ID computer

It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" once stated: Fair enough. Me, while I like knowing how the computer works, most of the time *I* don't care enough to manually tweak something, or babysit some annoyingly written piece of software. I want my computer to run without thought. And that probably explains why I drive an automatic car (it even turns the headlights on automatically). Sure, I know how a car works (generally, with some gaps in knowledge here and there) but I view it more as something to use. Same with most computers I work with (and that's one of my biggest gripes with poorly run Unix networks---babysitting the damn things [1]). Similar to Unix and the ``rm'' command---make one slight mistake and well ... Have backup? Nothing worse than finding the ``rm'' command aliased to ``rm -i''. Yes! Yes! Delete the files! Aaaaaaah! /bin/rm blah blah. It depends on what you're used to. And when I read about that (in Microsoft's ``Programmers At Work''---great book by the way) I thought it was the coolest thing. I felt it made a lot of sense, but yes, I can see it being problematic in a heterogeneous setup, which I think is your concern. In his interview in ``Programmers at Work,'' he stated he didn't care for mice at all, as it forces you to relocate your hands from the keyboard to the mouse, and that most navigation could be done faster via the keyboard than with a mouse [3]. And his current work he mentions his dislike of the mouse. If it was him (and not Jobs) those are valid reasons, but it's not too difficult to color the buttons differently (or put a pip on one of them like my keyboard here has pips on the `f' and `j' keys [4]) and label one the primary button the other the secondary button. But left handed people present another problem in which the buttons need to be reversed (easily enough via software). Ah well. That's still a pretty big keyboard (I'm looking at it right now). The idea of using the keyboard *as* the mouse (as in, the keyboard can slide around) is intriguing, but I'm not sure if I would want my keyboad to slide around like that. -spc (I really enjoy Raskin's work though ... ) [1] I work in the NOC (Network Operations Center) at a large company, so all I'm really concerned with is monitoring the network and servers (if something goes down, I call SA). No administration, no development. Some of the SAs are complaining about zombies [2] and it bugs *ME* (because I'm that way 8-) that the SAs have to manually go in and kill them (even if it's to run a shell script which does it). I know how to fix the programs causing the zombies and it's only a few lines of code (in C even!) that need to be added. But it's a large company. Sigh. [2] Zombies are zombie processes under Unix that are caused when a child process exits but the parent process doesn't check the status. They don't really consume any resources other than a process slot, but the fact they're there is annoying. [3] In my experience, that's true once you learn how to navigate a document via the keyboard. But there are some things I like using a mouse for though. [4] The Apple keyboards have the pips on the `d' and `k' keys, which annoys me, but I understand the reasoning behind Apple doing that (middle finger is longer than the rest and will hit the keyboard first, hence the pips on `d' and `k').