Luuux

The Anti-Mouse-Extinction Manifest

It's a consideration crossed my mind today. The technological possibilities of the touchscreens have risen with the introduction of iPhones. Now the debate about converting our standard home computer into touchscreen operated is renewed. It is a tempting option, very fashionable and very trendy, and the touchscreen fans already call for the extinction of our veteran user-input - the mice. However, we have one thing to consider. Simple holding out your hand up 24 hours straight will not just hurt your muscles, it might temporarily paralyze an arm, requiring a serious med attention. Now usually we don't use our machines for so long, but in many cases we scrap this number. Last statistics on that I've seen mentioned some 14 hours average a day in particular fields. This basically mean there are people out there who reach even 18 hours on regular basis. It is especially notable in gaming, programming and computer based professions like photoshop design. These are also mostly the fields that rely on prolonged pointer activities, like constant control of you character in a game, or subtle and accurate gestures required for image editing. Now, some physicians already warned us of devastating effects that sitting in front a computer in one pose for prolonged duration have on our body. With that in mind consider, what maims will we see when users will spend the same time with a hand stretched up to the screen? Concluding, I'd just say that disabling the mouse as the basic human input device of the computer is foolish. Whither it would be a personal choice or an incorporated action, this will not do any good. The touchscreens are fine, I really enjoyed working with touch enabled computers, but they should be used as an addition to the mouse.

Shoplinks Will be opened in new window

• PHILIPS WACS7500 80GB Wireles Music...
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Thunderbird's Emergency Landing

Recently I did some maintenance and software improvement on my computer. One of the things I decided to try was Mozilla's email client - Thunderbird. Being very fond of the popular browser by the company, I figured it'd be nice to have more of it's products. I have two email accounts. One of them is Hotmail for general use. The other one is a local account. Hotmail connected just fine, but the other one gave me some three hours of crippling with "connection to server timed out" message constantly reappearing. Attending Mozilla's net support service I found out that I'm standing here in good company. Apparently, after upgrading to the latest version, Thunderbird got a glitch for certain servers across the globe, one of them even being Gmail. More info would be desired, if any of you know something. However, I believe it's programming problem and have to be improved by Mozilla. The suggestions at their support public forum were of no help. So, until they realize and fix it, many users might quit using Thunderbird.

Crucifying BlackBerry

This is a promo for BlackBerry Torch 9800 that aired YouTube a week ago. By now it got some 24 thousand views. However, a short peek through the loaded comment section reveals a gloomy picture for the shiny device. It appears that even costumers satisfied with it despise the official promo material for one reason: iPhone. Things like "WOW iphone 1 features finally arrive at blackberry! Welcome to 2006!!! Finally" or "dudes its like the iphone what a new device" can pretty much summarize some 70% of what viewers had to say. Some comment were even removed, obviously for excessive use of bad English. Given that in YouTube 15 to 20 % of comments are of no particular opinion or content (or simply spam), that leaves no more than 15 percent to defend the latest BlackBerry. So, if RIM are considering the public responses, they are still in need of big improvements to level up with Apple. As one of the commentators have put - they need to focus on their own special features, instead of copying from the iPhone.

Shoplinks Will be opened in new window

• Apple MB528BT/A iPod Touch 8GB
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