QWERTYdid not prevent jamming by making people type slower.

I never said it did. QWERTY wasn't designed with speed in mind, it was designed, as you said, to minimize jamming. Dvorak was designed for speed.

I just learned something, thank you!

I've been writing books on this notebook for years. Damned near impossible to touch type on it, I wind up hitting the wrong keys.

I don't use it, but a lot of people do. The windows key works in KDE the same way it does in Windows (or did before 8).

A full suite of programming languages? Kids today are spoiled, what's wrong with assembly? I mean, besides the fact that 8086 assembly is a pain in the ass compared to a Z-80 or 6802?

I like my ten year old Logitech cordless. The key layout is standard but there are extra buttons for media player controls, a scroll wheel, home, back, email keys, etc. It actually was innovative.

When it was new the extra buttons only worked with Windows but apparently someone has made it work in KDE because they've worked on my Linux box for a few years now.

Very few IT departments will let users install anything on "their" computers, which makes sense because otherwise you're going to have security problems.

It isn't my computer at work, it's my employer's. He pays me to use it.

That's something I've wondered about for a long time. Why doesn't alt+n type a chr 164 in a word processor, and shift+alt+n make a chr 165? Straightforward logic, yet the logic is ignored.

I just grinned at the juxtaposition of your comment and sig. Rather than "Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them" shouldn't it be "Scientists point out problems, engineers implement them"?

That said, I more than agree with what you said. It seems they no longer test anything for real-world use. In today's world, the old design axioms "KISS" and "form follows function" seem to have gone straight into the dumpster.

So then why didn't the Dvorak keyboard take hold? QWERTY was designed to keep keys on mechanical typewriters from jamming, Dvorak should be much faster.

What the corporate (and yes, some open source) dumbasses don't understand is that if you change my interface there's going to be a learning curve. For someone who has touch-typed for years, it would take years to get up to speed with Dvorak; TFA was right on the money IMO.

Unity, Windows 8, Lenovo and other keyboards... just stop already! Jesus, if they were designing cars you'd have a joystick instead of a wheel and the brake and gas pedals would be reversed (and have a hand-operated clutch).

I only want new if old is broken or new is demonstrably superior. Change for the sake of change is stupid and counterproductive.

So you are saying that, somehow, the FDA would force Google to keep selling the product?

Of course not. Whoever owns CrystaLens now (Bausch&Lomb sold them, I don't remember to whom) could discontinue sales today and nobody could have one implanted until the patent runs out in nine years and anyone can manufacture them. The same goes for Google contacts.

Hmmm...blood sugar a little low? Suddenly all your adwords beside your google searches are for candy bars.

Illegal.

And, as I mentioned in my first post, if it turns out not to be as profitable as Google desires, away it will go.

This isn't a web service like gMail, it's a physical device. They can no more take it away than Amazon can take your hardcover copy of 1984.

A co-op has the same advantages as city-owned; you're both customer and shareholder.

And you wonder why your karma's in the toilet. The hypocritical irony... you gaily stalk j_r's journal to call him a gay troll stalker.

Dude, if you'd learn to troll PROPERLY...

From wikipedia:
Biology
Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following characteristics or traits:[32][34][35]

1.Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
2.Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells â" the basic units of life.
3.Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
4.Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
5.Adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.
6.Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
7.Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
These complex processes, called physiological functions, have underlying physical and chemical bases, as well as signaling and control mechanisms that are essential to maintaining life.

Alternatives
To reflect the minimum phenomena required, other biological definitions of life have been proposed,[36] many of these are based upon chemical systems. Biophysicists have commented that living things function on negative entropy.[37][38] In other words, living processes can be viewed as a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of biological molecules towards more potential microstates.[39] In more detail, according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin SchrÃdinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena that are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.[40][41][42] At a higher level, living beings are thermodynamic systems that have an organized molecular structure.[39] That is, life is matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates.[43][44] Hence, life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.[45]

Others take a systemic viewpoint that does not necessarily depend on molecular chemistry. One systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.[46] Life can be modeled as a network of inferior negative feedbacks of regulatory mechanisms subordinated to a superior positive feedback formed by the potential of expansion and reproduction.[47] Alternatively, life can be said to consist of things with the capacity for metabolism and motion,[32] or that life is self-reproduction "with variations"[48][49] or "with an error rate below the sustainability threshold."[49]

Viruses
Electron micrograph of adenovirus with a cartoon to demonstrate its icosahedral structureViruses are most often considered replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life,"[50] since they possess genes, evolve by natural selection,[51][52] and replicate by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolize and they require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.[53][54][55]