I wager I am a hair faster typing right handed than some, except I got my practice typing with pizza and other yummies in my left hand! : ) It's in fact faster for me than my iPhone because on the iPhone I wrestle with Autocorrect every single word, and it won't leave well enough alone. It's also not possible to do the "click 4 lines up with the mouse to fix the Squiggly warning.
Oh, more fun: depending to be sure you don't break a game's rules, maybe consider one of the Macro / hotkey programs. For example if you get the window spacing right, it would put stuff like 7 mouse clicks onto a key, and then since your hand stays on the keys, you can recover even more time.
Not counting the amusing time that I spent half of high school with an arm in a cast because of a strange break in my arm, in your honor and pulling some gamey-science flair, I am typing this reply one handed with a stopwatch going.
I am happy to update your status in a quick-dirty little study I did a couple of hours ago!
--------------- Quickly created on 9-22-2012 Ask Slashdot: Gaming With Only One Hand? Hork_Monkey IN THREAD - YAY!!!!
Ask Slashdot: Hearing Aids That Directly Connect To Smart Phones? mtcups Not In Thread Ask Slashdot: Best Protection Plan For Your Phone? nastav Not In Thread Ask Slashdot: What Tech For a Sailing Ship? Razgorov Prikazka IN THREAD Ask Slashdot: When Is It a Good Idea To Incorporate? stairmaster IN THREAD Once Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators? Covalent Not In Thread Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Collecting and Storing User Information? isaaccs IN THREAD ---------
You said Gaming, leaving things open to interpretation, so I'll try a 25% tangent and look at "typing/keyboard." I'll offer some ideas you can play with as I type this and maybe it will help with the keyboard-controls side of gaming.
I'm at 8 minutes so far one handed and if I am to believe the red dashes, my spelling is pretty good. I at least am apparently fairly fast atusing the mouse to jump up a line and fix goofs.
So hoping you still have your dominant hand, (I'm right handed so that's gonna influence my suggestions.)
It might be an easier change if you were a hunt-peck typist already. The finger assignments will be different than regular typing. Let's look at some examples.
1. Middle and fourth fingers. I'm getting the most "firepower" (to add some gaming flair) out of my middle and third fingers. The middle finger is the "heavy cannon" for some 50% of the letters and symbols. The third finger covers another 40% of stuff including Backspace, the left side of the symbols with your index finger parked on Shift. I am also using it for the number-pad version of period rather than the reg one. Shift-T is also a fourth finger op. 16 minutes so far.
2. Keyboard remapping. Whether in the game control level or OS-hook level, it seems to me that there's a nice bunch of keys all on the right side that would work for a right-hander. You can get even fancier with the foot pedals etc, but for all the "select this and this from drop menus" games, it's looking like you can park your thumb on the arrows, index-middle-third on all the option toggles etc, and the pinky on the Enter to select on the far right.
3. Custom Right-Click Menus Depending on the game, you might be able to load new entries into any Right-Click menus that the game already has. For Basic OS work there are already utilities that do that.
It's not clear he's even reading this. At that point, we're talking to each other, few of which need our advice we're offering. I suddenly caught on to that in one of the last Ask Slashdots, the one about freelancing IT. The Asker never appeared in the thread. Hork_Monkey hasn't yet appeared in this one either.
(Dice company, what if you made a rule that the Ask Slashdot submitter has to reply to his thread?)
"The biggest deal for me is that ads are quite a large exploit vector. I block ads in my browser because I consider them to be from an untrusted source. If these are simply text and PNG, then perhaps it's not so bad."
Good, after scanning most of the thread, you're one of the few looking at the security side. I'll presume that Canonical won't allow a full fledged virus attack, but if ads are in fact integrated into the OS and not just "a web store" or whatever, I think that creates data leak risks that could have really nasty implications.
Since everyone is playing with tablet-phone ideas for OSes, I'll say that some of the ads on some of the free versions of my iPhone apps ARE intrusive. They're sandwiched between parts of the app, so when you reach for a settings or menu button, your finger hits the ad instead, and "poof" - you're ripped away from your app and then get to burn 15 seconds while the App store triggered by the ad loads up. It gets VERY intrusive, VERY fast.
That would actually be an epic thing to see. It would make for a beautiful legal decision "you can't change your name to one that causes social confusion". The Artist Formerly Known As Prince could submit an amicus brief on it too.
I do feel this thread is partly about Office vs OO as a whole, because if Office 2013 is pushing subscriptions, it is important to know if LibreOffice (aka ex - OO) has some/most of certain functionality.
Once again I provided an example. Those functions I mentioned were examples of a user's most often items, collated to be used any and all as desired on a custom ribbon/toolbar. So since you seem to be pretty good, please advise where in LibreOffice has that system. My point was that the MS version had a (rather well hidden) drop down to darn near every feature ever, including hundreds of strange ones I'd never heard of. Does Libre have the same or did I just hit a "common use case" twice in a row? Please show me where the "toolbar builder" is. I'm as Pro-LibreOffice as anyone, and you're the first one to actually reply to my occasional mentions of customization with info.
I've daydreamed about an Opt-In Ads page for years now, but I'm a humanities type, not a dev, so I can't make it happen.
It's like this: You set up a site, you declare "I want to see an ad", and then you pick your ad you want to see. Make the ad studios work a little for once.
Ssh, you're threatening 15 years worth of urban legends with facts. Obviously the urban legends generate more ad revenue. I leave the conclusions to you. (Satire)
Sure, we should nationally publish the public schedule of one Mr. Eric Wheeler, get a little money from a mysterious donor to "Make It Okay", then we should flood him every waking moment of his life with about 7 people per minute offering him stuff. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you said you liked advertising. I'm sorry if you think that doesn't apply to you." But no, it's always built in with little cute loopholes to the Powers That Be, like an I Am An Executive setting.
Naw, see this is why I have been griping that one Copyright Hand isn't talking to the other. I haven't checked the license details, but that's three years worth of x channels of news. That's a lot of data, and it's not that old, it's fairly current. So I'll check later, but the magic recipe here is "derivative works" which is your YouTube Mashups.
Compare that to the Music side where 24 song up to THIRTY YEARS OLD are worth $200,000 in sharing fees. See the problem? That's why my ex-gamer Combo Alarm is going off.
Sorry, I picked too easy of an example of the customizability.
Let's try an Excel version. You start with a blank ribbon and your favorite commands are Format-Column-Hide, Select-Visable-Only, Format-Cells-Accounting, Record Macro, Stop Macro, Run Macro, (then the old ones) font size, underline, fill background blue, (unselect your cells and select all), Format-Column-Unhide.
I guarantee all of THAT stuff isn't on one juicy little toolbar, in that order, with no other clutter.
In case you missed it, I said it was hard to find, but you can select *any of the 1000+ features in the entire program* at your heart's content and stick them on your custom ribbon.
5 Years is a long time to "hide away" just because of some legal contract clause. If they get a new good thing going, then power to them.
Also, in Internet Time, I for one can no longer "settle down to wait 5 more years" for something. I retired from most comp gaming many years ago, so this is just a "nice little story to read" but I won't remember it next month, let alone 5 years from now.
I'm like a Grade D prophet - barely good enough to predict these guys won't come back like you suggested, but hopess at offering any other forward direction for them.
Oh, they are patient too. 12 years is a long time to wait on a partent portfolio before suing, even for something as juicy as trolling.
"The patents asserted in these lawsuits were developed by a company called Kinetech Inc. The portfolio was split up in 2000, and itâ(TM)s now co-owned by PersonalWeb and Level 3 Communications, a large internet infrastructure company."
What's precisely so special about gmail, now that there are all of these hidden downsides lurking?
I'm giggling because I've been a yahoo mail user for some 8 years, and while dear ol' Yahoo isn't doing all that great, Yahoo Is Not Google (YING?) so they aren't too deeply hooked to anything else and I don't see these kinds of stories about them.
That's a nice post, on the insightful side of informative. I just barely hit the rising curve of the AOL days and one of the 1988-ish versions of Think Of Da Kiddiez was to "never use your real name lest that evil person does evil things."
But it was also a simpler time, I was a good little birdie, and have basically only had two variants of this screen name for my entire internet career. I instinctively worked to build what I now call a "web brand", basically meaning that of course this handle isn't legal to transact any formal business, but 90+% of my writings under this brand are pretty easily PG13. (Yeah, if a mean critic really looked, you could find a few that sneak into R.)
So I'm happy if an advertiser decides "Tao likes books, so here's an ad for the newest Dean Koontz book." That's all of the fun of targetted ads and none of the other drawbacks. I stand by 20+ years of consistent tone as evidence that I haven't abused (often) the Greater Internet ___Wad Theory. It's been a nice raw defense against spam because if any email came through with my real name then chances are it was legit, all the spammers can't apparently do the 15 minutes of work it takes to figure me out even though I left a back door.
Meanwhile, back in those SysAdmin days, (as I understand it, correct me if I am wrong), there wasn't the... uh... Terrifying twin pair of the Dept of Homeland Security and the Copyright Brigade examining every user action with intent to sue. Look at the nasty prison penalties going out to people posting politically incorrect social-media posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I agree, the pure Linux Kernel is pretty solid.
However they could be grafted in the custom layers that Ubuntu is grafting on top such as Unity.
(Heh - Also one handed!)
I wager I am a hair faster typing right handed than some, except I got my practice typing with pizza and other yummies in my left hand! : ) It's in fact faster for me than my iPhone because on the iPhone I wrestle with Autocorrect every single word, and it won't leave well enough alone. It's also not possible to do the "click 4 lines up with the mouse to fix the Squiggly warning.
Oh, more fun: depending to be sure you don't break a game's rules, maybe consider one of the Macro / hotkey programs. For example if you get the window spacing right, it would put stuff like 7 mouse clicks onto a key, and then since your hand stays on the keys, you can recover even more time.
Catch ya about!
.
Hello!
Not counting the amusing time that I spent half of high school with an arm in a cast because of a strange break in my arm, in your honor and pulling some gamey-science flair, I am typing this reply one handed with a stopwatch going.
I am happy to update your status in a quick-dirty little study I did a couple of hours ago!
---------------
Quickly created on 9-22-2012
Ask Slashdot: Gaming With Only One Hand? Hork_Monkey IN THREAD - YAY!!!!
Ask Slashdot: Hearing Aids That Directly Connect To Smart Phones? mtcups Not In Thread
Ask Slashdot: Best Protection Plan For Your Phone? nastav Not In Thread
Ask Slashdot: What Tech For a Sailing Ship? Razgorov Prikazka IN THREAD
Ask Slashdot: When Is It a Good Idea To Incorporate? stairmaster IN THREAD Once
Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Found Calculators? Covalent Not In Thread
Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Collecting and Storing User Information? isaaccs IN THREAD
---------
You said Gaming, leaving things open to interpretation, so I'll try a 25% tangent and look at "typing/keyboard."
I'll offer some ideas you can play with as I type this and maybe it will help with the keyboard-controls side of gaming.
I'm at 8 minutes so far one handed and if I am to believe the red dashes, my spelling is pretty good. I at least am apparently fairly fast atusing the mouse to jump up a line and fix goofs.
So hoping you still have your dominant hand, (I'm right handed so that's gonna influence my suggestions.)
It might be an easier change if you were a hunt-peck typist already. The finger assignments will be different than regular typing. Let's look at some examples.
1. Middle and fourth fingers. I'm getting the most "firepower" (to add some gaming flair) out of my middle and third fingers. The middle finger is the "heavy cannon" for some 50% of the letters and symbols. The third finger covers another 40% of stuff including Backspace, the left side of the symbols with your index finger parked on Shift. I am also using it for the number-pad version of period rather than the reg one. Shift-T is also a fourth finger op. 16 minutes so far.
2. Keyboard remapping. Whether in the game control level or OS-hook level, it seems to me that there's a nice bunch of keys all on the right side that would work for a right-hander. You can get even fancier with the foot pedals etc, but for all the "select this and this from drop menus" games, it's looking like you can park your thumb on the arrows, index-middle-third on all the option toggles etc, and the pinky on the Enter to select on the far right.
3. Custom Right-Click Menus
Depending on the game, you might be able to load new entries into any Right-Click menus that the game already has. For Basic OS work there are already utilities that do that.
Hope all that helps and good luck! 25 minutes.
It's not clear he's even reading this. At that point, we're talking to each other, few of which need our advice we're offering. I suddenly caught on to that in one of the last Ask Slashdots, the one about freelancing IT. The Asker never appeared in the thread. Hork_Monkey hasn't yet appeared in this one either.
(Dice company, what if you made a rule that the Ask Slashdot submitter has to reply to his thread?)
"The biggest deal for me is that ads are quite a large exploit vector. I block ads in my browser because I consider them to be from an untrusted source. If these are simply text and PNG, then perhaps it's not so bad."
Good, after scanning most of the thread, you're one of the few looking at the security side. I'll presume that Canonical won't allow a full fledged virus attack, but if ads are in fact integrated into the OS and not just "a web store" or whatever, I think that creates data leak risks that could have really nasty implications.
Since everyone is playing with tablet-phone ideas for OSes, I'll say that some of the ads on some of the free versions of my iPhone apps ARE intrusive. They're sandwiched between parts of the app, so when you reach for a settings or menu button, your finger hits the ad instead, and "poof" - you're ripped away from your app and then get to burn 15 seconds while the App store triggered by the ad loads up. It gets VERY intrusive, VERY fast.
(Bitter Satire)
Hi user mtrachtenberg.
Are you the actress Michelle Trachtenberg? http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005502/
With an ID that low and the "wrong" gender I am guessing not.
That would actually be an epic thing to see. It would make for a beautiful legal decision "you can't change your name to one that causes social confusion". The Artist Formerly Known As Prince could submit an amicus brief on it too.
Thanks for the effort.
I do feel this thread is partly about Office vs OO as a whole, because if Office 2013 is pushing subscriptions, it is important to know if LibreOffice (aka ex - OO) has some/most of certain functionality.
Once again I provided an example. Those functions I mentioned were examples of a user's most often items, collated to be used any and all as desired on a custom ribbon/toolbar. So since you seem to be pretty good, please advise where in LibreOffice has that system. My point was that the MS version had a (rather well hidden) drop down to darn near every feature ever, including hundreds of strange ones I'd never heard of. Does Libre have the same or did I just hit a "common use case" twice in a row? Please show me where the "toolbar builder" is. I'm as Pro-LibreOffice as anyone, and you're the first one to actually reply to my occasional mentions of customization with info.
Thanks,
--Tao
I've daydreamed about an Opt-In Ads page for years now, but I'm a humanities type, not a dev, so I can't make it happen.
It's like this: You set up a site, you declare "I want to see an ad", and then you pick your ad you want to see. Make the ad studios work a little for once.
Top 100 best ads ever: Fed Ex, 1981, John Moschitta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A
Someone's been power-modding this entire super-thread down. 3/4 of the registered guys are at 0.
Including my comment that the work was from the 1950's hence it's dubious that you were paying taxes then. Your parents were, to be sure.
But still, this whole thread has been un-naturally down-modded.
Ssh, you're threatening 15 years worth of urban legends with facts. Obviously the urban legends generate more ad revenue. I leave the conclusions to you. (Satire)
Sure, we should nationally publish the public schedule of one Mr. Eric Wheeler, get a little money from a mysterious donor to "Make It Okay", then we should flood him every waking moment of his life with about 7 people per minute offering him stuff. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you said you liked advertising. I'm sorry if you think that doesn't apply to you." But no, it's always built in with little cute loopholes to the Powers That Be, like an I Am An Executive setting.
This might be a record, tests from the 1950s !?
It's going the wrong way. He's buying goods and services, those have the sales tax. The bacon is the "outbound currency".
Meanwhile receiving free _____ is non-cash income when it gets high enough, and my quick guess was in the $30,000 range.
So I think he needs to trade 10 slabs of bacon for some accounting advice, if alarm bells are going off for lil' ol' me.
Naw, see this is why I have been griping that one Copyright Hand isn't talking to the other. I haven't checked the license details, but that's three years worth of x channels of news. That's a lot of data, and it's not that old, it's fairly current. So I'll check later, but the magic recipe here is "derivative works" which is your YouTube Mashups.
Compare that to the Music side where 24 song up to THIRTY YEARS OLD are worth $200,000 in sharing fees. See the problem? That's why my ex-gamer Combo Alarm is going off.
Sorry, I picked too easy of an example of the customizability.
Let's try an Excel version. You start with a blank ribbon and your favorite commands are Format-Column-Hide, Select-Visable-Only, Format-Cells-Accounting, Record Macro, Stop Macro, Run Macro, (then the old ones) font size, underline, fill background blue, (unselect your cells and select all), Format-Column-Unhide.
I guarantee all of THAT stuff isn't on one juicy little toolbar, in that order, with no other clutter.
In case you missed it, I said it was hard to find, but you can select *any of the 1000+ features in the entire program* at your heart's content and stick them on your custom ribbon.
Wait, what? Isn't the runner up prize here GPS nodes that only activate when protective wrappers are removed?
A. I wanna see the patent on that!
B. Gives new meaning to Halloween!
Someone find him and get a statement.
Can you buy a dinner with Kevin Bacon with bacon?
Is anyone on his team keeping track of the sales taxes on $30,000 worth of bacon-sales?
How did they manage the copyright clearance for THAT!?
Maybe not.
5 Years is a long time to "hide away" just because of some legal contract clause. If they get a new good thing going, then power to them.
Also, in Internet Time, I for one can no longer "settle down to wait 5 more years" for something. I retired from most comp gaming many years ago, so this is just a "nice little story to read" but I won't remember it next month, let alone 5 years from now.
I'm like a Grade D prophet - barely good enough to predict these guys won't come back like you suggested, but hopess at offering any other forward direction for them.
Oh, they are patient too. 12 years is a long time to wait on a partent portfolio before suing, even for something as juicy as trolling.
"The patents asserted in these lawsuits were developed by a company called Kinetech Inc. The portfolio was split up in 2000, and itâ(TM)s now co-owned by PersonalWeb and Level 3 Communications, a large internet infrastructure company."
Dramatization of processing wins for Intellectual Property holders in East Texas. (I know, this is satire, ignore the different country.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46qYCIt954
What's precisely so special about gmail, now that there are all of these hidden downsides lurking?
I'm giggling because I've been a yahoo mail user for some 8 years, and while dear ol' Yahoo isn't doing all that great, Yahoo Is Not Google (YING?) so they aren't too deeply hooked to anything else and I don't see these kinds of stories about them.
That's a nice post, on the insightful side of informative. I just barely hit the rising curve of the AOL days and one of the 1988-ish versions of Think Of Da Kiddiez was to "never use your real name lest that evil person does evil things."
But it was also a simpler time, I was a good little birdie, and have basically only had two variants of this screen name for my entire internet career. I instinctively worked to build what I now call a "web brand", basically meaning that of course this handle isn't legal to transact any formal business, but 90+% of my writings under this brand are pretty easily PG13. (Yeah, if a mean critic really looked, you could find a few that sneak into R.)
So I'm happy if an advertiser decides "Tao likes books, so here's an ad for the newest Dean Koontz book." That's all of the fun of targetted ads and none of the other drawbacks. I stand by 20+ years of consistent tone as evidence that I haven't abused (often) the Greater Internet ___Wad Theory. It's been a nice raw defense against spam because if any email came through with my real name then chances are it was legit, all the spammers can't apparently do the 15 minutes of work it takes to figure me out even though I left a back door.
Meanwhile, back in those SysAdmin days, (as I understand it, correct me if I am wrong), there wasn't the ... uh... Terrifying twin pair of the Dept of Homeland Security and the Copyright Brigade examining every user action with intent to sue. Look at the nasty prison penalties going out to people posting politically incorrect social-media posts.