And here I thought I was the only one who remembered that game...everyone looks at me like I'm nuts when I talk about it.
Random bit of trivia that floats through my head every so often about Cliff Hanger: To get through the junkyard: down, left, down, right, up. I'm set if space aliens ever force me to play Cliff Hanger to save the world.
And yeah, those ninjas...that was always the end of the game for me, too.
The one thing I'm interested in is that, apparently, they are planning to let you to send an email to an address, which they will then print and hand-deliver to the addressee. For me, this would be really nice -- my wifes grandparents and I enjoy a regular correspondence -- a correspondence that would be much more regular if I could email instead of snail-mail.
I don't mean to sound snarky, so if I do I apologize, but how would this make you reply to them any faster? I mean, if they don't have a computer, they're still going to send letters via USPS. Presumably, you use the computer to type up a letter to them, so what's the real difference between [printing and folding and sealing and stamping a letter] and sending email (in this case)? I don't get it, and I'm honestly curious.
Okay, after thinking about it, I can think of a few justifications:
It is very difficult or even physically impossible for you to send a letter via USPS due to some sort of disability; in this case, I can totally understand a completely electronic solution being a lot easier.
You don't live in the U.S., and even $0.41 is cheaper than airmail rates. But I have no idea what airmail rates are. The last time I had to send a letter outside the U.S. was nearly a decade ago.
You perceive the physical act of folding, addressing, sealing, blah blah blah as a pain in the ass that takes too damn long. Understandable.
I myself rarely ever write actual letters, mostly because I always find other things to do, so I totally understand where you're coming from, but I was interested when you said that this solution might work for you. To me it seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other.
This strategy assumes that you know you want the software and aren't going to return it, and hopes that the disc isn't defective. It also requires a little bit of chutzpah.
Take the software to the checkout.
Pay for it.
Say "No, thank you" if you're offered a bag.
After the transaction is complete, but before walking away, open the box, remove the CD, manuals, and assorted flotsam.
Leave the box on the counter.
IIRC this is the tactic people used with those stupid CD longboxes and it worked. Maybe it will work here, too.
Opened the box, popped the disc in, and played. Were there even walkthroughs available when Myst first came out? I suppose there must have been; it had been out for a month or two when I bought it. But I did play it from the beginning, with no help.
This isn't the kind of game I'm normally good at, which is why I was so surprised. Return To Zork, for example, completely confounded me. I think I bought the walkthrough book for that one the day after I bought the game.
Why do gamers always totally bash Cyan and the Myst line of games?
Here's my two cents; YMMV of course. If anyone reading this hasn't played the game and intends to, there are some huge spoilers in this comment.
I had three problems with Myst:
This one is my fault: I believed the hype. "The game that will become your world" was, for me, merely a collection of pretty pictures.
The puzzles were almost insultingly easy. For example, the maze that some people seem to think was so damn confusing was easily and quickly traversed with the right-hand rule.
"Whatever you do, don't put the last page into the green book!" Gee, you're both evil, I wonder what I should do?
I finished Myst in something like ten hours, which seems to me to be an incredibly short time for a game that was supposed to be so devilishly complicated. It was no challenge at all.
Just because it's the best-selling game of all time doesn't imply quality; Britney Spears and Kid Rock sell a lot of records, but it doesn't mean they're any good.
I was thinking...you know, all I want from my TV is to be able to watch TV programs. I want my F-Troop reruns, not a bio of Larry Storch. You know? I don't want HTML or Java. I want to watch the F1 race at Monte Carlo or Suzuka. Is any of this fighting over "interactive" content really needed for TV?
Besides, there's nothing interactive about staring at a screen, no matter what's on it, no matter whether you've chosen it or not. You don't interact with a TV show or a movie. You watch it.
What's really important is this: when they're pushing ads at me over the damn DTV line, do I get to turn them off? I seem to recall that Winston Smith couldn't turn his screen off at all. Is Big Brother going to be watching us?
The latest issue of the FAIR newsletter/magazine has a great article on PBS advertising. Worth picking up if you can find it (hint: you probably can't find it at Barnes & Noble). Especially interesting is the part about how the ads insert company slogans: "Chuck E. Cheese is proud to sponsor PBS, where a kid can be a kid." Which is exactly what you pointed out, but it's being done in a specific, deliberate way--they're not just "(in a way) being programmed". It's a deliberate advertising tactic.
...if I got clothes for free which have the logo of the manufacturer.
Well, a company has a reasonable expectation that they should make some money from their products, so "free" is stretching it a little. But it's ridiculous that logo-bearing clothes cost MORE than non-logo bearing clothes. What's the real difference between a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt or a Gap t-shirt and a 3-pack of white Hanes t-shirts for ten bucks?
...and you'll be stunned at what you see. Go to a mall, for example. Or a high school or college campus. Start counting all of the walking billboards you see: people wearing clothes that very prominently display the name of the designer or the store they bought it from. Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts and pants are a prime example around here. Gap. Old Navy. Yeah, Nike. Guess.
Stop counting when you reach a hundred. It won't take long.
This is all fscked up, AFAIC. People are paying companies large sums of money (ever bought a Tommy t-shirt?) for the "privilege" of advertising for them. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to pick it up tonight.
Rap music's main distinguishing characteristics is sampling, as well techniques such as record scratching. I sure would like to know how you think you can sample music which isn't recorded, and scratch records which do not exist!
Uh...this is totally wrong. The main distinguishing characteristic of rap is the rap, the flow, the words. A person can provide the beat. The Fat Boys come to mind. Early records from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Doug E. Fresh. You can have rap without samples and records.
I enjoy User Friendly well enough, but I won't be buying the new book. Why? Well, the first one didn't print all the strips, and didn't print them in order (which, from the review, it sounds like the new book is also guilty of).
Any other collection of comic strips doesn't do this (with the exception of some gag strip books that print Sunday strips back-to-back because gag strips don't generally have an order). And I don't think they leave strips out.
As for the crappy art, hey, it's part of the appeal. I think that one of the best current comic strips is Fox Trot, and Bill Amend is not really a *great* artist. Not everybody can be Frank Cho.
The main difference, or so it seems to me, is that the MPAA and the RIAA are trade organizations and not corporations. The only power they have is the power given to them by the corporations. If Jack Valenti said "From now on, any motion picture submitted to the MPAA for rating *must* contain a clown in a rainbow wig doing the fox trot with a midget elephant, or it will receive an NC-17 rating", how many companies do you think would go for that? (I kind of wish the old bastard would do something like that so they could kick him out.)
The corporations you mention arrogate power to themselves, an entirely different thing.
It seems like a lot of people are missing the point. Corporations can and do influence what we think and see--or at least they try to.
An example: Microsoft claims so often that it is an innovator that people are starting to parrot the company line.
Okay, that was an easy target.
How about this: Seen the ads for Verizon wireless? You know, the single company formed by the merger of Primeco (which had just merged with something else, IIRC) and two other companies? Have you noticed that their ads claim that customers have *more* "freedom" and *more* "choice" now that there are fewer cellular providers? Just how much sense does that make?
The sad truth is, ideas like freedom and liberty are being redefined by corporations every day. Like I said about government a while ago, the only function of a powerful organization is to keep that power. Everything else is totally ancillary.
For example, if a shoe company thought that it could increase its profits by engaging in slavery, don't you think it would? Oh, wait a minute, they already have.
I've got a great idea for a horrible game. Start off with incredible artwork. Combine incredible artwork with insultingly easy "puzzles". Mix with horrible non-story. Add a dash of hype. Ah, what the hell, dump the whole box of hype in there. Make the last choice so obvious that only a moron would miss it (perhaps by having two people, independently, say "whatever you do, don't put the page in the green book!"). Finally, add a non-ending.
It'll sell millions, I guarantee it. You can advertise it as "the game that will become your world".
I've Been There...Here's Why it's a Bad Idea
on
Laptops In Education
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· Score: 1
I'll preface my comments by saying that I worked for many years as a network tech/pc specialist/sysadmin for a metropolitan school district in what can loosely be termed the Upper Midwest. I spent most of my time traveling to schools around the district fixing servers, running cable, basically "you-name-it-we-do-it" types of things, from the inanely simple to the extraordinarily complex. The upshot is, I've been in public schools, I've seen teachers at work, and I know a thing or two about computers.
I'm also a parent.
Now that that's out of the way, here's why this whole laptop idea is Bad: it's not a solution to the problem of the quality of education in America. It is at best a Band-Aid, something for politicians and teacher unions to point to to say "we're educating your children". It is a panacea. To quote Gertrude Stein, "There's no there there."
As far as education goes, computers are just the latest in a line of tools that educators can use to avoid educating children. When I was growing up, it was TV. Now it's computers. The fact of the matter is, or at least it seems to me, that computers cannot replace humans as teachers. They can replace the teacher as dispenser of information, but they cannot replace the teacher as teacher. The classroom teacher is not there to "facilitate learning", or whatever your favorite buzzword happens to be--the teacher should lead by example, and not only dispense facts (which the machine can do), but to relate those facts to life and to their own life experience, which a machine can never do.
Laptops, or any kind of computer really, are an expensive sop to parents who think that computers are all-important. A very expensive sop; even $500 per unit in a a district of, say, 20,000 children is a $10 million investment, and that $10 million could be much better spent where it really needs to go: teacher education and retention.
First, education: it's a sad truth that people who do have a hope of getting a better job than teaching usually don't go into teaching. Note that I said usually--there are some extremely intelligent people who go into teaching. Unfortunately, they're few and far between in public education. If you're one of them, congratulations; I myself met one once. Teachers need to take real subjects in college, not education classes. Teachers need to be educated, not...I don't know, not taught to regurgitate what the professor says.
Next, retention. Starting salaries need to be raised. Long-term teachers get paid fairly well, at least around here, but starting salaries are abysmal. If you pay more money, you can attract more intelligent people. It's that simple. Why, for example, should I teach computer science for $25K when I can work in the field for three times that much?
The answer isn't laptops. The answer is to do something about teachers who tell their students "Shut up!" (I saw this more than once), or to do something about the English teacher who says "Me and her are going to eat". We need to ground kids in the basics. It's not happening anymore.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly what Cliff Stoll describes in "The Cuckoo's Egg"? Seems to me it worked pretty well there. However, I would imagine that that is only a good idea if you know you have intruders and want to see what they're doing and keep them coming back. If you're thinking more of getting people who otherwise wouldn't touch your system, then that can be a problem, as others have said, with entrapment.
Now what I have to ask is, will a 600MHz PC with 64 MB RAM and an NVIDIA card really be all that by Christmas 2001, 21 months from now?
Potentially. It all depends on the software. Look at the original Sony Playstation. Developers are still trying to figure out how to get the absolute most out of it, and doing a damn fine job. And what does the Playstation have, 2MB of memory? It's amazing what you can do when you simply can't have code bloat.
Having said that, though, I'd never even consider buying this monstrosity. It's the Playstation 2 for me, and that's the bottom line.
Yeah, I was thinking of FUDGE too. You can get it for free, in pdf format, but I recommend actually going to a game store and plunking down the $12 or $15 for it. FUDGE is easily the most extensible RPG; I think it surpasses even GURPS. Literally the only thing FUDGE gives you is the conflict-resolution mechanism. Everything else is up to you. It needs to be seen to be believed. It is incredible.
I'm assuming that the question is submitted in earnest, and that it's not somebody looking to make a buck off of Coca-Cola. Perhaps I'm naive that way.
The easiest solution, if you're serious about wanting to make a site detailing the evils of cocaine addiction, is to do just that. Put up a server. Prove your intentions. Then Coke can't (or shouldn't be able to) touch you.
For example, if my name were Jim Coke and I wanted to open up a cleaning business and call it Coke Cleaners, I could do that because:
It's my name, fercryinoutloud.
It has nothing to do with the soda business.
(Or at least that's how I understand it; IANAL of course. And that's assuming that I don't use anything that looks like Coke's logo in my advertising.)
The problem is, you never did do anything with it.
Oh, and another thing: as I understand it, companies are legally required to defend their trademarks and copyrights. If they don't defend every case of possible infringement, it can come back to haunt them.
Parker and Stone should have made some new animation for them to play at the awards. It would have been a perfect solution, given the death of Mary Kay Bergman. They could have cut the song right into it, as a kind of memorial to the talent that was lost when she killed herself.
Robin Williams, though? Yuck. He's waaaaay to corporate, even though he represents as "wacky" and "out there". He's the perfect safe choice for an AMPAS that lost all credibility whatsoever long ago. What a disappointment.
My only hope is that Parker and Stone win and get up on stage and just rip into pretty much everything and curse up a storm and do Cartman voices. Trey Parker is a comic genius. Let's hope they win so there'll be some entertainment on the Oscars this year.
I assume that they've drop-tested them, but just how rigid are the glass platters? And what kind of glass? I mean, if I drop a standard-issue hard drive on the floor, it might never work again, but I can do (or have done) some kind of data recovery. There's not much you can do with shards of broken glass except get cuts on your fingers.
Also, isn't glass fairly unstable on a geological time scale? I realize that it would make very little difference in a device that isn't designed to last forever, but doesn't glass deform (albeit very very slowly)?
I wish they had said what kind of glass they were using.
Re:Can I host an online book on a libraries homepa
on
King's New eBook
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· Score: 1
Some of the public libraries around here (loosely defined as the Upper Midwest) have Rocket e-books available for borrowing. I've never tried to borrow one, so I don't know what's involved, whether there are any agreements to sign or what have you. But it is a possible solution to the issue you bring up.
Of course, it's not feasible for a lot of libraries, where they can only wish that they had a $300 budget. But for some, it is not out of reach.
Re:Men who don't try to tell the difference
on
Men Playing as Women
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· Score: 1
Excellent, excellent point.
Although perhaps in the case of MU*s, especially MUDs, it has something to do with being able to recognize that the other person is playing a role rather than themselves. In my gaming group, we had a D&D campaign where two characters, one male and one female, fell in love and got married, all done very well and handled appropriately. Both of the players were guys, and nobody got hung up on it.
It is different electronically; people are much too willing to believe what they see. But it's absolutely correct--we don't try to hard to dispel our myths.
I can't personally attest to whether this works or not, because it's not a method I use, but my wife has been typing (writing fiction) for hours and hours a day, pretty much every day, for twenty-five years now and has no pain whatsoever.
She also types well over 100 wpm for sustained amounts of time, channeling streams of thoguht through her hands; she started out on a manual typewriter, then an electric typewriter, and now a computer keyboard. So I'll just tell you how she types.
She uses her index fingers, and that's it. I'm not kidding. Well, she uses her thumbs on the spacebar, but none of her other fingers. She really does go over 100 wpm, too. It's pretty amazing, it's like a damn machine gun when she gets going. But by using only her index fingers, she keeps her wrists straight, and that's really the key.
Of course, part of the equation is also having started on a manual typewriter. It made her wrists strong. It also gave her an incredibly heavy touch on the keyboard. We go through one about every eight months because she thinks she's still using a manual typewriter.
So there's my recommendation: a regular old keyboard and two fingers. It's probably a bit late to get the wrist strength, but you can try. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Random bit of trivia that floats through my head every so often about Cliff Hanger: To get through the junkyard: down, left, down, right, up. I'm set if space aliens ever force me to play Cliff Hanger to save the world.
And yeah, those ninjas...that was always the end of the game for me, too.
I don't mean to sound snarky, so if I do I apologize, but how would this make you reply to them any faster? I mean, if they don't have a computer, they're still going to send letters via USPS. Presumably, you use the computer to type up a letter to them, so what's the real difference between [printing and folding and sealing and stamping a letter] and sending email (in this case)? I don't get it, and I'm honestly curious.
Okay, after thinking about it, I can think of a few justifications:
I myself rarely ever write actual letters, mostly because I always find other things to do, so I totally understand where you're coming from, but I was interested when you said that this solution might work for you. To me it seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Wouldn't a better solution be to stop using Outlook completely?
IIRC this is the tactic people used with those stupid CD longboxes and it worked. Maybe it will work here, too.
This isn't the kind of game I'm normally good at, which is why I was so surprised. Return To Zork, for example, completely confounded me. I think I bought the walkthrough book for that one the day after I bought the game.
Here's my two cents; YMMV of course. If anyone reading this hasn't played the game and intends to, there are some huge spoilers in this comment.
I had three problems with Myst:
- This one is my fault: I believed the hype. "The game that will become your world" was, for me, merely a collection of pretty pictures.
- The puzzles were almost insultingly easy. For example, the maze that some people seem to think was so damn confusing was easily and quickly traversed with the right-hand rule.
- "Whatever you do, don't put the last page into the green book!" Gee, you're both evil, I wonder what I should do?
I finished Myst in something like ten hours, which seems to me to be an incredibly short time for a game that was supposed to be so devilishly complicated. It was no challenge at all.Just because it's the best-selling game of all time doesn't imply quality; Britney Spears and Kid Rock sell a lot of records, but it doesn't mean they're any good.
Besides, there's nothing interactive about staring at a screen, no matter what's on it, no matter whether you've chosen it or not. You don't interact with a TV show or a movie. You watch it.
What's really important is this: when they're pushing ads at me over the damn DTV line, do I get to turn them off? I seem to recall that Winston Smith couldn't turn his screen off at all. Is Big Brother going to be watching us?
Will we care?
The latest issue of the FAIR newsletter/magazine has a great article on PBS advertising. Worth picking up if you can find it (hint: you probably can't find it at Barnes & Noble). Especially interesting is the part about how the ads insert company slogans: "Chuck E. Cheese is proud to sponsor PBS, where a kid can be a kid." Which is exactly what you pointed out, but it's being done in a specific, deliberate way--they're not just "(in a way) being programmed". It's a deliberate advertising tactic.
Well, a company has a reasonable expectation that they should make some money from their products, so "free" is stretching it a little. But it's ridiculous that logo-bearing clothes cost MORE than non-logo bearing clothes. What's the real difference between a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt or a Gap t-shirt and a 3-pack of white Hanes t-shirts for ten bucks?
Stop counting when you reach a hundred. It won't take long.
This is all fscked up, AFAIC. People are paying companies large sums of money (ever bought a Tommy t-shirt?) for the "privilege" of advertising for them. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to pick it up tonight.
Uh...this is totally wrong. The main distinguishing characteristic of rap is the rap, the flow, the words. A person can provide the beat. The Fat Boys come to mind. Early records from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Doug E. Fresh. You can have rap without samples and records.
Any other collection of comic strips doesn't do this (with the exception of some gag strip books that print Sunday strips back-to-back because gag strips don't generally have an order). And I don't think they leave strips out.
As for the crappy art, hey, it's part of the appeal. I think that one of the best current comic strips is Fox Trot, and Bill Amend is not really a *great* artist. Not everybody can be Frank Cho.
The corporations you mention arrogate power to themselves, an entirely different thing.
An example: Microsoft claims so often that it is an innovator that people are starting to parrot the company line.
Okay, that was an easy target.
How about this: Seen the ads for Verizon wireless? You know, the single company formed by the merger of Primeco (which had just merged with something else, IIRC) and two other companies? Have you noticed that their ads claim that customers have *more* "freedom" and *more* "choice" now that there are fewer cellular providers? Just how much sense does that make?
The sad truth is, ideas like freedom and liberty are being redefined by corporations every day. Like I said about government a while ago, the only function of a powerful organization is to keep that power. Everything else is totally ancillary.
For example, if a shoe company thought that it could increase its profits by engaging in slavery, don't you think it would? Oh, wait a minute, they already have.
It'll sell millions, I guarantee it. You can advertise it as "the game that will become your world".
I'm also a parent.
Now that that's out of the way, here's why this whole laptop idea is Bad: it's not a solution to the problem of the quality of education in America. It is at best a Band-Aid, something for politicians and teacher unions to point to to say "we're educating your children". It is a panacea. To quote Gertrude Stein, "There's no there there."
As far as education goes, computers are just the latest in a line of tools that educators can use to avoid educating children. When I was growing up, it was TV. Now it's computers. The fact of the matter is, or at least it seems to me, that computers cannot replace humans as teachers. They can replace the teacher as dispenser of information, but they cannot replace the teacher as teacher. The classroom teacher is not there to "facilitate learning", or whatever your favorite buzzword happens to be--the teacher should lead by example, and not only dispense facts (which the machine can do), but to relate those facts to life and to their own life experience, which a machine can never do.
Laptops, or any kind of computer really, are an expensive sop to parents who think that computers are all-important. A very expensive sop; even $500 per unit in a a district of, say, 20,000 children is a $10 million investment, and that $10 million could be much better spent where it really needs to go: teacher education and retention.
First, education: it's a sad truth that people who do have a hope of getting a better job than teaching usually don't go into teaching. Note that I said usually--there are some extremely intelligent people who go into teaching. Unfortunately, they're few and far between in public education. If you're one of them, congratulations; I myself met one once. Teachers need to take real subjects in college, not education classes. Teachers need to be educated, not...I don't know, not taught to regurgitate what the professor says.
Next, retention. Starting salaries need to be raised. Long-term teachers get paid fairly well, at least around here, but starting salaries are abysmal. If you pay more money, you can attract more intelligent people. It's that simple. Why, for example, should I teach computer science for $25K when I can work in the field for three times that much?
The answer isn't laptops. The answer is to do something about teachers who tell their students "Shut up!" (I saw this more than once), or to do something about the English teacher who says "Me and her are going to eat". We need to ground kids in the basics. It's not happening anymore.
And it needs to.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly what Cliff Stoll describes in "The Cuckoo's Egg"? Seems to me it worked pretty well there. However, I would imagine that that is only a good idea if you know you have intruders and want to see what they're doing and keep them coming back. If you're thinking more of getting people who otherwise wouldn't touch your system, then that can be a problem, as others have said, with entrapment.
Potentially. It all depends on the software. Look at the original Sony Playstation. Developers are still trying to figure out how to get the absolute most out of it, and doing a damn fine job. And what does the Playstation have, 2MB of memory? It's amazing what you can do when you simply can't have code bloat.
Having said that, though, I'd never even consider buying this monstrosity. It's the Playstation 2 for me, and that's the bottom line.
Yeah, I was thinking of FUDGE too. You can get it for free, in pdf format, but I recommend actually going to a game store and plunking down the $12 or $15 for it. FUDGE is easily the most extensible RPG; I think it surpasses even GURPS. Literally the only thing FUDGE gives you is the conflict-resolution mechanism. Everything else is up to you. It needs to be seen to be believed. It is incredible.
The easiest solution, if you're serious about wanting to make a site detailing the evils of cocaine addiction, is to do just that. Put up a server. Prove your intentions. Then Coke can't (or shouldn't be able to) touch you.
For example, if my name were Jim Coke and I wanted to open up a cleaning business and call it Coke Cleaners, I could do that because:
- It's my name, fercryinoutloud.
- It has nothing to do with the soda business.
(Or at least that's how I understand it; IANAL of course. And that's assuming that I don't use anything that looks like Coke's logo in my advertising.)The problem is, you never did do anything with it.
Oh, and another thing: as I understand it, companies are legally required to defend their trademarks and copyrights. If they don't defend every case of possible infringement, it can come back to haunt them.
Robin Williams, though? Yuck. He's waaaaay to corporate, even though he represents as "wacky" and "out there". He's the perfect safe choice for an AMPAS that lost all credibility whatsoever long ago. What a disappointment.
My only hope is that Parker and Stone win and get up on stage and just rip into pretty much everything and curse up a storm and do Cartman voices. Trey Parker is a comic genius. Let's hope they win so there'll be some entertainment on the Oscars this year.
Also, isn't glass fairly unstable on a geological time scale? I realize that it would make very little difference in a device that isn't designed to last forever, but doesn't glass deform (albeit very very slowly)?
I wish they had said what kind of glass they were using.
Of course, it's not feasible for a lot of libraries, where they can only wish that they had a $300 budget. But for some, it is not out of reach.
Although perhaps in the case of MU*s, especially MUDs, it has something to do with being able to recognize that the other person is playing a role rather than themselves. In my gaming group, we had a D&D campaign where two characters, one male and one female, fell in love and got married, all done very well and handled appropriately. Both of the players were guys, and nobody got hung up on it.
It is different electronically; people are much too willing to believe what they see. But it's absolutely correct--we don't try to hard to dispel our myths.
She also types well over 100 wpm for sustained amounts of time, channeling streams of thoguht through her hands; she started out on a manual typewriter, then an electric typewriter, and now a computer keyboard. So I'll just tell you how she types.
She uses her index fingers, and that's it. I'm not kidding. Well, she uses her thumbs on the spacebar, but none of her other fingers. She really does go over 100 wpm, too. It's pretty amazing, it's like a damn machine gun when she gets going. But by using only her index fingers, she keeps her wrists straight, and that's really the key.
Of course, part of the equation is also having started on a manual typewriter. It made her wrists strong. It also gave her an incredibly heavy touch on the keyboard. We go through one about every eight months because she thinks she's still using a manual typewriter.
So there's my recommendation: a regular old keyboard and two fingers. It's probably a bit late to get the wrist strength, but you can try. Good luck.