Pixar started as a hardware company. They hired animators originally to create content to show off what the Pixar Image Computer could do. And of course, they created lots of software to drive the machines. The company was founded by software/hardware guys: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, Alvy Ray Smith, and their early contributions are legendary in the field of computer graphics. They set up a software division separate from the rest of the company for the development and sale of RenderMan, which was the industry standard for CG in movies for many years. I can't remember what time period this way, but there was a 10-year stretch when 27 of the 30 thirty films nominated for Best Visual Effects in the Oscars used Pixar's Renderman.

They did commericals (I remember the old Listerine and Livesavers spots) to pay the bills while they worked on the software before their first movie.

Well, Pixar started as an independent spin-off from ILM. And Pixar and ILM now have the same parent company.

From the article, this is troubling:

12345678 is a much more secure password than 12345. If the latter is more in vogue now, it illustrates that too many aren't taking security seriously enough.

Sounds you got a mouse that defaulted to "left-hand mode." I bought a Razer "left-handed" mouse which was pretty much identical to the right-handed version, but with different button-mapping defaults.

That's often true, but so far most of the responses to him here have been fairly civilized.

When I was in college, after years of using the cheap keyboard my Dell came with, and then using the shoddy Ultrix machines in the Unix lab, I stepped into the SGI lab which had a number of high-end SGI graphics workstations and some nice SGI keyboards. Mostly I was there to test the file system browser SGI had shown off in Jurassic Park. It sucked. But still I was amazed. Amazed at how fast I could type! Amazed that the keyboard mattered that much with my typing speed. It would have been a misuse of those high-end workstations, but I wanted to do all of my programming homework in there.

Now that I'm older, I've noticed my WPM goes waaaay down on the cold nights when my fingers are stiff.

My first Razer mouse was a Lachesis. What a complete waste of money that was. After a bunch of headaches, it finally just broke not that long after the original purchase.

Against my better judgement, I got a Razer Deathadder. Results have been... mixed, per my comments above

I have a Razer DeathAdder and... well the Linux support is not great. The mouse gets detected perfectly fast under Windows, but on Linux there's always an eight-second delay and when it finally gets added, it always sends a tiny bit of "noise." If I have vi up, I'll notice the cursor moved down several lines when the mouse is finally added, if I was pressing control at the time, it switches workspaces. I've never had another mouse that does this, and it makes switching back and forth on a KVM a pain in the ass.

Not to mention that the buttons aren't 'buttons' but are presented as a programmable keyboard. A keyboard you have to program using the windows-only Razer driver, as the bindings are stored in memory on the mouse hardware. But the buttons feel -really- nice, as does the scroll wheel. Those are usually the downsides of many mice: buttons that take too much effort to press, a wheel that takes too much (or too little!) effort to roll, or is hard to "click" (since it's a middle mouse button too) without accidentally causing a scroll event too. The Deathadder seems to get all of that right. I just wish its programming methods weren't so kludgy.

Apparently you were playing them wrong.

Of course it also depends on the tasks that you use a mouse for. I didn't have much mouse-caused hand pain until I became a Diablo II addict, with its "hold down left-click to run" movement paradigm. What ended up helping was switching to using the mouse with my left hand, even though I'm right-handed. Problem mostly solved.

I use a right-handed mouse with my left hand, the Logitech Mouseman Optical (URL is a picture of the thing). It has a thumb button which I click with my ring finger of pinkie finger, and I love this setup by far over any other, at least for office work.

Boy, I would love a trustworthy source for such a claim.

The problem I have with their methodology performance is that it seems like they came to a conclusion first, then wrote a test that would support that conclusion. We might roll our eyes and move on, but that's a poor way to conduct biology and chemistry research as well.

I'm actually happy this story was posted to Slashdot, because it has the side effect of illustrating a number of cautionary tales about how to do things, which I don't think the submitter or editor had in mind when approving it.

Yes, but we're talking new programmers here. At least in C, you're forced to have to explicitly write inefficient code. New programmers know what malloc does (if they don't, they're behind in their classes). In Java and Python, things are done for you. That can be good! It frees you from a bit of micromanagement. But again, for a new programmer, it's not apparent that they're doing something especially inefficient because the work happens invisibly. It's obvious when you have to malloc() a whole new string buffer in C every time you append to a string. It's less obvious in Java when you just append and the runtime ends up creating a new buffer on the heap for you. ASM is perhaps a bit TOO low-level and weird to start a new programmer on, but I think a full OOP language like Java or scripting language like Python might be too high-level and encourage bad habits to develop. In my CS classes, C hit a pretty good sweet spot.

Then again, you can program badly in any language, and C has its own perils.

It's not necessarily that -- I think there's a third layer that doesn't get the attention deserved while people work on end-user applications or tinker building hardware. There's not much attention on operating system design and fundamentals. Your code will usually be dealing with an OS and rarely with the bare hardware, so I'm surprised there's as little attention about operating systems principles and design.