1 Oct
2010
1 Oct
'10
11:58 a.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
Yeah, aside from the copyright issue, it's finding the time to sift through
everything and make sure there's nothing *really* sensitive there - e.g. some
of the data came from employee desktop machines, which means that there's
personal data on there as well as corporate stuff.
Urgh :-( I did wonder, but the ads and corporate blurb all go one about them
being bladeless when what they really mean is 'no visible blades'
Yes, but an infinite number of buttons with poor feedback :-) Humans like
audible and tactile responses, just as they like visual ones.
Oh, it's coming. Much argument over techniques and standards. They'll
squabble for a while then make it work.
I seem to recall ads for some wireless phone charger here in the US a year or
two ago, but then it all went quiet. Not sure why - maybe their tech just
didn't work, or maybe people just didn't believe that it was real.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to have a mouse mat that doubles as a charging
pad, though.
Aha! I think this particular one is a relative youngster, from 1993.
Mine's so ancient that it doesn't even have the status LEDs on it. I do
kind-of miss a caps-lock LED - one of my tests for an apparently-hung system
was always to hit the caps-lock and see if the LED lit; invariably it wouldn't
if the machine had gone completely loopy.
cheers
Jules
On 30 September 2010 14:47, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think it was quite as smooth as Acorn's implementation. I think there
was also functionality in some setups where the amount that the window
scrolled by on a left or right click was dependent on how close to the top or
bottom (or left/right) the mouse pointer was on the window's scrollbars - but
that was a pretty awful feature (because it was hard to judge exactly how much
the window would scroll by for a particular mouse position)
Hmm, I think X windows had something similar at
one time - middle button to
drag the bar, left button to automatically go up and page and right button
to go down a page (if I remember right, it did jump by a screenful, rather
than smaller increments)
Interesting. I have played with a fairly primitive X setup, no modern
window managers and so on, and yes, it did some of that, but I'd not
registered the direction-switching bit, which (for my money) is the
core usability feature. ISTR going "ooh, it's like RISC OS", playing
to see if the features I liked were there, and being disappointed -
but I might have missed it. I've got
some internal Acorn emails from that era related to their UI design
- one day I'll have to see about 'releasing' them. It's interesting
reading,
seeing their thoughts about what features they should implement, and their
analysis of what the competition was up to.
Oh, that would be cool! Hmm, those
Dyson bladeless fans, maybe? (No idea how that technology works,
or if it needs a minimum size to do so effectively).
They cheat. It does have conventional fans, with blades, they're just
concealed within the base. No whizzy electrostatic impellers or
anything here. Nothing to see, move along. :?) But like it or not, the PC is moving toward being a
consumer
appliance, like TVs or phones. There are no commercial TV or phone
repairmen around any more; the PC will go the same way.
The question is, will they do it well or not?
I'd put my money on not. Nobody gives a crap about quality any more :-(
And if the big players don't, is there room for a
small company to
make money doing it right?
Maybe, but it's difficult. A small company won't have the marketing budget,
which means they have to rely far more on word of mouth - and it's difficult
these days to survive long enough to establish a reputation. Once you're
there, not so bad, but getting to that point is the problem.
What I
really dislike are mice that try to be too ergonomic (OK if you have an
average hand size and are right-handed, bad for everyone else) or which have
too many unnecessary buttons (3 is good, more is pointless)
Entirely agree. But no buttons is also an infinite number of buttons,
in a way. Apple /were/ right, like it or not - there are
abundant
figures to prove it. 1 button *is* the easiest for novices.
I agree - but I think it's also a hindrance for more experienced users. Maybe
we need 3-button mice, but an OS that can run in 'single button mode' for
novices, where they don't have to worry about which mouse button they have to
press :-)
Mind you, come to that, as ordinary user PCs migrate
to being
multi-touch-operated slates, it could be that mice will disappear
altogether. Keyboards too, when the speech recognition gets good
enough.
I think a lot of the reason that the entire world isn't using Model M's is the
noise factor, though - I'm not sure I could handle an office full of people
babbling away at their computers :-)
Maybe 50 years from now we'll be able to control computers via thought - that
would get rid of a lot of the bottlenecks (I can think far faster than I can
type or speak) and would be silent...
I want the thing to have a damned cable, though, not a
wireless
transciever and batteries.
Yes, me too - I like the reliability of cables. There
was a lot of hoo-hah
about wireless charging a couple of years ago, but that seems to have gone
quiet for the moment (it'd at least solve the battery swap problem) As for keyboards, well, some of my Model Ms are now
pushing 25, so I
am not worried about their longevity. :?)
Yes, this one turns 25 next year :-)