This man speaks truth.

Funny you should mention that. I grew up in a small town. When my wife and I were married, one of the local retailers was on my wife's gift registry for her china pattern. This retailer knew I had a (relatively, small-town-scale) wealthy aunt who frequented the shop. So the retailer loaded up on all the wacko, high mark-up accessory pieces for my wife's china pattern and every time my aunt came into the store she would get the sales pitch for a soup tureen or something. This went on for years.

Totally agree with you about LaTeX. TeX (on which LaTeX is based) was done back in the days of punch cards -- it was the only game in town for typesetting mathematics papers on a computer. TeX is a really an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. Score another one for Knuth. But.... it is about as far from WYSIWYG as can be imagined, with all the good and bad brought on by that circumstance.

LaTeX can be learned with effort. The learning curve is nasty, but you get very nice math typesetting as a result. My daughter does on line math classes from Art of Problem Solving. http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/ The lecture classroom is a chatroom that supports LaTeX. So it's pretty wild to see a bunch of middle-school and high-school kids blasting LaTeX into the chat. LaTeX isn't dead -- but only math nerds are fluent.

Um.... typing this from Sunnyvale. Personally, for me living in SF would be Hell on Earth. Different people have different definitions of 'livable'. Not that Sunnyvale is Nirvana, I'd rather live some place like Mariposa. But at least in Sunnyvale I have easy access to places liked Halted and Weird Stuff Warehouse and life's other fundamental necessities.

I just happened to recall that the Behemoth bicycle had switches on the handlebar so that Steve could compute while cycling. http://microship.com/bike/behemoth/ It took two hands, though. He simply entered the ASCII codes directly. So he didn't find it so hard to learn 'chords'.

Did you see the bit on Leno where they had two kids texting over phones, race to hams with radios using morse code? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfyf5Y5AHNc Morse code won easily and handily by a huge margin. I know one of the hams (Chip), he said it was clear during rehearsal that morse code was going to win by a mile. It's actually pretty easy to send morse code, and as you say easy to do in a clandestine fashion. Copying, though, requires practice, practice, practice. Until it becomes a key skill in modern video games I don't see lots of kids learning the code.

There are morse characters for punctuation. I don't know most of them, just the common ones. There are also language-specific characters for Cyrillic, and some oriental languages as well. So coming up with codes isn't the issue. The data rate isn't outstanding. Experts go 30 to 35 word per minute or so. I knew one old cigar-chomping sparks who first went to sea in a WW II Liberty Ship, who claimed "49 1/2" words per minute. I watched him operate, too, with a WW II era bug, beer and ash-tray handy -- he could move the traffic, though. I think chording is always going to beat keying if implemented correctly.

BTW -- a bit off topic, but if there are any other CW ops out there that haven't read this piece by Hans Brokab, do it. Put down your drinks to protect your keyboards. You have been warned. http://mikea.ath.cx/QRQ-QRV.html

Nah. It is just practice. Just like learning to type or to use the buttons on a video game controller. For how many /.'ers are the buttons on a game controller instinctual?

It does require motivation and a pay-off. Otherwise you will never do it enough to get proficient. I know Morse code. Simply obtaining a ham license was the original motivation for the considerable work it took to get minimally proficient. Radiosport contesting using high speed Morse was my payoff. And before you ridicule my addiction to a mostly pointless exercise in communication using anachronistic technologies, explain why people spend so many hour playing video games.

So if there was a pay-off I think chord keyboards could catch on. It seems like a pretty good way to deal with modern touch screen phones and tablets. It would probably be faster and less error prone that the current generation of on-screen text entry mechanism. I think for it to catch on it requires that every device that you walked up to must use the same standard chord set.

The technology was developed by PrimeSense. Microsoft's gaming unit brought it into Microsoft. As I understand it, Primesense was initially aiming to make it part of every television as a remote control device. No longer will you lose the remote behind the couch cushions. The robotics community jumped on the Kinect right away, since high resolution distance measurement of the robot's environment is a long standing problem. Out of the box, though, I think the Kinect in its current form has trouble in outdoor environments since the sun is such a strong IR emitter. That is a generic problem with anything that depends on IR.

Yes, exactly. The mfgr paid by the unit, on the assumption that Windows was installed on all of them. Oh, and if Windows *wasn't* installed on all of them, it was very hard to get your phone calls returned, and somehow your competitors found out about new things much sooner than you, and for various odd reasons they always got the releases before you.