Posts by Kyle Matthews
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And if I want my title bars to blur from fire engine red down to a delicate shade of magenta today, and then tomorrow change it so they go from azure to gunmetal, that ought to be my prerogative.
Someone needs to take a chill pill!
The window with focus on my 10.6 imac is dark grey. All the other windows are light grey. Fixed it for ya.
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After a couple of repeats I suddenly remembered I had a few urgent things to do in town. So urgent, in fact, that I totally forgot to turn off the stereo before heading out for the next six hours or so. Imagine my embarrasment when I came back and realised!
In 1998 my pregnant partner and I took a downstairs flat with some students upstairs.
Two weeks before the baby was born the flat upstairs did this - an incredibly loud stereo from about 11pm until 2am on a Friday night. While they were all out on the town.
Except we didn't play loud music to deserve any retaliation. They were just drunk and decided to go out and didn't turn the music off.
I phoned the landlord the next morning and he gave them notice.
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I upgrade my electronics when it breaks down, and even then I'm unhappy about it.
I have a rather large, not very good, 8 year old CRT which I hope will last at least another 10 years. For me to buy a new one before that would have to be the deal of the century AND me to have found a thousand dollars lying around.
I'd love to be able to buy apple toys for at home (I had a brief play with a macbook air last week, that thing is stupidly light, and my home wireless network makes the lack of ethernet not a problem), but they're outside my budget by a factor of several.
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There's no place for jokes in serious sports commentary.
Murray Mexted.
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Let me clear up one thing; the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow typists down; it was designed to prevent the keys from jamming, thus allowing typists to work even faster.
Well. It was designed to spread out the hammers so that they were less likely to jam. And that caused the keys to be placed in un-optimum locations - the A key for example is a little finger key. It means that our typing is slower than it could be if it was designed from the ground up in a computer age.
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Kyle, the point is that the keyboard is "an effective interface with the computing systems we use". It's about as effective as we're likely to get within my lifetime,
It's not really effective. It's just that we've become very good at using them. I spent a term in 3rd form learning to touch type as my high school option. Was probably the most useful thing I learnt at school. But is there any other single physical skill with no other purposes that we have to invest so much in to be good at?
Keyboard skills do not transfer to anything else - it's a skill with one purpose - human-computer/typewriter interface. If you learn to ride a bicycle you have learnt skills that transfer onto other things - riding a motorbike, balance etc. The only further application of typing is OOS.
It's a relatively difficult skill, and even less sensibly the layout of the keys is stuck in a legacy system designed to slow down typing to make typewriters work, rather than speed up typing to make computers work. If you choose to go to a more efficient layout of keyboard, you have to retrain yourself to use that.
It requires this large object to be attached to the computer, except sometimes they come as part of the computer, except these latter computers are supposed to be the ones that we carry around everywhere.
A keyboard is a very good interface for getting words from the brain to the page.
OK, you're still thinking about typing out text, which you're unlikely to use an ipad to do much of. Turn the camera on, hit record. Or the microphone. You're now interfacing with the machine. Move your finger around the screen, you're interfacing with the machine.
If you want to write a book, unless you've got voice recognition going well, keyboard is your tool. That's not what we're doing however. PAS is a public interaction space, and yet the interaction uses the same method of interface as if we were to write novels to each other.
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Keep that in mind when you say that we've failed in how we communicate with computers.
That was three paragraphs making my point - we've failed to build an effective interface with the computing systems that we use, hence the keyboard.
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No. Really, it isn't. It's nice we have GUIs which mean we no longer have to ask the computer to do things in words, but one of the main functions of a computer is writing.
But we're talking about ipads today. Which isn't primarily a instrument for writing. Which doesn't come with a keyboard and this is an issue people have with the machine.
The keyboard is simply an interface with the machine and given the nature and likely purposes of an ipad, a different primary interface might be more useful.
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And what would that more efficient interface be? What's quicker than typing for writing?
My point is, typing was a skill you learnt solely for the purpose of interfacing with your computer. It's a skill that we have to learn because of the limitations of the interface.
In the context of a discussion about the ipad, which has itself limited the keyboard options (quite possibly limiting your speed at typing), other ways to interface with the device are relevant.
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If I had a magic dictaphone that wrote down unfailingly what I say into it, I'd still rather have pen and paper (or pen and tablet, assuming equal ability to convert into perfect script) or, better, a keyboard. I can type faster than I can handwrite, and I can manipulate text on a page much better via a mouse and keys than I could giving my magic dictaphone verbal instructions.
Yes. But you can only type faster than you can handwrite (or indeed, possibly at all), because we're still using it as an interface to computers. It's a skill created because of an interface problem - converting thoughts to individual characters - in relation to typewriters/computers. It's the ongoing inability to create or use a more efficient interface that uses existing skills that ensures it continues.
Tablets show the same problem with the computer mouse - it's an interface that we have because you couldn't manipulate the screen directly. Now that's no longer true in many cases.