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Input Devices

Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse 459

Posted by Soulskill from the we've-randomized-the-keys-for-your-convenience dept.
FuzzNugget writes "Peter Bright brings the hammer down on the increasing absurdities of laptop keyboard design, from the frustrating to the downright asinine, like the 'adaptive keyboard' of the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. He says, 'The X1's Adaptive Keyboard may have a superior layout to a regular keyboard (I don't think that it does, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it does), but that doesn't matter. As long as I have to use regular keyboard layouts too, the Adaptive Keyboard will be at a huge disadvantage. Every time I use another computer, I'll have to switch to the conventional layout. The standard layout has tremendous momentum behind it, and unless purveyors of new designs are able to engineer widespread industry support—as Microsoft did with the Windows keys, for example—then their innovations are doomed to being annoyances rather than improvements.' When will laptop manufacturers focus on perfecting a standardized design rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every new generation?"
Biotech

DNA Detectives Count Thousands of Fish Using a Glass of Water 61

Posted by samzenpus from the where's-walleye dept.
vinces99 writes "A mere glass full of water from Monterey Bay Aquarium's 1.2 million-gallon Open Sea tank is all scientists really needed to identify the Pacific Bluefin tuna, dolphinfish and most of the other 13,000 fish swimming there. Researchers also discerned which of the species were most plentiful in the tank. Being able to determine the relative abundance of fish species in a body of water is the next step in possibly using modern DNA identification techniques to census fish in the open ocean, according to Ryan Kelly, University of Washington assistant professor of marine and environmental affairs, and lead author of a paper in the Jan. 15 issue of PLOS ONE. 'It might be unpleasant to think about when going for a swim in the ocean, but the water is a soup of cells shed by what lives there,' Kelly said. Fish shed cells from their skin, damaged tissues and as body wastes. 'Every one of those cells has DNA and if you have the right tools you can tell what species the cell came from. Now we're working to find the relative abundance of each species present,' he said."

Comment Re:Scroll bar steppers are gone from Chrome (Score 1) 141

by Megawatt-hour (#45967365) Attached to: Google Chrome 32 Is Out: Noisy Tabs Indicators, Supervised Users

That doesn't always work, since the page can intercept the key presses and do whatever it wants with them, and also because the input focus may be inside some element on the page, such as an embedded video, requiring a click somewhere else on the page to return the focus to the entire document.

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One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

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