orthogonal's Journal: A Prediction

If my prior comments on wikipedia are any guide, after the post drops off the front page, a wikipedia editor with mod points will mod-bomb all my (currently 5,5,5,4) comments in the Wikipedia story.

The wikipedia administration, for whatever reason, is extraordinarily defensive and hates to see criticism remain un-suppressed. If this is reminiscent of a cult, well, if the show fits....

Twiddler2

[utexaspunk]

This is OT, but I was wondering if you ever got the Twiddler2? I've got one that I bought several years ago and didn't like very much. In my opinion, it's a product that sounds good in theory, and really could have been good, but fails due to many design flaws. If you've got one, I'd like to know if you found it to be any more useful than I did. If you don't, you can have mine! :)

Re:Twiddler2

[orthogonal]

That's a generous offer.

I didn't get a Twiddler but I did get a Touchstream. wonderful keyboard, unfortunately one cold winter night a spark leapt from my finger and destroyed it.

Then I wrote some software to ley me input keys using a PS2-type double joystick. This works, but slowly.

At this point, I don't think a Twiddler would be all that fast or comfortable. But I'd be interested in your impression of its design flaws.

A bit OT

[tomhudson]

... but I noticed while meta-modding, that you were unfairly modded off-topic with regards to your comment about the halting problem http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182271&cid=15 0 69012 [slashdot.org]

btw - his "proof" is flawed, and I've written him as to why. Simply put, 2 problems:

1. optimizing compilers should remove all loops without side effects and no variables declared with the "volatile" keyword. A "while(1){}" is the most trivial case. So the program ends up returning either TRUE or FALSE in all cases.