It was thus said that the Great ben once stated: IBM Model M. I have a stash of them and they're on all my computers (including the Mac). I even took one to the office to use; the one they got me was close (it uses a similar mechanism as the IBM Modem M) but was too mushy (it was the "quiet" model) for my liking. -spc (Who won't use anything else if he can help it)

are these really the same thing? Have you tried the "rubber dome" model? Steve On 9/27/2010 11:51 PM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

On 28/09/2010 12:51 AM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: I tried that until I found they just take credit card or paypal - I have neither. http://www.clickykeyboards.com/ will take real money! :)

On 27 September 2010 02:41, Chris Elmquist <chrise at pobox.com> wrote: I think Gateway used to ship a variant of those, a bigger one with 2 sets of F-keys, programmable? As shown on here: http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2005/QBlog301105A.html I had one. I think I gave it away - I was never all that impressed. Not enough "feel" for me. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 27 September 2010 07:47, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote: Some friends love Sun keyboards. I was never that impressed. Also, the Apple Extended II is often regarded as a classic. It's certainly far better than modern Apple k/bs but although they're OK I don't love them. I sold one recently on eBay & it only fetched a few pounds, so I will keep the others I have. Still my all-time favourite. I'm typing on one now. I love them and the noise is totally worth it. Not tried one, but I have used Alps boards and found them lacking feel for my taste. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

I have a soft spot in my heart for the IBM DisplayWriter keyboard-- built like a tank. I don't suppose that anyone has a spare? :) --Chuck

On 27 September 2010 16:09, Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote: The preceding model, the Mighty Mouse, actually has 2 microswitches beneath the shell. Although there is no visible division on the surface of the mouse, as well as scrolling both vertically and horizontally with the tiny trackball, you can also left-click, right-click and squeeze it & it detects all separately. I don't like it - I prefer more obvious, tactile buttons; it used to amuse me to use a MICROS~1 mouse on my Mac - but the Mighty Mouse /did/ support 3 or 4 button actions. The Magic Mouse, while much simpler, doesn't - but its multitouch surface does allow gestures to perform most of these actions. But I don't really need gestures. It's clever but I'd rather some clear physical buttons I can feel with my fingertips, myself. (I imagine, come to that, that the multitouch version is harder and less accessible for people with physical disabilities.) Anyway. To be fair, the model before /did/ allow right-clicking. All the ones before that, no - you had to hold down Ctrl while left-clicking. Easy enough, but a 2-handed operation. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Sep 27, 2010, at 21:20, Liam Proven wrote: The Magic Mouse works exactly the same as the Mighty Mouse when it comes to clicking: there's a single switch for detecting the clicking motion, then there's a capacitive surface that detects where your fingers are on the mouse surface and interprets the click as a left or right click, accordingly. .tsooJ

On 9/28/10 10:55 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Not really. The replacement of one expensive, failure-prone mechanical part with a cheap-and-getting-cheaper silicon part is almost always a good thing. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 9/28/10 12:35 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I've replaced two in mice, which admittedly isn't many, but do you really think they're as reliable in the long term as a multiple-zone capacitance touch sensor? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 28 Sep 2010 at 12:49, Dave McGuire wrote: I've never replaced one in a mouse, so I'm not qualifed to say, but how does a touch sensor stand up to ESD in comparison to a microswitch? --Chuck

----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 12:49 PM Subject: Re: Evolution of the Apple Mouse With new computers designed to be thrown away after 3 years what gives you the idea that the mice on those machines are supposed to last longer then that?

On 28/09/2010 11:18 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: The little telflon sp? feet have worn off?

Didn';t somebody say here last week that they had ordered some replacement switches for their mouse? So presumbly they do fail. I can think of 2 microswitches that I've had problems with in computer devices farily recently. The devices themsevles were over 25 years old, so I can't moan. One was a track 0 switch in a Tandon TM100 drive in an HP9836. It intermeittanylu failed to make contact properly. Since it was debounced by an SR flip-flop this caused some interesting faults. Since the drive will step towards the spidle when the track0 siganl is active, but won't step out again once the stepper ahs got to the right phase, this caused the itneresting effec that the drive would step in ith no problems but would only step out by 3 or 4 cylinders. This switch was a low-force one, but amazinygly I foudn the exact replacement (size and operating force) in a current catalogue. So I replaced it. The other was the paper-out swtich in an HP 2631 printer. I think I mentiond this on the lis a few months back. The contacts were shorted, even though it still clicked properly. This led me a merry dance trying to work out why the printer appeared totally dead. I guess switches are less reliable than ICs, but equally they are easier to test and repair/replace. So I am not at all convinced that replacing the former wit hthe latter is a good thing. -tony

On 9/28/10 4:06 PM, Tony Duell wrote: You'll get no argument from me there. Sure, but this is a mass-market device that will never be "collectible" in any sense. The choice is between a cheap device that will last maybe a year or two and give limited functionality, or a more expensive device that will last more likely a decade or more (I have several decade-old expensive Apple optical mice) and give enhanced functionality. "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap tools." ;) *poke* -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 9/28/10 8:33 PM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: I'm full of 'em. =) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Somewhat on-topic and coincidental, EDN's "Prying Eyes" series looks at a nearly-40-year-old Sharp microwave oven and marvels at the simplicity and robust design. What I gather from the article is that the oven still works fine: http://bit.ly/dA6bSM What's notable is the electromechanical timer. How many microwave ovens made 20 years later with electronic controls are still functional? --Chuck

On 9/29/2010 3:25 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I can't really answer your question of course, but I can tell you that we have a GE microwave purchased about 1987 with electronic controls that still works just fine. The logic power supply in it must have minimal filtering, as we get the "PF" indication any time there is the slightest power blip and when all other electronic clocks in the house show no effect. I do worry sometimes about all the appliances we have with IMHO unnecessary electronics since we don't have a whole house surge supressor. e.g. Clothes washer and dryer, range, refrigerator. The only things we've ever lost that I think I can blame on surges are a couple of telephones. Those may have been telco line surges rather than power line ones for all I know. Later, Charlie C.

On 10/3/2010 1:03 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Been there, done that, though it has been quite a few years. I would still be glad to fix things that way if possible. I had exactly the same thing happen. By that I mean I had clothes washer board/s fail after only about 5 years. I kept the bad boards but have not yet tried to delve into exactly what is wrong with them. When the washer needs replacing I'd love to get one with a simple electromechanical timer. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that is possible any more. The guy at the Fixit Shop where I usually buy my appliance parts did not think so when I mentioned that idea the last time I was in there. This crazy washer we have now has two motors: a pump motor which runs at line frequency, but the main mechanism drive motor is PWM'ed at varying frequencies up to I think a few KHz. Who needs it? Not me! Washing clothes is not rocket science! Yeah, us too, as far as manually cooking goes. But so much of the control stuff is electronic I don't think it would be very easy to circumvent. At best, it would probably look pretty bad I think. I should probably really get serious about a whole house surge suppressor, though I realize that still does not remove 100% of the vulnerability. Later, Charlie C.

On 9/29/10 1:44 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Fair enough. And I do see where you're coming from, but for something as pedestrian as a mass-market mouse, personally I don't go that far. More power to you, though. None of course, but they all use imaging-based optical positioning sensors rather than mechanical rollers, axles, and opto-interrupter wheels. Sure, but the types of functionality we're talking about are far from "gimmicks". I'm the most gimmick-averse person you'll ever meet (save for perhaps yourself ;)) and *I* want one of those new mice. Why? Because I want a scroll wheel that's not a "wheel" (I find them very difficult to use), and I want two-finger zoom manipulation. This is real functionality that I will use every day...I know this because my laptop has that functionality in its trackpad, and I use it to great advantage. Just my $6.72. (inflation..) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Liam Proven wrote: 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) 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. Hmm, those Dyson bladeless fans, maybe? (No idea how that technology works, or if it needs a minimum size to do so effectively). I think that *good* bladed fans rarely fail, though - it's just that 99% of those inside modern PCs are cheap junk. Oh, and I've had old all-metal fans of around 5" or so which are very quiet in comparison to modern plastic-bladed, smaller versions. Maybe systems just need better airflow design/ducting and a single larger-but-quieter fan. That and sensible grilles - a lot of PCs just have stamped grilles with rough slot edges, and they create a huge amount of noise (as well as collecting dust) compared to grilles of old which were formed from round metal stock. It's rare I've had a traditional rodent fail on me and be unfixable, though - a good clean now and then, and the odd microswitch is about it. 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) 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) Yes, this one turns 25 next year :-) cheers Jules

I have somewhere around 8 Model M keyboards (most found at the recycler) and none had a bad key (all needed cleaning but look new now). I also have a Model F that works great and is older them the model M. I wonder if anybody would have kept using those model F's for 25+ years (if they worked on AT machines)? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 9:56 AM Subject: Re: Evolution of the Apple Mouse On 30 September 2010 14:47, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: Aha! I think this particular one is a relative youngster, from 1993. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 9/30/10 11:38 AM, Doc wrote: It's not part of the window manager, it's part of the "toolkit". That word has a slightly special meaning in X; basically it's a higher-level set of widgets that sits atop raw Xlib. Typically-implemented widgets are buttons, menus, and...scrollbars. The behavior that Jules mentions is specific to the scrollbars implemented by Xt, for "X toolkit", which is a standard toolkit that ships with X11. Nowadays, though, most apps use other toolkits like GTK+ or Qt. Thank you. =) I was debating mentioning it but didn't want to sound too pedantic. I'm glad you did. :) "It's a window system called X, not a system called X Window". -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

The term "X Windows", as "improper" as it is, is very widely used and understood. - Will

On 9/30/10 2:17 PM, William Donzelli wrote: So is "DB9". Doc

And "VMS" is incorrect as well. It is "OpenVMS". Nitpicker, start your engines. -- Will

Certainly you mean VAX-11/VMS or VAX/VMS for those early machines, correct? Don't make me filibuster this list by posting the MIL-STD for D shell connectors. -- Will

William Donzelli wrote: Doesn't that only apply to recent versions? Peace... Sridhar

On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Liam Proven wrote: I know many, many people that can type faster than they can talk. And then there's programming. When every character matters, and many of them are punctuation, speech recoginition (and speech for that matter) falls flat on its face. It will never be faster to pronounce: print join(',', map $_->(), @$closures), "\n" for 1..$num; than it is to type it. And that's relatively readable; perl lets you code with >50% punctuation... When I see photos of the 'keyboardless' ipad, more often than not there's a virtual keyboard taking up half of that very expensive screen... I giggle and keep on typing :-) Alexey

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 21:49, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote: Of course, programming languages these days are designed for typing, with plenty of special characters to indicate common syntactic elements. Try writing code on a typical smartphone qwerty keyboard; it's a pain because the special characters, seldom used in text messaging are hard to get to (sometimes only via menu). Example: the Kindle... Thus, programming using voice recognition should have a language syntax adapted to it, and likely be very annoying to type. Perhaps COBOL will see a resurrection ($deity save us all)! Perhaps a new language can use non-speech vocalisations as syntax elements. "Ummmm.." to delimit arguments to functions. A cough to terminate statements. Clicking the tongue to delimit literals! print umm... <click> result <click> umm... a umm.. b umm... d! <cough> Programmer's cubicles will become very noisy places! Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem

On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Liam Proven wrote: What the heck are you talking about? In third world countries maybe? If you've used a computer in the last 30 years, you know how to type. Most of the population of G8 countries and the EU has used a computer... They have them in schools and libraries now, you know :-) All the important ones are :-) Alexey

[snip] I do have a fold-up USB keyboard for use with my Android tablet - but I don't recall the last time I used it. Of course, for long emails, I fire up the PowerBook. :-) My point being: I agree that programmers are a minority among consumers of information technology, as are "knowledge workers" and most other categories, compared to consumers who surf the web, play YouTube videos and natter on FaceBook. So the tools they need may well be specialized, and that may be the category into which the physical keyboard will soon find itself -- Ian

When I first started writing code for a living (6800 assembly language), I was the only programmer on the team who *could* touch-type. Everyone else was hunt-and-peck. -- Ian

On 1 Oct 2010 at 9:44, Ian King wrote: ...which is why there are chalkboards, overhead projectors, etc. in every classroom. Ian, were you involved at all with the L&H stuff? It was actually pretty decent for the time. Too bad it turned into a "pump and dump" scheme by a couple of shysters. --Chuck (who made some money from an investment in L&H before it imploded)

On 1 Oct 2010 at 10:39, Ian King wrote: It's amazing how slowly the wheels of justice can turn. This, from Wikipedia: "On 20 September 2010, co-founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, as well as Nico Willaert, former vice chairman, and Gaston Bastiaens, former chief executive officer, were each sentenced to 5 years prison (of which 3 years effective and 2 years probationary) for fraud by the Ghent Court of Appeals. However, due to the endemnic problem of overcrowding in Belgian prisons and the policy of not executing sentences of 3 years or less, it is quite unlikely any of them will actually serve any time." --Chuck

In article <FF6AB92D97A23A409701CDBF66F03FCD03DC3D195B at 505fuji>, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> writes: Really? Because I find that application software favors the mouse, i.e. keyboard shortcuts/navigation are often broken or missing. Really? Because moving from the screen to the keyboard with my hand is a *huge* distance compared to moving my hand to the left from the keyboard (yes, I'm right handed but left mouse due to RSI). For the existing apps that are mouse-centric, I see touchscreens replacing them, but for things that are text-centric I don't see that as a good transition. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

But if your initial interaction is not with a keyboard but with a touchscreen (as is more common with mobile devices), then the argument is different. Yes, I've dealt with older touch screen machines, and felt that they just weren't Ready For Prime Time. The new tablet devices usually take good advantage of a touchscreen and recognize that it isn't a mouse - it's something different in a pointing device. This is about a fundamental change in how people interact with computing devices. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Tony Duell [ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk] Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 11:59 AM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution TOuchscreens have been tried in the past (the most obviosu example is the HP150 'Touchscreen PC') and I think they were always found to be less convenient to use than a mouse or trackball. You have to move your hand further (keyboard to screen rather than keyboard to mouse on desk near keybaord), and you arm/hand is not supported (e.g. by resting it on the desk) when you are doing the pointing. -tony

One thing I believe you missed mentioning is accents. Some of the voice recognition games on the Nintendo DS have this problem, where it can understand most UK accents but some can trip it up. (Personally, I know I can't understand a word anyone says in a broad Yorkshire accent... I found this out when I met my ex's grandfather years ago. Very embarrassing indeed). Then you have people that speak at different speeds. Some people talk slowly (Captain Kirk usually... only spoke three... words at a... time!), whilst some speak very fast and everyone else sits somewhere in the middle. Personally, I don't see voice recognition going anywhere major. Just like 3D TV, it's cool, but it's still just a passing phase. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian King" <IanK at vulcan.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 5:44 PM Subject: RE: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re:Evolution of the Apple Mouse You're mixing two different arguments, but there is merit to both. Once upon a time, I worked on speech recognition and synthesis at Microsoft - we shipped the first Speech API that wasn't produced by Microsoft Research. (Instead of 137 interfaces, there were five.) It was a good product, offering quite accurate speaker-independent recognition, but it wasn't going to replace keyboards. For one thing: it's bad enough when you have a roomfull of people talking on telephones. Imagine if they were also talking to their computers! One of the problems speech recognition has yet to solve is the so-called 'cocktail party' scenario: a computer cannot pick out and focus on one voice among many. So if the woman in the next cubicle has a particularly loud, penetrating voice (not that that's ever happened to me), your results may vary.... I've also noticed that people who are talking to devices don't modulate their voices the same way people do when talking to other people. There's no sense of feedback, and volume rises. (It's interesting that the only place voice systems have really become successful is - on the phone!) Further, since the device isn't perfect but again provides no mitigating feedback upon error, people rapidly become frustrated with voice systems, once again leading to raised voices. IMHO a more important factor is that our application software is written for keyboard input, with varying support for mouse input. Spoken interaction is dramatically different from either command-line interaction or its translation to the GUI. This goes beyond UI, and requires a very different model of communication with our digital companions. Given the above objection, no one has put much time or money into tackling the problem. Speech recognition will not catch on either among vendors or customers if it's simply a replacement for the keyboard and the model of interaction it engenders. Regarding touchscreen devices, yes, I agree that mice are on their way out. Remember the cute little pop-out mouse on the HP Omnibook? As we move more to mobile devices (a category in which the iPad barely 'fits'!), physical pointing devices are awkward (including a stylus, which is easily lost). But once again we will need to make changes to our user interfaces: isn't it fun trying to select one line from a single-spaced list on a Web page? (I have an Android-based 7" tablet, which I'm coming to dearly love.) Also, there is a very significant difference between the mouse and the touchscreen: the former has a persistent cursor. The touchscreen has no 'default' for 'clicking' but instead enables all visible icons as potential action objects. This is more akin to the light-pen/gun devices that predate the mouse (the mouse was not the original pointing device). This subtle difference can make it challenging to port a mouse-based application to a touchscreen. While touchscreens will likely supplant the mouse, at least for the mobile computing world (which is becoming the dominant expression of information technology), speech recognition just isn't going to replace keyboards, simply because it's a fundamentally different means of communication. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Alexey Toptygin [alexeyt at freeshell.org] Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:49 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution of the Apple Mouse On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Liam Proven wrote: I know many, many people that can type faster than they can talk. And then there's programming. When every character matters, and many of them are punctuation, speech recoginition (and speech for that matter) falls flat on its face. It will never be faster to pronounce: print join(',', map $_->(), @$closures), "\n" for 1..$num; than it is to type it. And that's relatively readable; perl lets you code with >50% punctuation... When I see photos of the 'keyboardless' ipad, more often than not there's a virtual keyboard taking up half of that very expensive screen... I giggle and keep on typing :-) Alexey

----- Original Message ----- <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Re:Evolutionof the I found slowly whilst like 3D That depends. Wearing 3D glasses always gives me a headache after a few minutes and I wear glasses (four-eyes!) anyway... so how would I wear 3D glasses and still be able to see (clearly) what I am doing? (six-eyes?!) Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On 05/10/2010 4:55 PM, Liam Proven wrote: I guess now we can watch (but not for free) all the old B grade 3D movies

On Tue, 5 Oct 2010, Fred Cisin wrote: In addition to lenticular, folks are also doing a parallax barrier; essentially, you're looking at the screen through a striped mask, kind of like a sideways, inside-out Sony Trinitron. I'm not certain which tech the 3DS will be using. -- roger ivie rivie at ridgenet.net

Not everyone can see the 3D effect (and it's apparently a sizeable portion of the audience): http://www.practical-home-theater-guide.com/3d-tv-1.html For others, 3D viewing results in eyestrain and headaches. I'll happily take a well-made production with a good plot and acting any day to a "Bwana Devil" or "Cat-Women of the Moon". 3D motion pictures have been around for nearly a century. Every once in awhile the technology is resurrected and then abandoned. Quality writing, production and acting is timeless. --Chuck

On 6 Oct 2010 at 18:30, Liam Proven wrote: Video and computer gaming has never held interest to me. Wrong generation--to me, it seems like a fabulous waste of time that could be better spent doing something else. So I'm not qualified to comment on games. Besides, I have terrible depth perception. :) --Chuck

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Tony Duell wrote: There seems to be a lot of variation in how much flicker people can or will put up with. That's why SG went for the 120Hz, instead of the [at that time] much more common 60Hz. Do British TVs have a 50Hz flicker? SGs financial problems were not primarily technical. They arose from such behaviors as listing investments as "income", and a relaxed "California style" corporate culture that included "working from home" by employees with jobs inappropriate for that, such as receptionist. OK, I understand the principle behind LCD shutter glasses. And they certainly were a major step up from Lipton's original spinning wheel. But how do LED spectacles work? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 6 October 2010 19:34, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: nVidia's setup is a 120Hz screen, ergo, I presume, 60Hz shuttering. Flicker was rarely noticeable, but then, I am not at all sensitive to such things. I suppose the difference is now that any games-capable recent nVidia card will do it & the bundle of wireless specs (estimate battery life is on the other of months between recharges) and screen is ?250-300 - for a 24" widescreen. I am guessing 20Y ago, you could have added at least 1 zero on the end of that... -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Depends on your definition of "high-res". Silicon Graphics certainly had megapixel and higher for cad work, etc. For PC, though, "Wyse WY-700"/"Amdek 1280" at 1280 x 800 monochrome was state of the art, and "super-VGA" was moving upwards from 800 x 600. Twenty-FIVE years ago, EGA was considered hot. THIRTY years ago, CCTV monitors and home TV sets. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, William Donzelli wrote: 20 years ago, SGI. There probably were others, but SGI "defined" that market. Earlier than that, I vaguely remember that during a Siggraph meeting at Moscone center, one of the street vendors had "Hi-res" root beer. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Jules Richardson < jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: Which market are you referring to ? You actually think SGI started it all - gimme a break ! Because Singer-Link already had graphics using projection monitors with resolutions upto 1000x1000 for their military simulators as far back as 1980 - raster not vector. It didn't that many colors yet, about 64, but still. We designed many of the computing systems for their simulators while at SEL - even Rediffusion. =Dan --http://www.vintagecomputer.net/ragooman/

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: some levity doesn't hurt, doldrums is bad for your health :)

On 6 Oct 2010 at 22:02, Fred Cisin wrote: Aw... --Chuck

On 7 Oct 2010 at 21:11, Tony Duell wrote: There were (monochrome) high-resolution TV systems 50 years ago. In particular, the Soviets were fooling around with an 1125-line technology in 1958: http://rus.625-net.ru/625/2007/01/tvch.htm --Chuck

Tony Duell wrote: But with many colors and 120Hz? Peace... Sridhar

On 7 Oct 2010 at 19:22, William Donzelli wrote: I see phosphor decay rates as being a problem if we're talking a frame rate of 120 Hz. Were dual-beam CRTs ever used for high- resolution display (one beam scans even lines; the other scans odd)? All in all, you'd be better off with 2 CRTs instead of one. --Chuck

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Chuck Guzis wrote: I played with that in the early 1980s. I used viewfinders from video cameras. Take a matching pair, and turn the eyepiece cup around to turn one into left-eye, and bolt them on a bracket. I used B&W, because I'd rather have sharp than colorful (in text mode, the B&W viewfinders could resolve 80x25 text quite comfortably) I fed each one from a separate computer, because I never could manage to get 2 CGA cards to coexist in one machine. I never took it past "proof of concept" (a few 640x200 B&W still images) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Driving a 1" CRT is child's play compared to driving a real tube. Still, I bet it was an impressive system. -- Will

Tony Duell wrote: But, again, this was about HDTV-resolution 120Hz. Peace... Sridhar

Fred Cisin wrote: I think the consensus on what was meant (in the thread) by "high resolution" was a minimum of a megapixel. Wow! How? Using a display capable of rendering actual depth? Peace... Sridhar

--- On Fri, 10/8/10, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: I once saw a product announcement for a commercial 3D display that used a flexible varifocal mirror. If you've ever seen one of those things that makes a coin inside appear to be floating in space just inside an opening at the top, you've seen how a concave mirror can manipulate apparent depth. From the diagrams/photos, it looked like the device used the acoustic wave from a hi-fi speaker to drive the mirror. The image was provided by a vector display, limited to wire-frame graphics, and there was likely some electronics or software to compensate for the distortion introduced by the optics. It was a big box, somewhat reminiscent of both a radar console and an arcade game. If I recall correctly, the tube was mounted overhead, and you looked down into the mirror at its reflection. --Bill

I'm sensitive to any refresh rate under 85Hz (even 72 and 75 give me eyestrain after awhile), so I've assiduously avoided any spectacle-based 3D. The lenticular methods look interesting, but I'm reserving judgment. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- What's another word for thesaurus? -----------------------------------------

Liam Proven 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) 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' I'd put my money on not. Nobody gives a crap about quality any more :-( 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. Yes, but an infinite number of buttons with poor feedback :-) Humans like audible and tactile responses, just as they like visual ones. 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 :-) 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 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. 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

Hmm... I see this often as a negative trend in that I can fix the mechanical bits (other than HDDs) and can't fix custom silicon. It may be cheaper to replace, but when you have a deadline looming, the ability ot get the machine workign again is very useful... How are these supposed to work (without violating the 2nd law)? -tony

Try pricing a big-ass hunk of extruded heatsink some day. -- Will

Playinghte devil's advocate for a moment, Cheaper -> less likely to be econmical to repair, and thus more waste sent to landfill, fewer jobs for repairers. Not _ncessarily_ a good thing. Again, if oyu're not careful, you end up with a machine that makes simple tasks trivial, but which can't be used for difficult tasks (or at least makes htem a lot harder than they should be). Somehting that really annoys me is the lack of a propper command language in many modern window-based OSes. Computeras are good at doing the same thing over and over agian, I should be able to tell them to do that. External heatsinks on hi-fi amplifiers have been around from the tiem of the first transitorised power amplifier :-). The thing is, though, audio amplifiers work at fairly low frequencies. So you can mount the output transistors, etc, directly on the heatsink, and link them to the rest of the components (e.g. by fitting them near the edge of the PCB amd mounting the PCB on an angle bracket fixed ot the heatsink. AMy amplifiers are built that way. But you can't do that with the much higher speed signals goign to a PC's processor or graphics chip or whatever. The pesky speed of light gets in the way. -tony

It may well be a fait acompli, but that doens't make it a Good Thing necessarily... I wonder why I never fidn useful bits like this... In other words, most people do not really want a computer. They want something to borwse the web, store their digital photos on, download from iTunes to their iPod (or whatever you do these days), and so on. Problem is, I do want a computer. A machine that I can program to do things for me I don't want to sit and do the same job <n> times by hand. That's what perl is for ;-). The problems I have generally require programming. Which is why, I guess, PC shops ahve absolutely no iterest for me... I susepct the problms are then mechancial. Getting the heatpipes where you want them with the CPU, grpahics processor, RAM, etc where they have to be, A fan amy well be tge simplest and best solution. Problem is, the fans you find in consumer PCs are horrible. I've had enoguh of them cross my bench. I also remember real fans that are sill running and still quiet afet over 25 years. Of cource those have decent bearings and probably cost ratehr more when they were new. -tony

On 2 October 2010 00:48, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: No, true, but it might start the programs much quicker. If the performance ends up being cheap, it will be offered anyway, even if not "needed". Also, vast parallel performance and stupidly-cheap local storage opens up possibilities of brute-force solutions to some of the hard problems of face/gesture/speech/etc recognition. Nor do I, but I spent yesterday with some friends at a computer-games exhibition here in London. My $DEITY but some of the modern immersive 3D games are *stunning* now. Really truly beautiful rapid high-refresh real-time high-resolution wrap-around rendering, in actual 3D if you wear special LCD shutter glasses (which are tiny, light and wireless. Good job I wore contact lenses, though.) The kit is about ?250-?300 and a ?1000 PC is more than capable of generating the effects. It was really truly impressive to behold. Suddenly one realises the /point/ of an individual owning a quad-core PC with 4G of RAM and a terabyte of disk, when it can do this. The gap between the state-of-the-art and photorealistic rendering is a sort of Zeno's paradox. You are forever getting closer but never quite there. However, now, a ?40 game is at the level where at a casual glance walking past, I sometimes can't tell in-game graphics there. /Avatar/-level rendering isn't far away. Hmmm. Good point. But if one were talking about a very small motherboard with no expansion slots - smaller than mini-ITX - might it not still be doable? Oh dear... -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 9/30/10 3:01 PM, Tony Duell wrote: Come on, you don't have a box of mice kicking around? Even nontechnical people I know have at least two or three in a closet somewhere. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 30 September 2010 20:01, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: You use a mouse? I'd have thought that was a bit modern for you, Tony! :?) -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Tony Duell wrote: that raised a chuckle :-) I'm pretty sure I had one on a PC before I had a graphics display - it was handy for cut and paste.

On 1 October 2010 22:11, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: Ahh, fair enough. *Thinks* Wouldn't an upgraded Archimedes, or some other recent RISC OS machine such as an Iyonix, be a better tool for accessing the Internet than a PC-AT with a 486? Helpful with text editing, occasionally. I used MS-Word 4.0 for DOS on a few PCs with mice but no GUI. Not really worth the effort, though, to be fair. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Sunday, October 03, 2010, Tony Duell wrote: Look at "GPM." It's been available for Linux "forever" (at least since the days of 2.0.x kernel-based distributions), and lets you use a mouse to copy/paste on a Linux text console. I haven't tried, but suspect it would work with an MDA just fine, because it uses the Linux console abstraction layer.. http://freshmeat.net/projects/gpm/ You should be able to use it with an PC "serial mouse" or "bus mouse" on your hacked-up PC/AT. (I'm sure you at least have some serial ports on the box even if you don't have a free ISA slot to shove a bus mouse card into. :) Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Tony Duell wrote: *Some* versions can. Peace... Sridhar

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jules Richardson" <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 11:59 AM Subject: Re: Evolution of the Apple Mouse The gesture concept makes sense for small portable devices with limited CPU power. For desktop users I don't see why they cannot design something that tracks what you are focusing on with your eyes and use that for a cursor while having a few buttons on your keyboard you can mouseclick with (hands never leave the keyboard, no mouse needed).

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 5:39 PM Subject: Re: Evolution of the Apple Mouse I wear glasses... does that mean it won't work for me?!! Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

Anyone have access to this article? Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems - CHES 2009 Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009, Volume 5747/2009, 363-381, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04138-9_26 The State-of-the-Art in IC Reverse Engineering Randy Torrance and Dick James It's also available via ACM: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1617758 Thanks Keith

You have to have a 'web account' set up - have you done that? -- Ian

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010, Ian King wrote: I did that. That's how I got my @acm.org email address. All I can figure out is how to save an abstract to my "binder shelf". I can't actually view the article. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

On 9/29/10 9:00 AM, Keith Monahan wrote: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w8568j6533634w74/fulltext.pdf now, EVERYONE has it

On 2010 Sep 29, at 3:13 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Just picked it up here, no problem.

On 9/29/10 8:00 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Damn thing's giving me a 403 here with wget. I tried it in a web browser and it redirected me to a "here, give us money and we'll let you read this" page. WTF? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 9/29/10 9:48 PM, Kevin Schoedel wrote: I suppose, but I'm in SW FL. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL