Evolution of the Apple Mouse

[Tony Duell]

> >> Overall, I'd agree. For mass-market consumer kit, I think it might be
> >> good. Cheaper, faster computers are a good thing. Also, for the random
> >
> > Playinghte devil's advocate for a moment, Cheaper -> less likely to be
> > econmical to repair, and thus more waste sent to landfill, fewer jobs for
> > repairers.
> 
> You're right, however, it's a /fait accompli/. I have fetched

It may well be a fait acompli, but that doens't make it a Good Thing 
necessarily...

> entirely-working reasonable-spec PCs out of skips before now. Thrown
> because they were too slow & the owners too lazy and stupid to find a
> way to give them to charity or recycle them.

I wonder why I never fidn useful bits like this...

> 
> >> punter, *simpler* computers are a good thing.
> >
> > Not _ncessarily_ a good thing.
> >
> > Again, if oyu're not careful, you end up with a machine that makes simple
> > tasks trivial, but which can't be used for difficult tasks (or at least
> > makes htem a lot harder than they should be). Somehting that really
> > annoys me is the lack of a propper command language in many modern
> > window-based OSes. Computeras are good at doing the same thing over and
> > over agian, I should be able to tell them to do that.
> 
> Concur, personally and for myself, but programming is a lost cause now.
> 
> User computers are trending towards being very simple Web access
> devices with limited customisability and extensibility and that is
> what most people want. The same way they want a simple, reliable car
> that needs little maintenance and don't give a hoot if they can't
> perform that maintenance themselves.

In other words, most people do not really want a computer. They want 
something to borwse the web, store their digital photos on, download from 
iTunes to their iPod (or whatever you do these days), and so on.

Problem is, I do want a computer. A machine that I can program to do 
things for me I don't want to sit and do the same job <n> times by hand. 
That's what perl is for ;-). The problems I have generally require 
programming.

Which is why, I guess, PC shops ahve absolutely no iterest for me...

> That is a good point, but there are heatpipes and other ways of moving
> heat over relatively short distances, no? Not good enough? I am
> genuinely curious here...

I susepct the problms are then mechancial. Getting the heatpipes where 
you want them with the CPU, grpahics processor, RAM, etc where they have 
to be, A fan amy well be tge simplest and best solution.

Problem is, the fans you find in consumer PCs are horrible. I've had 
enoguh of them cross my bench. I also remember real fans that are sill 
running and still quiet afet over 25 years. Of cource those have decent 
bearings and probably cost ratehr more when they were new. 

-tony