Resuna's Profile

No, the Pocket PC was the OS 9 of phones. Seriously, all the things you're saying about the iPhone were all the things I was saying about the T-Mobile PPC Phone Edition... except that the T-Mobile phone also had no way of backing up the entire contents and configuration of the phone via ActiveSync, and if you lost power you had to restore from backup... except it was incomplete. You had to back up to flash cards if you wanted to be able to reliably save your data. I gave up and went back to Palm which may crash (and it does) but at least you never had to go back to square one just because it crashed. But I gotta say, I'm sorry for your friends. I quit recommending Apple back in the OS 8 era: The classic Mac OS was just too embarrassingly bad. I'm genuinely shocked that the iPhone is sounding as bad as the Pocket PC, though. What happened to the protected multiuser operating system?

I haven't liked any of Apple mice or keyboards, even ignoring the button thing, since they quit making them in Beige. The hockey-puck mice were horrible, but at least you could pick them up and move them without having to practice holding on to those little immobile patches (and now they've made those patches into buttons), and all the post-beige keyboards have been really loose and sloppy. I'm still using my years-old grotty-looking Microsoft optical mouse and a surplus Dell keyboard I picked up at the "garage sale" room at a local reseller.

I don't see any relationship between the mighty mouse and the Kensington studio mouse. Just having a touch-sensitive component doesn't mean it's similar to the Mighty Mouse: the Kensington device has a trackpad for the scroller, and it doesn't work very well and isn't a 2-d controller like the scroll ball on the Apple mouse. I've been looking for a mouse with a good 2-way controller for some time. The ones out there with tilting scroll wheels are too asymmetrical in the X and Y direction. IBM came up with a mouse with a trackpoint button on it... but the stupid thing only supports up-and-down (HELLO, IBM, DID YOU FORGET WHAT THE POINT OF THE TRACKPOINT WAS?). Unfortunately, the 2-d scrolling on the Apple mouse is one of the features that requires a Tiger upgrade to use. Ironicaly, a plain old 3-button mouse works VERY WELL as a 2-d scroll mouse. Logitech came up with the ideal solution (though they implemented it badly)... the third button is "grab". You hold it down and move the mouse and you drag the image around under the window... kind of like Adobe's PDF viewer does, except this works in all apps. Why everyone didn't implement this instead of playing around with a billion variants of the scroll wheel I don't know... well, I guess I do. Logitech's implementation was so badly done (it was never really explained, and it left weird graphics all over the screen, and the eventually abandoned it) that nobody ever realised what a basically cool idea it was. Someone needs to write a Haxie that makes the 3rd or 4th button do this. The Mighty Mouse's "squeeze" buttons would be ideal for this, because it would actually FEEL like you're grabbing the document you're dragging...

It's push-marketing Tiger, is all. You want to check if Tiger supports those extra mouse functions (I can't, I'm still on Panther) on other multi-button mice? I suspect that may be a 10.4.2 enhancement they slipped in to prepare for this mus muscular.

You left out the resigned masses. They may know more than you think about Windows, they're not kidding themselves about the mess that Windows has become, but they've just plain resigned themselves to putting up with it. Some might actually have an opportunity to switch, but others really do have software they depend on that simply isn't available on anything but Windows.

What makes you think that Intel is capable of designing a chip like that? Intel's strength is process, not design, never design. I mean, look at their track record: 4004 - this was a pocket calculator chip, complete with BCD registers and different word sizes for read-write and executable memory. 8008/8080 - Highly irregular design, slower than the competing 6502 and 6800 clock-for-clock, and beaten out by a clone... the Z80. 8086 - slow even when it came out, exotic "segment" design that made it easier to port CP/M software to it, which made it a marketing success but a technical disaster we're STILL paying for. iApx432 - CISCiest American chip ever, only beaten out by the Japanese TRON effort for the "missing the point" award. Total disaster. 80286 - Extended the address space of the 8086 with segment mapping, but that made segments even slower to use because you had to take a trip through the MMU every time you loaded a segment register, and they put the segment type bits at the wrong end of the segment word, so you couldn't just lay down a bunch of segments every 64K and treat them like a big flat array. 80386 - Slower than the contemporary 680x0 models when it came out, had to switch to a subtly incompatible ISA to use the 32-bit addressing, and still short on registers. i860 - About 10 years earlier than compiler technology could handle it, died. i960 - Best processor, for the time and available technology, that Intel ever designed, so they promptly caponised it by removing the MMU and sold it to the embedded controls business who are still using it. 80486 - Intel builds a balls-to-the-wall processor they don't have glitz up with cool features to make their marketeers happy, and wraps a translator for the 80x86 instruction set around this "RISC Core". 80586/Pentium - It worked for the 80486, so they did it again, better. So does AMD. IA64 - Itanium is a bomb, HP pulls them out of the water with Itanium 2... maybe too late. XScale - Take DEC's StrongARM, increase the clock speed, and end up with a processor that's slower at 300 MHz than the StrongARM was at 206 MHz. On the upside, they've now got it up over 600 MHz, which is pretty good for an embedded controller like that... About the only thing I could see that would let Intel do this would be to do what they did with the XScale... for them to get together with HP and resuscitate the Alpha. Call it "IAXP", "IA" for "Intel Architecture", "AXP" for "it sounds cool" ("AXP" was an early marketing name for the Alpha, it didn't mean anything), and tell us it's "Intel Architecture eXPress". Give it an x86-64 to Alpha transcoder (from what I've heard, the P4 transcoder should be close enough), and a way for programs to switch to "IAXP mode" and "run directly on the RISC core". But they'd be more likely to put Itanium cores in there, and if you thing the G5 runs hot you ain't seen nothin' yet...