usually just rewritten them themselves in order to be able to control the plugins and support their subscription-based business. For them to complain that there is very little open source software in their code is disingenuous.
Apart from the inherent problems of comparing sales of Windows with "sales" of Linux, it is probably true that there are many more Windows Server installations than Linux server installations.
Is that due to some amazing technical advantages of Windows Server? No, not really. It's because if you have Microsoft desktop machines, it's an uphill struggle to use anything other than their servers. Of course, small businesses are going to go with Windows Server.
In any case, the future of Microsoft is so dependent on other factors that short term statistics don't matter anyway. Personally, I think Microsoft's business model is doomed; if they survive, they'll have to become a very different company.
Now that the company pulls the source and closes it down, does that mean they took your work and will use it for their closed source purposes without your consent? Profit from it? Can you revoke their access to it?
If the project is (L)GPL and you contributed under the GPL, they can't close the source.
If the project is, say, MIT, X11, or BSD licensed, and you contributed under one of those licenses, then they can.
I guess that's the problem -- too many users, not enough developers or users with enough motivation/ability to make useful changes and additions.
There is no problem; a project like Nessus shouldn't need more than a handful of developers. However, a large user community is still useful: they act as testers and generators of ideas.
How long until we see OpenNessus or (insert clever derivative name here)?
I would guess fairly soon. Personally, I'd like to see a rewrite, though, and a better UI.
open source != open source project
on
Nessus 3.0 discussed
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· Score: 5, Interesting
'I speak to a lot of different open source project managers and they say similar stuff -- it's mostly free users and not really code contributors.'
If your open source project is popular but you don't manage to attract contributors, the fault is likely with the people managing the open source project: any popular project potentially has hundreds of contributors.
Just writing software, making it open source, and having it become popular doesn't create an "open source project"--you have to design and manage the project as an open source project. You have to make it easy for people to contribute, organize the code appropriately, be nice to potential contributors, and give people an incentive to contribute.
(Just one data point: last I looked at Nessus, it didn't look like a good foundation to build on for our needs.)
My point is that it's just rediculous to say that Amazon will patent Wiki's after SOOOO many publicity
It's not so ridiculous at all--it's in fact standard patent strategy and quite feasible. The strategy is known as "building a patent wall around" the core idea. That is, a company patents so many implementation details that are necessary for a real-world implementation but not contained in the original publication/patent that it becomes essentially impossible for anyone to implement it without violating a lot of them, and succeeding in striking down the patent in every single case is so expensive that people generally can't afford it.
In any case, if you are going to participate in conversations, you should be familiar with the rudiments of written expression, which includes concepts such as "sarcasm" and "hyperbole". Although, sadly, in the case of Amazon, sarcasm and hyperbole are uncomfortably close to the truth. Amazon won't bother patenting Wikis not because they couldn't get away with it (they already have done similar things many times before), but simply because there is no money in it.
On the plus side, Amazon's blatant abuse of the patent system will ultimately give us the ammunition to get big changes pushed through. Until then, any geek that wants to have a job in the future should not give them their business.
The fact that there is a mandatory suffix for every top level domain is the only thing that has kept the domain name system reasonably sane, both technically and legally. Allowing arbitrary top level domains is plain evil.
You aren't paying attention: we are actually quite selective in our anti-patent rants. Mostly, it's software patents, patents on life forms and DNA sequences, and business method patents we rant against, that is, the kinds of patents that aren't granted in most of the world, the kinds of patents that didn't use to be granted in the US, and the kind of patents that hamper progress and innovation.
I'm sorry for you that you don't understand what a threat these kinds of patents represent to a democracy, to property rights, and to a free market economy. Just be happy that other people worry about that sort of thing.
Oh, sure, there are uses for super-high end computing hardware. But, in case you didn't notice, Microsoft is a Pee-Cee company that is working on clustering Pee-Cee hardware. So, again, what sense does this hire make?
Hiring big names is good PR. But what else is this guy gonna do? It's not like Cray has been spectacularly successful. Mostly, they made a name with their quirky special purpose hardware before most college students were even born. How is that a good preparation for doing anything reasonable for Microsoft?
Tomorrow, we'll learn that Amazon has patented the Wiki. After all, they invented it, and even if they didn't invent it, they have given us so many other inventions that we should just shut up and let them get away with this patent.
Amazon sucks. Buy somewhere else. If you can't kick the amazon.com web site habit, use it for finding what you want and then buy somewhere else. BookBurro makes it simple and usually gets you a cheaper price as well.
Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states
Many places that have water problems are downstream from places that think they don't; so the upstream places take out water and pollute like there's no tomorrow and let others deal with the consequences.
There are no water shortages in my area,
You're probably wrong.
But even if you have excess water and are behaving responsibly (and I can't think of any state that does), we should let companies build aquifers so that they can move your water to high demand areas and the prices and availability equalize across the nation. That's what interstate commerce is all about.
we should leave those that only affect certain regions to the levels of government closest to the problems to fix as they see fit.
Feel free to point-out those usability tests in question. I would like to see how one comes to that conclusion.
Look for usability tests on Trackpoint; they show you how the usability of pointing devices is determined.
With a trackball on the sides, you wrap your hand around the edge of the notebook, making it a much more natural position to hold your hand. Having it in the middle means you have to hold your hand flat, with your thumb elevated moving the trackball, which is very uncomfortable
There may be a few poorly designed trackballs out there, but in general, that's wrong. A center-mounted trackball comes in several variations, none of which requires you to "hold your hand flat".
Some variations are operated like the trackpad, with the index finger resting on the ball and the thumb operating the buttons. Some use both hands, with the thumb of one hand operating the ball and the thumb of the other hand operating the buttons (usually, from a position close to home row), and some use the thumb to operate the track ball and the index finger to operate the mouse button. All of those can be operated from a nearly neutral hand position.
But there is a reason for reverence for peer review - as a procedure, it weeds out a lot of bullshit.
Yeah, but that doesn't have to turn into a binary decision: publish or not. Furthermore, there is no need for a small body of people to do the judging, in particular since a lot of those people are selected by fame; there are Nobel prize winners whom I wouldn't trust to recommend a dinner mint, let alone have any kind of competent judgement in the sciences.
Modern technology will greatly change the way scientific results are reported, evaluated, and reviewed. The traditional journal is already obsolete; it will just take a few decades for the scientists that like the current system to either realize it or retire.
there is too little bandwidth allocated to this use.
What WiFi really shows is that technology has made the kinds of allocations the FCC used to do obsolete in many cases. What we should do is kick bandwidth-hogging companies off the airwaves and make that bandwidth available under similar terms as those bands used for WiFi.
If a standard ethics violation occurred, they won't publish the results a lot of the time. [...] and have faith that if they are successful, Nature will still publish their work(which is a godsend to most beginning researchers).
Maybe, but that kind of causality was apparently not at work here.
it is a violation of trust that when you publish research, you have everything be as truthful as possible.
If by "everything" you mean "everything related to establishing the scientific validity of the paper", then I agree. But you are under no obligation to be truthful about, say, the name of your dog.
Ultimately, I think many people are forgetting that it isn't Nature editors that determine scientific validity, it is the readers, when they try to reproduce an experiment. The preselection by the editors is a convenience for the reader to select articles that are relevant. If the editors are pursuing any other goal, then they are not doing their job properly.
It's absolutely Nature's business, in this case, and they deserve credit for enforcing proper standards.
Neither the publisher nor the reviewers are qualified to perform investigations or make judgements. They are an unaccountable, haphazard collection of people that are abusing the authority granted to them by the scientific community for the purpose of disseminating accurate scientific information for an entirely different purpose, the punishment of ethics violations.
Of course, a scientific journal may stop scientific publication for ethical reasons, but the justifications are narrow: either, the ethical violations call into question scientific accuracy, or the ethical violations are clearly egregious. Neither applies here.
But this sort of arrogance is typical for Nature. I still subscribe, even though I find their scientific judgement questionable and their extra-scientific behavior close to unacceptable. I hope (and believe) that the next few decades will shut down rags like Nature and replace them with more rational and more transparent network-based systems.
I've seen a crashing Firefox too recently, but most of the time, a plugin was directly involved while loading the page (Java, for example). I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.
If you're going to write a browser in C or C++, then plug-ins can crash the browser; it's an unavoidable property of the way C and C++ work. Using a separate thread won't protect the browser.
You can run viewers in a separate process, but then it's not a plug-in, it's an external viewer. The UNIX/Linux version of Mozilla allows external viewers to be captured and treated like plug-ins. However, that's a cumbersome workaround and makes doing other things with the plug-ins a lot harder (like controlling them from JavaScript).
The fundamental problem is the language in which Firefox is written: C and C++ lack what's called "fault isolation". Languages like Java and C# have fault isolation, as did many of the languages in use before about 1985.
From the BBC story, this sounds grossly unfair to Dr. Hwang.
According to the BBC, Dr. Hwang did not attempt to violate the policy, he did not even know about the fact that the women donated, and it is clear that he wasn't trying to circumvent the policy either. It sounds to me like he did nothing wrong.
Yes, he did lie to Nature about it, but I find his justification acceptable. While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.
Hats off to Dr. Hwang for being willing to take the blame for something he didn't do. I suspect that his motivation is to keep human cloning research going, and he knows that the media and politicans would continue a feeding frenzy over this as long as he stays in his job.
So does my Powerbook. Those are pretty standard specs these days--nothing to write home about. And in terms of software, many laptops come at least with as much software included as Powerbooks
And in some areas the Powerbooks fall short, most notably CPU performance and battery life. And while a Mac-only user might not notice it, the pointing device and keyboard are pretty mediocre designs (and, worse yet, you don't get a choice--if you want a Powerbook, you are stuck with Apple's design).
As I was saying: the Powerbooks are great looking and they are, overall, capable, well-designed laptops at reasonable prices. I do recommend them. But they are not cutting-edge or particularly innovative. In fact, until Apple starts shipping x86-based laptops, they simply won't be able to match the performance of other laptops.
I'll admit it is somewhat a matter of personal preference, but I liked having a trackball on the right-side of the unit much more than in the center of the unit. Being near the edge of the unit allows you to bend your hand around it, making it almost feel like a normal thumb-operated trackball.
It's not just a question of preference: in general, the center mounted trackball under the space bar tests out well in usability tests, better than side-mounted trackballs or trackpads.
There may have been specific problems on specific laptop models, but in general, it's a good design.
(The decision to go with trackpads was probably motivated not by usability, but by cost, styling, and size: trackpads are cheap, trouble-free, don't break the line of the design, and don't require much space inside the case.)
The center-mounted trackball necessitated the same terrible hand contortions you're familiar with due to notebook touchpads.
If the trackball is right under the spacebar, you don't contort your hands at all, you just move them down a little. Some of them are designed to be used with thumbs, others, with your index fingers, and some can be used either way. If you try to use one of those pointing devices in a way different from the way it was intended to be used, the result may have been frustrating, however.
Its these useful everyday features that show Apple designs their products for users and not just adding stupid preschool interfaces like XP.
Apple did not invent this feature, and plenty of non-Apple laptops had it earlier than that.
There are also many features you get on other laptops that Apple thoughtlessly leaves out. Like a second mouse button, a built-in camera (like on the new iMac), and separate fn and Fxx keys.
The Powerbooks are among the nicer laptops out there, but just because a feature eventually makes it into a Powerbook does not mean that Apple invented it.
Slashdot Mirror
Physicists are sloppy about causation almost everywhere except when they explicitly reason about it in areas such as time travel. It's because they can--causation in physics experiments is usually so trivial that it doesn't require a second thought. Biologists often have to consider that what looks like a simple outcome on the surface is caused by the complex and haphazard interplay of a lot of underlying mechanisms; most experimental interventions in biology require detailed experimental controls in order to ensure that the effect you are observing is actually caused by the intended variable.
Your comment applies to the summary, not the original paper. You can be certain that the original paper gets this right: biologists are sticklers for making sure statements about causation are correct in their papers (physicists, in contrast, are often quite sloppy about causation).
The thing to keep in mind for lay readers is that adding this gene to people won't automatically turn them into regenerating superheroes. However, indications are that understanding how this gene functions will tell us something useful about the mechanism by which stem cells are involved in regeneration, and that may have medical applications.
Yes, if all copyright holders agree, then they can alter the license. But the question was from someone who presumably didn't want to agree to such a change.
Incidentally, that discussion thread points out the reason Nessus has so few open source contributions in it: when people have submitted plug-ins, Tenable has usually just rewritten them themselves in order to be able to control the plugins and support their subscription-based business. For them to complain that there is very little open source software in their code is disingenuous.
Apart from the inherent problems of comparing sales of Windows with "sales" of Linux, it is probably true that there are many more Windows Server installations than Linux server installations.
Is that due to some amazing technical advantages of Windows Server? No, not really. It's because if you have Microsoft desktop machines, it's an uphill struggle to use anything other than their servers. Of course, small businesses are going to go with Windows Server.
In any case, the future of Microsoft is so dependent on other factors that short term statistics don't matter anyway. Personally, I think Microsoft's business model is doomed; if they survive, they'll have to become a very different company.
Now that the company pulls the source and closes it down, does that mean they took your work and will use it for their closed source purposes without your consent? Profit from it? Can you revoke their access to it?
If the project is (L)GPL and you contributed under the GPL, they can't close the source.
If the project is, say, MIT, X11, or BSD licensed, and you contributed under one of those licenses, then they can.
I guess that's the problem -- too many users, not enough developers or users with enough motivation/ability to make useful changes and additions.
There is no problem; a project like Nessus shouldn't need more than a handful of developers. However, a large user community is still useful: they act as testers and generators of ideas.
How long until we see OpenNessus or (insert clever derivative name here)?
I would guess fairly soon. Personally, I'd like to see a rewrite, though, and a better UI.
'I speak to a lot of different open source project managers and they say similar stuff -- it's mostly free users and not really code contributors.'
If your open source project is popular but you don't manage to attract contributors, the fault is likely with the people managing the open source project: any popular project potentially has hundreds of contributors.
Just writing software, making it open source, and having it become popular doesn't create an "open source project"--you have to design and manage the project as an open source project. You have to make it easy for people to contribute, organize the code appropriately, be nice to potential contributors, and give people an incentive to contribute.
(Just one data point: last I looked at Nessus, it didn't look like a good foundation to build on for our needs.)
My point is that it's just rediculous to say that Amazon will patent Wiki's after SOOOO many publicity
It's not so ridiculous at all--it's in fact standard patent strategy and quite feasible. The strategy is known as "building a patent wall around" the core idea. That is, a company patents so many implementation details that are necessary for a real-world implementation but not contained in the original publication/patent that it becomes essentially impossible for anyone to implement it without violating a lot of them, and succeeding in striking down the patent in every single case is so expensive that people generally can't afford it.
In any case, if you are going to participate in conversations, you should be familiar with the rudiments of written expression, which includes concepts such as "sarcasm" and "hyperbole". Although, sadly, in the case of Amazon, sarcasm and hyperbole are uncomfortably close to the truth. Amazon won't bother patenting Wikis not because they couldn't get away with it (they already have done similar things many times before), but simply because there is no money in it.
On the plus side, Amazon's blatant abuse of the patent system will ultimately give us the ammunition to get big changes pushed through. Until then, any geek that wants to have a job in the future should not give them their business.
You're making a lot of assumptions.
First, how do you know the Singapore law doesn't protect atheists as well?
Second, how do you know that it prohibits "criticism", in the sense of philosophical or literary examination?
I think before jumping to conclusions, one needs to know a little more about the law.
The fact that there is a mandatory suffix for every top level domain is the only thing that has kept the domain name system reasonably sane, both technically and legally. Allowing arbitrary top level domains is plain evil.
You aren't paying attention: we are actually quite selective in our anti-patent rants. Mostly, it's software patents, patents on life forms and DNA sequences, and business method patents we rant against, that is, the kinds of patents that aren't granted in most of the world, the kinds of patents that didn't use to be granted in the US, and the kind of patents that hamper progress and innovation.
I'm sorry for you that you don't understand what a threat these kinds of patents represent to a democracy, to property rights, and to a free market economy. Just be happy that other people worry about that sort of thing.
Oh, sure, there are uses for super-high end computing hardware. But, in case you didn't notice, Microsoft is a Pee-Cee company that is working on clustering Pee-Cee hardware. So, again, what sense does this hire make?
Hiring big names is good PR. But what else is this guy gonna do? It's not like Cray has been spectacularly successful. Mostly, they made a name with their quirky special purpose hardware before most college students were even born. How is that a good preparation for doing anything reasonable for Microsoft?
The "troll" is you (well, actually, you're an astroturfer, but close enough).
Tomorrow, we'll learn that Amazon has patented the Wiki. After all, they invented it, and even if they didn't invent it, they have given us so many other inventions that we should just shut up and let them get away with this patent.
Amazon sucks. Buy somewhere else. If you can't kick the amazon.com web site habit, use it for finding what you want and then buy somewhere else. BookBurro makes it simple and usually gets you a cheaper price as well.
Despite the opinions of many Californians I've met, the universe does not revolve solely around them, or their state. Water shortages are rarely an issue in the U.S., outside of California (and I suspect probably mostly only Southern California) and the Southwestern states
Many places that have water problems are downstream from places that think they don't; so the upstream places take out water and pollute like there's no tomorrow and let others deal with the consequences.
There are no water shortages in my area,
You're probably wrong.
But even if you have excess water and are behaving responsibly (and I can't think of any state that does), we should let companies build aquifers so that they can move your water to high demand areas and the prices and availability equalize across the nation. That's what interstate commerce is all about.
we should leave those that only affect certain regions to the levels of government closest to the problems to fix as they see fit.
Water is a federal issue.
Feel free to point-out those usability tests in question. I would like to see how one comes to that conclusion.
Look for usability tests on Trackpoint; they show you how the usability of pointing devices is determined.
With a trackball on the sides, you wrap your hand around the edge of the notebook, making it a much more natural position to hold your hand. Having it in the middle means you have to hold your hand flat, with your thumb elevated moving the trackball, which is very uncomfortable
There may be a few poorly designed trackballs out there, but in general, that's wrong. A center-mounted trackball comes in several variations, none of which requires you to "hold your hand flat".
Some variations are operated like the trackpad, with the index finger resting on the ball and the thumb operating the buttons. Some use both hands, with the thumb of one hand operating the ball and the thumb of the other hand operating the buttons (usually, from a position close to home row), and some use the thumb to operate the track ball and the index finger to operate the mouse button. All of those can be operated from a nearly neutral hand position.
But there is a reason for reverence for peer review - as a procedure, it weeds out a lot of bullshit.
Yeah, but that doesn't have to turn into a binary decision: publish or not. Furthermore, there is no need for a small body of people to do the judging, in particular since a lot of those people are selected by fame; there are Nobel prize winners whom I wouldn't trust to recommend a dinner mint, let alone have any kind of competent judgement in the sciences.
Modern technology will greatly change the way scientific results are reported, evaluated, and reviewed. The traditional journal is already obsolete; it will just take a few decades for the scientists that like the current system to either realize it or retire.
there is too little bandwidth allocated to this use.
What WiFi really shows is that technology has made the kinds of allocations the FCC used to do obsolete in many cases.
What we should do is kick bandwidth-hogging companies off the airwaves and make that bandwidth available under similar terms as those bands used for WiFi.
If a standard ethics violation occurred, they won't publish the results a lot of the time. [...] and have faith that if they are successful, Nature will still publish their work(which is a godsend to most beginning researchers).
Maybe, but that kind of causality was apparently not at work here.
it is a violation of trust that when you publish research, you have everything be as truthful as possible.
If by "everything" you mean "everything related to establishing the scientific validity of the paper", then I agree. But you are under no obligation to be truthful about, say, the name of your dog.
Ultimately, I think many people are forgetting that it isn't Nature editors that determine scientific validity, it is the readers, when they try to reproduce an experiment. The preselection by the editors is a convenience for the reader to select articles that are relevant. If the editors are pursuing any other goal, then they are not doing their job properly.
It's absolutely Nature's business, in this case, and they deserve credit for enforcing proper standards.
Neither the publisher nor the reviewers are qualified to perform investigations or make judgements. They are an unaccountable, haphazard collection of people that are abusing the authority granted to them by the scientific community for the purpose of disseminating accurate scientific information for an entirely different purpose, the punishment of ethics violations.
Of course, a scientific journal may stop scientific publication for ethical reasons, but the justifications are narrow: either, the ethical violations call into question scientific accuracy, or the ethical violations are clearly egregious. Neither applies here.
But this sort of arrogance is typical for Nature. I still subscribe, even though I find their scientific judgement questionable and their extra-scientific behavior close to unacceptable. I hope (and believe) that the next few decades will shut down rags like Nature and replace them with more rational and more transparent network-based systems.
I've seen a crashing Firefox too recently, but most of the time, a plugin was directly involved while loading the page (Java, for example). I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.
If you're going to write a browser in C or C++, then plug-ins can crash the browser; it's an unavoidable property of the way C and C++ work. Using a separate thread won't protect the browser.
You can run viewers in a separate process, but then it's not a plug-in, it's an external viewer. The UNIX/Linux version of Mozilla allows external viewers to be captured and treated like plug-ins. However, that's a cumbersome workaround and makes doing other things with the plug-ins a lot harder (like controlling them from JavaScript).
The fundamental problem is the language in which Firefox is written: C and C++ lack what's called "fault isolation". Languages like Java and C# have fault isolation, as did many of the languages in use before about 1985.
From the BBC story, this sounds grossly unfair to Dr. Hwang.
According to the BBC, Dr. Hwang did not attempt to violate the policy, he did not even know about the fact that the women donated, and it is clear that he wasn't trying to circumvent the policy either. It sounds to me like he did nothing wrong.
Yes, he did lie to Nature about it, but I find his justification acceptable. While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.
Hats off to Dr. Hwang for being willing to take the blame for something he didn't do. I suspect that his motivation is to keep human cloning research going, and he knows that the media and politicans would continue a feeding frenzy over this as long as he stays in his job.
So does my Powerbook. Those are pretty standard specs these days--nothing to write home about. And in terms of software, many laptops come at least with as much software included as Powerbooks
And in some areas the Powerbooks fall short, most notably CPU performance and battery life. And while a Mac-only user might not notice it, the pointing device and keyboard are pretty mediocre designs (and, worse yet, you don't get a choice--if you want a Powerbook, you are stuck with Apple's design).
As I was saying: the Powerbooks are great looking and they are, overall, capable, well-designed laptops at reasonable prices. I do recommend them. But they are not cutting-edge or particularly innovative. In fact, until Apple starts shipping x86-based laptops, they simply won't be able to match the performance of other laptops.
I'll admit it is somewhat a matter of personal preference, but I liked having a trackball on the right-side of the unit much more than in the center of the unit. Being near the edge of the unit allows you to bend your hand around it, making it almost feel like a normal thumb-operated trackball.
It's not just a question of preference: in general, the center mounted trackball under the space bar tests out well in usability tests, better than side-mounted trackballs or trackpads.
There may have been specific problems on specific laptop models, but in general, it's a good design.
(The decision to go with trackpads was probably motivated not by usability, but by cost, styling, and size: trackpads are cheap, trouble-free, don't break the line of the design, and don't require much space inside the case.)
The center-mounted trackball necessitated the same terrible hand contortions you're familiar with due to notebook touchpads.
If the trackball is right under the spacebar, you don't contort your hands at all, you just move them down a little. Some of them are designed to be used with thumbs, others, with your index fingers, and some can be used either way. If you try to use one of those pointing devices in a way different from the way it was intended to be used, the result may have been frustrating, however.
Its these useful everyday features that show Apple designs their products for users and not just adding stupid preschool interfaces like XP.
Apple did not invent this feature, and plenty of non-Apple laptops had it earlier than that.
There are also many features you get on other laptops that Apple thoughtlessly leaves out. Like a second mouse button, a built-in camera (like on the new iMac), and separate fn and Fxx keys.
The Powerbooks are among the nicer laptops out there, but just because a feature eventually makes it into a Powerbook does not mean that Apple invented it.