I did some rudimentary research on this question about a year ago, except I was looking for a Bluetooth mouse to use with my ThinkPad. All the reviews I could find for Bluetooth mice seemed to point to a common set of problems:

• Battery life is poor,
• There is always an annoying wake-up delay,
• They average 50-100% more expensive than their non-Bluetooth counterparts.

Based on these findings, and my own experience in the embedded arena, I would hazard a guess that all these Bluetooth mouse vendors are using the same embedded microcontroller, probably with the same embedded firmware. Hence, they all suffer from similar problems.

The only mouse's reviews that didn't seem to mention these issues (at least, not as bad as the others) was Apple's wireless MightyMouse. Of course, the MightyMouse has its own set of issues, such as the pretend secondary button, but if you can work around it, it's kinda sorta not too bad.

Again, this was about a year ago. I don't know if things have improved since then.

Schwab

Ha, very ha.

Mac OS X long ago learned to cope with mice sporting more than one button. OS X even does The Right Thing (context menus) with the secondary mouse button by default.

And now, with the new touchpads in MacBooks (where the "button" area is also part of the touchpad), you can set it up to pretend it has one button, or two.

Here's another news flash: OS X can handle standard PC keyboards, too! If it generates a standard USB HID code, OS X can deal with it.

Schwab

After allowing them to breed for a couple of generations, the organisms accused the scientists of being, "big ugly bags of mostly water," and subsequently attempted to destroy the lab before the technicians could shut the lights off.

Schwab

And people wonder why I'm still using Acrobat Reader 6. With JavaScript turned off.

And, seriously, how does an uninstaller that leaves DLLs behind ever pass a non-corrupt QA process?

Schwab

Since Adobe seems to (incorrectly) think JavaScript inside PDFs is a great idea, how about adding this feature:

When loading a PDF, if Reader sees there's JavaScript that wants to run, Reader pops up a dialog along the lines of, "Hey, this file contains executable code which is, y'know, kind of contrary to the whole concept of a 'document'. Do you want to allow the code to run? [Yes] [[Hell, No]]"

This is the cheesy but mostly effective stopgap solution Microsoft adopted when Word became an infection vector for macro viruses. Unless Microsoft got a patent on it, I don't see any reason why Adobe couldn't also use the same approach.

Schwab

I have a pair of these things installed as a stopgap measure to get the living room on the LAN. There's a PC, an HD TiVo, and an Xbox-360 in there (the Wii lives off the WiFi).

I would prefer to have genuine Ethernet strung in there, but I rent the place, and I'd have to cut holes in things to get the cables and outlets in place (I know; I crawled around under the house and looked). So until I get the impetus to actually follow through on that, we're living with these HomePlug AV things.

They're still unreliable. That entire branch of the LAN drops out on occasion -- not even pings get through. And since there's no management interface on the bridges, I can't see what they're complaining about. They just mysteriously work, then stop working, then start working again. Perfect for Windows users :-). And, of course, it's my fault when they stop working.

Somewhat better than WiFi, but a weak substitute for genuine Cat 5.

Schwab

Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"

BOFH: "What the hell is going on is that the message is currently working through our anti-spam measures -- the ones that filter out all the \/!Agr/\ ads because you keep visiting pr0n sites -- and if you really wanted it right now dammit, you would have had him FAX it.

"But, for a modest rise in salary, I can add his domain to our whitelist..."

Schwab

How is it not intrusive? I browse to a website I haven't been to before - something I do several times daily - and it doesn't work right unless I click that little S and allow it permission to run javascript.

That pretty much defines intruding on my experience.

Uh, no. You have it backwards.

If I browse to a Web site I haven't seen before and suddenly find my desktop (and other programs) covered by a barrage of pop-up ads, that is intruding on my experience. Injecting code into my browser in an attempt to get it to reject right-mouse clicks -- that is intruding on my experience.

The computer is mine, not yours. It obeys my commands, not yours. If you want it to run some of your code, then you're first going to have to convince me to let you. And you do that by earning my trust and not treating my browser and desktop like your own private playground. NoScript lets me enforce this policy, and it clearly exposes the children who won't play by the rules. Google.com has earned my trust (Google-analytics.com, however, has not.)

If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter. This is not a secret, and it is not something new. This has always been the case. (AJAX-heavy sites complicate this only slightly -- you should clearly explain what's not working and why (I'm looking at you, OKCupid...).)

And while we're about it -- Have you ever clicked on that little "S" in the corner to reveal a skyscraper of 15 different domains trying to execute JavaScript on your machine? Does this bother you even slightly? Why or why not?

Schwab

My initial gut reaction was to denounce this guy as a $SCOUNDREL (substitute your preferred profane term). But a little voice told me to go read the article, and now I'm not as sure as I was previously.

Just for fun, consider the following actions a Unitary Programmer might do to your machine. Where would you rate them on the $SCOUNDREL scale, and why?

• Deletes viruses from your machine.
• Deletes competing adware from your machine.
• Rebuffs attempts by competing viruses and adware to be deleted.
• Reconfigures IE to be more secure.
• Reconfigures Outlook to send plaintext only, fixed-width font, no top-posting, do not load or display remote images.
• Disables using MSWord as an email editor.
• Deletes IE; replaces it with Firefox, preserving all your bookmarks.
• Deletes Outlook; replaces it with Thunderbird, converting all your mail archives.
• Deletes all BitTorrent clients; replaces it with a RIAA/MPAA/FBI warning.
• Deletes the scary warning about installing device drivers not digitally signed by Microsoft.
• Converts HDCP to a system security setting, and flags all unprivileged applications that attempt to mess with it.
• Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+Wine.
• Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+KDE, with a message on the desktop reading, "Learn to use a real computer, kid..."

Playing "CoreWars" is tricky business, and people with even a dim sense of ethics are loathe to try it. But there's one case where none of the above actions are ethically questionable: When the machine's owner does it themselves.

I think the adware author lost sight of that for a while...

Schwab

We had ClearCase at MOTO. Complete mess. Nobody -- not even the admins -- could explain how it worked or how to use it. It was also supported only on an ancient version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, since it required a binary filesystem blob to support its version-tracking filesystem. If you didn't have exactly the kernel version it was looking for, ClearCase was simply not available to you. (You'd think, given the sums of money involved in procuring and deploying ClearCase, that Rational/IBM would offer a custom build service, where you'd feed them your kernel config and they'd mail you back a filesystem blob compiled for your kernel. But no, that would have made sense...)

Based on my imperfect reading, I can see two main appeals of ClearCase:

1. Everything is version-tracked, including the tools and environment variables you used to build the project. Thus, you are supposed to be able to roll your entire development environment forward and backward through time, and exactly reconstruct any project at any point in time. If you're working on a government project with a 15-year service life, I can see this as being very useful.
2. ClearCase appears to let you mechanize local management hierarchy and policy. If your manager -- and only your manager -- is authorized to commit code changes to the shipping base of code, ClearCase will let you describe that workflow and enforce it for you. For large organizations with a management fetish, this too is a "feature".

Schwab

I never thought I would say this without irony, but... Thank you, Microsoft.

We got this $(EXPLETIVE) $(EXPLETIVE) piece of $(EXPLETIVE) on the young one's PC, and it was an absolute bear to get rid of. I'm still not entirely sure we eradicated it. It's nice to see some bigger guns applied to the issue.

Schwab

Sorry. I won't install Steam, either. I've been very consistent on this point. It's the reason I still haven't played Half-Life 2.

It may also be worth pointing out that, since a company the size of EA believes Steam is a reasonable substitute for SecuROM, that Steam may not all the harmless sugardrops and fairydust that its supporters have been adamantly claiming all these years. Which is, pretty much, what I suspected all along...

Schwab

I run a FreeBSD box at the end of an ADSL line. Normally I would see a handful of SSH attempts. On a bad day I'd see a couple hundred. This last week, I've seen upwards of 1500 per day, all coming from different IP addresses. It's a straight dictionary attack, moving through in dictionary order. I think I'm in the G's right about now...

I long ago installed 'bruteblock' on my box, which plonks an IP address for N minutes after X failed attempts (both configurable). It's very small and efficient. But this obviously does nothing for distributed attacks. I should probably move the SSH port for a couple weeks... *sigh*

Schwab