The verdict is in: the Logitech RX300 mouse is out. The mouse-wheel buttons are too hard to click properly. The main mouse-wheel click, which replaces the traditional middle mouse button, is very hard to click because the wheel clicks twice: the first click happens when you press down with normal strength, but when you use your whole arm you can push the wheel further to get a second click, and this click is the one that actually works. The first click is just a decoy. This is annoying, but the problem is worse because it's very very easy to inadvertently tip the wheel to the left or right, thus activating the side clicks. This behaviour is annoying and it makes it difficult to manage tabs in Firefox: I middle-click to close a tab, but accidentally side-click, which scoots the active window somewhere else and closes THAT window. Or else I try to middle click something but realize I didn't lean on the mouse hard enough and only reached the decoy click.
It's too bad, because I like the rolling of the wheel better than my old mouse, but I depend on the ability to middle-click properly. Bye bye RX300.
True tales from Customer Support: A new hard drive for my modem
"Ever since you guys put a new hard drive in my modem I can't see the Swedish Bikini Team"This is how the conversation started. I knew right away that I was dealing with a novice, but this man had the nerve to admit WHY he wanted his modem to work. Another customer, who was using Netscape 3.0 back when browsers stored your browsing history in the address bar without giving you a way to erase it, had a different problem:
"The kids were doing something on the computer, and now there's smutty websites showing up when I try to type in a web address. How do I get rid of them before the wife sees it?"In the first case, the problem turned out to be the modem settings. Modems have never been easy to set up because several poor design factors in computers; first the classic modem hardware competed with other devices for scare resources, and then, when hardware started improving, modem manufacturers started cheapening their designs with buggy, unreliable, CPU-hogging software modems. Now things are pretty sane, and lots of people have high-speed Internet anyway. The customer's settings were messed up because we installed a new hard drive in his computer, which had an internal modem; I guess someone told him the box with the phone line is the modem.
For the second user, there was little he could do since he was unable to edit the registry. I told him to browse the web to 10 different sites so that he could replace the history entries. Unfortunately I couldn't walk him through it because he only had one phone line, and needed to dial-up to access the 'net. Now I'd ask him to call me back on his cell phone. Ah cell phones, high-speed Internet.... heck these days some ADSL and cable modems probably do have hard-drives.
Prisms
I complained to my optometrist that I was seeing slightly double. He prescribed some glasses for me and I bought them, but they didn't help. I then began a wild goose chase, visiting several specialists who each said "There's nothing wrong with X, go see a specialist who deals with Y", until I ended up at an ophthalmologist. He examined my glasses and said "These don't do anything for you, do they?" and proceeded to prescribe glasses with a prism lens, to bend the light and correct the horizontal mis-alignment of my eyes. Seems like the logical thing, right? Why didn't the first guy think of that? Thanks to him I've used up my optical health coverage on the wrong prescription and now it's going to cost $140 for custom prism lenses. But at least I'll be able to watch TV without closing one eye.
Creationists versus The Eye
The fundamentalist Christian group Answers in Genesis (AiG) preaches that evolution is wrong and everything was created directly by God. In this article they discuss why the eye must have been created. The argument essentially boils down to "If it wasn't built exactly the way it is, it wouldn't work at all". This suggests that the eye could never have arisen naturally. The article uses, as proof, the fact that the eye twitches constantly. This twitching (microsaccades) is imperceptible but has an important side-effect: twitching changes the light that appears on the cells of the retina and in essence refreshes the signal from those cells, so that your eyes can see constantly, even when nothing is moving. If there was no twitching, you'd stop seeing the image after a few moments, until something moved. This is because the retinal cells only respond to a change in light. Since the muscles that control this twitching are tiny, and the twitching is responsible for continuous vision, God must have made the twitchy muscles.
There are so many things wrong with this argument it's hard to know where to start. First, the argument is one of incredulity. Saying "It's absurd that such and such occurred naturally" is the same as saying "I can't imagine a way for such and such to occur", but some people have a better imagination than others. The fact that AiG don't understand how an eye might evolve microsaccades doesn't mean that those microsaccades didn't evolve.
The second problem with this argument is that it is quite obvious how microsaccades might have evolved. First, an eye evolves that doesn't have microsaccades. As the AiG article mentions, this eye can't see something if it isn't moving. However an animal can be born with a mutation where this animal's eyes are naturally twitchier. As a consequence, this animal sees better than his brethren and is a better hunter (or is better at escaping hunters), and thus has a better chance of surviving. Animals that survive longer have more offspring, thus propagating the mutation. This is only one possible scenario; in order to account for the tiny twitching muscles in the human eye it's probably required that the twitching evolved at the same time as the eye. Twitching is often a defect, but as a computer programmer I can assure you that defects often become features.
The third problem with this argument is that it denies God's own perfection. This isn't a problem for evolution, but a strange paradox in the creationists' arguments. If God is perfect, and he designed the eye to perfection, why did he make it so that it has to twitch in the first place? It doesn't make sense. If you're designing an eye, you don't make a photo-receptor that only works when the light changes, and then fix that by constantly changing the light with twitchy muscles. Rube Goldberg would have come up with a better system. And don't get me started on the testicles being outside the body.
There are so many things wrong with this argument it's hard to know where to start. First, the argument is one of incredulity. Saying "It's absurd that such and such occurred naturally" is the same as saying "I can't imagine a way for such and such to occur", but some people have a better imagination than others. The fact that AiG don't understand how an eye might evolve microsaccades doesn't mean that those microsaccades didn't evolve.
The second problem with this argument is that it is quite obvious how microsaccades might have evolved. First, an eye evolves that doesn't have microsaccades. As the AiG article mentions, this eye can't see something if it isn't moving. However an animal can be born with a mutation where this animal's eyes are naturally twitchier. As a consequence, this animal sees better than his brethren and is a better hunter (or is better at escaping hunters), and thus has a better chance of surviving. Animals that survive longer have more offspring, thus propagating the mutation. This is only one possible scenario; in order to account for the tiny twitching muscles in the human eye it's probably required that the twitching evolved at the same time as the eye. Twitching is often a defect, but as a computer programmer I can assure you that defects often become features.
The third problem with this argument is that it denies God's own perfection. This isn't a problem for evolution, but a strange paradox in the creationists' arguments. If God is perfect, and he designed the eye to perfection, why did he make it so that it has to twitch in the first place? It doesn't make sense. If you're designing an eye, you don't make a photo-receptor that only works when the light changes, and then fix that by constantly changing the light with twitchy muscles. Rube Goldberg would have come up with a better system. And don't get me started on the testicles being outside the body.
Petitioners demand more Potter
Harry's fans are at it again. Not content to get the seventh and final book, they have started a petition demanding that J.K. Rowling continue to write the adventures of the boy wizard. As a fan myself, I would like to raise my voice and say, "No!" Please let the story end when it ends. There are rumours that Harry will die. If he does, he must stay dead. Nothing makes a story lamer than when authors resurrect characters who are meant to remain dead. I fear, however, that Ms Rowling will take a lesson from George Lucas, and she will succumb to the desire to make more money, despite the damage done to the artistic integrity of her work. Feel free to re-use aspects of the Potter universe, Ms Rowling, if you aren't brave enough to create a new setting, but please don't bring back all the same old characters again.We've endured irritating house-elves, blast-ended skrewts, rules of magic changing under our noses, movies that get more rushed and confusing with every instalment, and, worst of all, an interminable wait between books, please do what's right for the story and put it to rest when its time comes.
Girl, Boyfriend kill family
How do you show you love your underage girlfriend? She's only 12, so you can't take her to Vegas. Her parents have locked your 23-year-old-ass out of their house. What should you do? Why, break into their house and kill them, that's what! Nothing shows you care like making an orphan of your significant other! Better make sure you finish off her little brother too. Once you're done, you can celebrate by going to a party and bragging about your deeds to your friends. In Jeremy Steinke's case, it seems to have gone over well with his girlfriend, except the part about being arrested while on the lam.
Long term thinking
Sometimes I think about tomorrow, or next week. Usually these thoughts are within one or two themes:
There are, however, longer time-frames that I sometimes think about. OMNI Magazine had an article in the early 90s about how to store nuclear waste. The article discussed two problems: the first, and most obvious, is how to make a vault strong enough to store plutonium for 10,000 years; the second is stopping people from opening that vault 10,000 years from now.
Consider the pyramids. We know them to be tombs, but much about them is lost. We don't know (exactly) how they were built. We don't even know how many there are, since many have decayed. People claim that the pyramids are cursed, but that's just what they'd say if the pyramids actually were toxic or radioactive and all who entered died painfully. If the pyramids were built to contain some evil, current generations are unaware of that evil and have entered and plundered most or all of the pyramids. Another mystery is the sphinx. What is it for, and why is it there? It could have been intended to frighten away would-be intruders, a job it has not done well. Nobody knows when, why, or by whom the sphinx was built, or even if it should be called a "sphinx" (legendary sphinxes were winged and had female heads, and were a Greek legend anyway, not an Egyptian legend). Now I don't really believe that the pyramids are ancient Egypt's nuclear waste dumps. But the point is we don't know much about them, and much of what we do know we only learned by entering the pyramids. What would happen to a future society that broke open our poisonous nuclear time-capsules?
The problem is that we're no good at transmitting information across the ages. We can't even transmit an automobile across a few decades. The folks of Oklahoma thought, in 1957, that their car was safely stored for future generations, but when it emerged it was a rusted heap. Every document printed on thermal paper will disappear when it's a few months old. Documents printed with ink jets fade after a few years, even if the paper and ink are so-called "fade resistant". And in the 1980s the BBC tried to digitize the Domesday Book in a multimedia presentation, yet the computers used for this project are obsolete, and broken, and all the data is essentially lost. Ironically the original book, over 900 years old, is still around and perfectly readable, but the fancy digital version lasted only 15 years.
The Domesday project used custom computers to achieve a goal that wasn't practical on contemporary PCs, and thus, in a sense, sealed its own fate. But even modern software, designed to transmit information from one person to another, is falling to decay. These days PCs don't have floppy drives anymore, and lots of people don't even remember that there were dozens of floppy disk formats before the ubiquitous 3.5" floppy. Most of these are essentially unreadable to most people, and for archivists who need to access these old disks, doing so relies on hardware that is no longer manufactured and which nobody can service. The only solution to this is to re-archive all the data every few years onto newer storage devices. But the physical storage is the easy part.
The hard part of accessing the old file formats is the fact that these file formats are often designed to work only with a single program. These programs often won't work on modern computers, which leaves us with no way to access the data. Microsoft suggests running virtual computers with old software but even this will only solve the problem so far. The real, long-term solution is to use open file formats with clear semantics and documentation. This way it will be easier for archaeologists to reconstruct the old text when they dig up an old digital file.
Over time digital storage of information will be a great benefit to society, but if the information isn't archived properly it will all disappear. And even if we keep it, there's no guarantee that future generations will know how to use it. In some sense society fell into decline after the fall of Rome, and information was lost; over time people regained their lost knowledge, but can we be sure our current knowledge will be preserved? Or will we build devices meant to store our toxic waste, and our society's collective history and knowledge, only to find that the latter failed our descendants and thus the former injured them, because they had no way to know what it was?
- Is tomorrow a weekend? Will it never arrive? or
- Crap, I have a deadline tomorrow, if only it were the next day.
There are, however, longer time-frames that I sometimes think about. OMNI Magazine had an article in the early 90s about how to store nuclear waste. The article discussed two problems: the first, and most obvious, is how to make a vault strong enough to store plutonium for 10,000 years; the second is stopping people from opening that vault 10,000 years from now.
Consider the pyramids. We know them to be tombs, but much about them is lost. We don't know (exactly) how they were built. We don't even know how many there are, since many have decayed. People claim that the pyramids are cursed, but that's just what they'd say if the pyramids actually were toxic or radioactive and all who entered died painfully. If the pyramids were built to contain some evil, current generations are unaware of that evil and have entered and plundered most or all of the pyramids. Another mystery is the sphinx. What is it for, and why is it there? It could have been intended to frighten away would-be intruders, a job it has not done well. Nobody knows when, why, or by whom the sphinx was built, or even if it should be called a "sphinx" (legendary sphinxes were winged and had female heads, and were a Greek legend anyway, not an Egyptian legend). Now I don't really believe that the pyramids are ancient Egypt's nuclear waste dumps. But the point is we don't know much about them, and much of what we do know we only learned by entering the pyramids. What would happen to a future society that broke open our poisonous nuclear time-capsules?
The problem is that we're no good at transmitting information across the ages. We can't even transmit an automobile across a few decades. The folks of Oklahoma thought, in 1957, that their car was safely stored for future generations, but when it emerged it was a rusted heap. Every document printed on thermal paper will disappear when it's a few months old. Documents printed with ink jets fade after a few years, even if the paper and ink are so-called "fade resistant". And in the 1980s the BBC tried to digitize the Domesday Book in a multimedia presentation, yet the computers used for this project are obsolete, and broken, and all the data is essentially lost. Ironically the original book, over 900 years old, is still around and perfectly readable, but the fancy digital version lasted only 15 years.The Domesday project used custom computers to achieve a goal that wasn't practical on contemporary PCs, and thus, in a sense, sealed its own fate. But even modern software, designed to transmit information from one person to another, is falling to decay. These days PCs don't have floppy drives anymore, and lots of people don't even remember that there were dozens of floppy disk formats before the ubiquitous 3.5" floppy. Most of these are essentially unreadable to most people, and for archivists who need to access these old disks, doing so relies on hardware that is no longer manufactured and which nobody can service. The only solution to this is to re-archive all the data every few years onto newer storage devices. But the physical storage is the easy part.
The hard part of accessing the old file formats is the fact that these file formats are often designed to work only with a single program. These programs often won't work on modern computers, which leaves us with no way to access the data. Microsoft suggests running virtual computers with old software but even this will only solve the problem so far. The real, long-term solution is to use open file formats with clear semantics and documentation. This way it will be easier for archaeologists to reconstruct the old text when they dig up an old digital file.
Over time digital storage of information will be a great benefit to society, but if the information isn't archived properly it will all disappear. And even if we keep it, there's no guarantee that future generations will know how to use it. In some sense society fell into decline after the fall of Rome, and information was lost; over time people regained their lost knowledge, but can we be sure our current knowledge will be preserved? Or will we build devices meant to store our toxic waste, and our society's collective history and knowledge, only to find that the latter failed our descendants and thus the former injured them, because they had no way to know what it was?
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