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Recent Comments by heathen
 | comment listing type: Top Sift for Nov 8th, 2009Friends O' the Sift Top New Videos by Vote                 Subscribe Top 15 Sifters of All Time Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week Newest Appreciated Comments         |
Hilarious Irish Rally Co-Driver
Ireland ≠ England
You're correct that Ireland is neither in, nor part of, England. However it's still part of the British Isles.
It can get a little confusing, but breaking it down as follows helps:
Great Britain consists of England, Scotland and Wales. (But neither Northern nor Southern Ireland.)
The United Kingdom includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Southern Ireland being an independent country called the Republic of Ireland, also known as Eire.)
The British Isles, however, are made up of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland and the several surrounding smaller islands.
So although Ireland is not part of Great Britain it is still part of the British Isles and therefore "British".
I'm not privileged and can't re-add this back into the * British channel, (Not to be confused with the English Channel with the tunnel going under it), so hopefully someone else will.
xkcd Loves The Discovery Channel - Animated!
Fuck xkcd. It could be renamed "Badly-Drawn Webcomic for Self-Important Cunts" and completely explain both its purpose and short-comings.
The disclaimer on the comic's homepage:
"Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."
So which one are you?
xkcd Loves The Discovery Channel - Animated!
Although I must complain, those 'red spiders' have too many legs.
>> ^schmawy:
That map is pretty good.
There's an even bigger version here: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png
Proposed future using Touch for User Interface
The 10 finger input method could be very interesting for gaming, and applications such as casual web-browsing, but it doesn't seem ready for the work environment yet, in my opinion.
Finger tips have a large surface area, compared to a mouse pointer. Even when the issue of obscuring the screen is removed by using a separate input pad, (as stated in the video), they still lack the precision required for detail work.
This can be mitigated with increased zooming and larger icons, but again this requires additional processing and restricts the overall view of the workspace.
Throughout the video I was wondering how they were going to handle typing. A printed or projected keyboard layout on the touch pad might help for functions such as casual social-networking communications, but for sustained typing I find some form of tactile feedback is needed. I'm only a "partial-touch-typist", glancing down at the keyboard intermittently, but without a physical reference of where the keys are and whether they are being pressed I get "lost" much more frequently. Generating a click sound on each key press, such as with the iPhone, can help with this but it's not a full solution.
I then noticed in the last few moments of the video a shot showing the touch-pad in front of a keyboard, suggesting both are to be used simultaneously and that the pad is replacing only the mouse. Wouldn't this cause posture issues, having to reach over the pad to type, and increased travel time for both hands rather than just the right hand to the mouse?
Finally there's the potential issue of resting fingers accidentally registering as a click. This can probably be tuned through the software to each user's individual preference, but it could be a tough one to nail down.
There are times when I'm browsing a website and my middle finger rests a little heavily on the right mouse button bringing up a context menu. It happens infrequently, and has no real impact as the menu is easy to close by left clicking back on the page. However when ten input points are involved, each having multiple functionality when considered both as individuals and groups of fingers, the issue quickly escalates.
I'm not saying it isn't an interesting concept, I'd love to have a play around with it. I'm just not ready to give up my keyboard and mouse in the work environment quite yet.
Randall Munroe (xkcd) 1-Ups Reddit