#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Succession riots in Egypt:
Egyptians are telling me Egypt’s internet has been disabled and that mobile phone service may be next. Twitter, used to coordinate public protests, has already been cut off.
This tends to raise the question… why does Obama feel that he needs a kill switch for the US internet?
Needless to say, I was much amused by this patent application in light of all of the Macintossers initially dismissing the multibutton approach and declaring how stylistically horrific it is. Clearly it is much better to imitate the multibutton approach, only to do so in a manner that forces one operate by sight instead of by touch and places the virtual buttons directly under one’s palm, if for no other reason than Apple has blessed the approach.
Speaking of comparing the effectiveness of different interface approaches, we’re going to be releasing the performance results of various mice soon and it looks to be a bit of a scandal. We have compiled strong empirical evidence indicating that in between the switch from mechanical rollers to optical sensors and the advent of the the multibutton interface, there has been essentially no actual performance difference between so-called high performance gaming mice and cheap office mice. Here is a comparison of four mice, two of which have multibutton support and two of which do not. The difference in performance between the two multibutton mice is the result of their different approaches to the interface; there is a reason, after all, that clumsy people are described as being “all thumbs”. That comparison marks the fastest speeds recorded at 1920×1200 resolution, whereas the sustainable speeds that one can reasonably expect to maintain in consistent use are about 15% slower on both the conventional and multibutton interfaces.
Finally, on the practical application side, there is a new video focused on Mozilla Firefox and demonstrating how the default Firefox mode operates for those who might be interested.
Remir throws down the gauntlet:
If you can beat an extrapolated 6.9 s for 10 clicks on a Meta, I will buy one. Likewise, if you beat 13.8 s for 20 clicks on a Meta, I will eat myself whole live on the Internet.
Now, I’m not saying that 21.59 s is slow, since it approaches the superhuman. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t reasonably expect to beat a jet with a propeller, even if it’s a turboprop. Who needs extrapolation when you can simply do it for real? Better start filing those teeth, Remir.
In addition to shattering the development team’s records, I thought it was interesting to note that the best of the 10 times that went into the 6.89 time was only 0.59, considerably slower than the present record of 0.41 that went into the 6.80 I clocked a few minutes later. This led to an emotional epiphany in which I suddenly realized that I am presently at the very apex of human progress. The entire history of Man’s technological development and achievement over the millennia currently culminates right here: le progrès, c’est moi. Being a man who lost his fifth gear more than a decade ago, I harbor no illusions that this historical landmark in man-machine relations will be not surpassed soon, perhaps even today. But for one brief, shining, glorious moment, on a planet of 6,894,600,000 people, I can legitimately claim to be the world’s fastest mouser.
Speaking of technological visions, as the Dread Ilk are aware, I am not in the habit of making assertions that I am not fully prepared to back up. In light of this, Markku and I have created a means of verifying our claims regarding the speed of our new mouse interface. While this is designed to permit one to test the Meta interface against the traditional interfaces, it also happens to serve as an excellent means of testing one mouse against another on the traditional point-and-click interfaces. We also included 20 of the most common hotkeys simply to see how the three mouse interfaces fared against it, but that’s really neither here nor there since practically no one uses more than five or six of the basic ones and you don’t leave your finger positioned over the Ctrl key in normal usage.
So, if you’re interested in trying it out and seeing how fast your mouse is against the best and average times of our interface, you can download the 5.3 meg zipfile here. Unzip it, click on the executable, and you’re in. First maximize the window, then select the interface you’re testing under Options; you can’t use Meta unless you have one, of course. Click on the black button with the blue logo to start the timer and it will stop once you click on the correct icon or menu. The logo will flash green, the timer will stop, and the logo will turn blue again, waiting for your next click.
Do at least 20 to get an average score, although 100 is better. If you have a high performance gaming mouse, please email me with the mouse model and your best average for 100 on icons and menu. You can see how it compares with my scores and the development team’s record scores below – I managed to beat the best single time but couldn’t maintain that pace. And if you can beat Markku on his Logitech MX-518 on the menus, (34.19 for Menu 20 at 1920×1200 resolution), I’ll be very impressed indeed.
My implacable hatred for Apple’s relentlessly fascistic vision of technology notwithstanding, I am a longtime admirer of Steve Jobs. I even regard him as somewhat of a role model since I am as confident in my own technological visions as he is in his. It is his unique talent for not only having a vision but also successfully communicating it that makes his recent departure so potentially ruinous to Apple:
Apple has not elaborated on the reasons for Steve Jobs’ medical leave, and it probably won’t unless/until it has to. As a result, those who care about the company and Steve can be forgiven for wondering how serious Steve’s condition is and for looking for clues about this in every communication.
In this vein, in our opinion, the wording of one sentence of Steve’s email to Apple staff is not encouraging: “I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can.”
In our opinion, those are not the words of someone taking a short leave who is confident he will be back at the company soon (or ever). Rather, in our opinion, they read like the tragic, heartfelt sentiments of someone who thinks he might never be coming back.
I wish Steve Jobs all the best and sincerely hope he makes a full recovery in order to come back and subject a new generation of Macintossers to imprisonment in his beautifully landscaped, walled-in, fascist, techno-utopian garden.
And empirical evidence is embraced in its stead. Now, I have long contended that it is worthwhile to pay attention to those with whom one disagrees even if one is convinced that they are wrong. While I am most certainly not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell and have little regard for science fetishists, after reading What the Dog Saw and engaging in the recent series of discussions related to the limits of science, it occurred to me that even without taking MPAI into account, I was asking far too much of most people in thinking they would grasp the benefits of a radically different interface by simply presenting them with the specifications and features and expecting them to reach the appropriate conclusions. Most people don’t want to have to think about something in order to figure it out, they want to be informed. But how can you inform someone of the detailed specifics when you don’t even know what they are? Most people find it far less meaningful to hear “X will be significantly better than Y because of Z” than “X is 20, Y is 10. So X is twice as much as Y.” They don’t want to think about Z or to work out how much better X is than Y. In fact, experience suggests that they often regard the first option as complete gibberish.
This should have been obvious to me from the beginning. Whenever people react to something that is perfectly logical by saying that it is crazy, this is little more than an indication that they really don’t understand either the logic or the conclusion. I suspect the modern fetish for unassailable empirical evidence is in part the result of a decline in the average individual’s ability to think in the abstract; I noticed that the early adopters of the interface with whom I have communicated have almost uniformly been highly intelligent. That might appear flattering, except it’s actually indicative of a problem because it means that the vast majority of potential users are not grasping the potential advantage to them.
Therefore, I concluded that empirical evidence was necessary. I therefore went about designing a means of acquiring that evidence, which has worked out rather well indeed. I now have a strange new respect for both Gladwell and blind, thoughtless faith in empirical evidence.
I’m not going to bombard the blog with videos, but since a number of you had some suggestions for improvement, here is a new one that shows off our favorite little device kicking it very old school style. I recorded the audio in Audacity rather than Camtasia and imported it this time… it worked better, I think, but I’m still having a few audio-editing issues. Anyhow, this is interesting because it shows how the keyboard can be entirely eliminated from a keyboard-only game.
By the way, does anyone know how the image that shows in the YouTube link can be selected or is it just random?
I have to say that Camtasia Studio has gone well beyond my expectations and even some of my hopes. I’m still learning my way around it, but this test of the picture-in-picture feature shows how versatile it is. The video embedded below is just a test of that feature, which I thought might be a useful way to show what the mouse is doing when the onscreen action is taking place. The result, crude as it is, turns out to be a remarkable and ironic testimony to the ergonomic advantage of the decidedly unergonomically-shaped device; even after having used it for months, I was surprised to see how it virtually eliminated wrist movement as well as the keyboard commands.
Anyhow, now that I know Camtasia works so well, I’m going to set about producing a series of higher-quality videos that will show how the mouse works with a wide range of various games and applications. But first, of course, I’ll wrap up that third inflation video for which Nate is so patiently waiting. I should be able to finish and upload it this weekend.
This makes me think that the security forces of the world must be getting more than a little nervous. The state no longer possesses air supremacy.
As Carroll Quigley noted, the power of the aristocracy over the masses has historically depended upon how great the divide between state and individual military power is. Once someone figures out how to turn these little RC planes with speeds of up to 130 kph and 27-mile range into delivery systems, pretty much all bets are off. And there’s no reason they can’t be effectively turned into cheap drones without too much trouble.
I suppose the obvious countermeasure is adding laser turrets to all the closed-circuit cameras. But it’s not hard to see the recon-related possibilities here either.
My own feeling is that time travel is rather less likely than a secret elite making use of advanced technology. Although apparently less advanced phone-wise than we are now; that mobile phone looks bigger than my Android device. Of course, this raises the question: if they had phones in 1928, what do they have now?
