"Cool" is the operative word here. Read over at The Register that Intel demoed their "2 watt" mobile chips but still spec for mobo manufacturers to allow for 17.8W consumption!!! (hope that's the right number)
I've been well pleased at the idea of a proper TP running linux for a while - and though hard about preordering for our office. But last night, bashing hard on the keyboard for hours on end on my own model, I had to keep lifting the TP off my lap 'cause the darn thing gets to like 90f outside case. Solve that - i.e. give me Transmeta - you got sales.
This is darn cool - but (maybe i'm dumb here) will an OS ever be native for Transmeta Crusoe, or will everything run in code morphing, basically old x86 code?
Remembering the PowerPC TP's IBM did for like all of a week or so (did anyone buy one?) I'd surely love to be able to recompile my apps for Crusoe - or *anything* other than x86 and be able to take them with me:)
I'm being late in the day here, as this story is dropping down the front page. But several posts have complained as has The Register in their coverage of the same, that IBM aint been up to much recently.
No I hate to say it but ZDNet has been a little more thorough.
What intrigued me was th ehint in the linked article that IBm was going to release some office products for Linux at the same time. ZDNet's coverage of the same story is more enlightening. In fact better than IBM's linux home IMO.
It's going to take some time to bring Linux into the support levels and consistency that IBM's corporate customers want. But Thinkpads to AS400 and CICS or whatever else is IBM's game. Not one individual product offering or another.
Sometime soon the floodgates will burst and CIOs will *need* to evaluate enterprise Linux solutions seriously. IBM plans to be right there. Check out the links (including a promise for AS/400 port:)
Forget the "article", man was it bad. Somewhere next door I have the spec sheets for NeXT STEP Intel Edition (forget which version) and the hardware support was really minimal, stuck with a few SCSI cards and drives, only basic or one or two video drivers
NeXT STEP's main feature was EOF or Enterprise Object Frameworks, basically a distributed Object-C set of classes with some real nice stuff like regular but quite complex UI widgets, spell checkers and more all there should you want to call on them and write an app damned fast. MacTech wrote some darn fine articles on basically progtramming functional and elegant stuff - with no prior sight of the machine.
EOF, of which Web Objects is apparently i think a subset, is now called Cocoa. Its heritage includes much Intel code and is anyway pretty cross plaform being avail on NT, HP-UX and Solaris (from memory so sorry if any mistakes here.)
It does occur to me there would be a whole load of people interested in NeXT - *ahem* the good bits of OS-X on Intel. One time UnixReview did a feature on NeXT and Macaw Cellular had just bought squillions of intel boxes for their CRM an dcall centers *just* because they loved EOF. So surely bits of OS-X will make their inroads anyway. I expect if a Intel WS solution were available, even on limited hardware, many big companies would be impressed and no way would Apple have to charge a retail price for the OS. I think I would happily pay $500 if i have good intel kit rather than ditch upgrade for mot G4or whatever.
erm, if you read my subject line "-with added Mach and Aqua" I figure (at least i thought this was clear) that any micorkernel integration for clustering and GUI on top would be the icing on the cake.
The OS-X kernel is quite extensible and pretty well documented. Since this Free-BSD clusterrelies on network cards between node (prolly not great for memory latency on large datasets tho') I expect you could make some use of reading the Kernel Network Extensions reference for a start.
But what I was thinking about was to replicate Darwin across a cheap cluster and modify the Standard Apple Numerics Environment or its OS-X enquivalent to pass real heavy duty FP to the cluster. Oratleast do something similar in a set of system calls / api in Cocoa or another environment.
Im sorry if my postwas a quickie, but I dont want to open source all of OS-X just maybe open up the hardware hegemony which Apple has at the moment. I mean, can you imagine if OS-X became a serious compute platform / renderfarm candidate. Surely even Jobs would drool:)
No you're not redundant, but here on/. they send the men over the top with guns at their backs to get the info posted.
New slashcode feature required : semantically complete linguistic comment submission non repudiation and meta sub - subject row locking . . think of the serene calm you would enjoy, safe in high s/n ratios. Or not.:^)
Hello there, small confession - the NYT article came up at K5 a little back. You may be interested in the story there on the spammer who spammed too often although I wish the author of the commented piece had let us in on *how* he cracked the spammers:) - I bet some/. ers could put some insight into that (K5 does miss out on the breadth of comment here).
And if you log in, maybe you could check out and vote on my story, which I worked on a while today?:^)
AFAIK - and I am quite close to telecoms in the UK - Telecommunications Act '90 and '92 served British Telecommunications Unlimited (the non corporate license holder) the license for its subsidiary, British Telecommunications Plc (trading as BT Plc)with the right to expand into defined areas of mixed media broadcasting e.g. VOD in return for indirect access rights for Cable Co's local loop
These licenses were always allocated to individual companies on a regional basis, ensuring a de facto regional monopoly if they didn'tbuild out.
Since (e.g.)CWC (Cable and Wireless Communications) took direct stakes in cable firms (circa 92-94) it lost the incentive to build out cable runs to areas not already served because its business model - as with a large part of all Cable Co's is to generate voice traffic.
For that CWC e.g. says to me : "Oh, sure we'll provision some ISDN lines for you, BT will put them in.." Thus my lines are BT, and when I had a not small dispute with BT last year they fsked with my CWC lines (which are legally in in CWC's name not mine) including pulling the cables at the exchange on frequent occasions
Oh yeah, and since BT's upstream ISDN is overloaded - as are almost all their local switches in dense areas right now - I cant even get 64/128k ISDN, sometimes throughput is one quarter of that.
For the record my beef with BT is they (disclaimer - my opinion based on evidence) implemented ISDN Q.931 ETSI signalling so poorly - 14 sware variations around the country - esp. with signalling (which is supposed to be X.25 for fskus sake so I cant believe they ballsed that) that I get a BIG line drop rate from overseas POTSloosing me business and generally causing grief (callers hear a ringing or dead tone and this is *not* a CPE set up problem).
the effect of the poor implementation is to drive up ISDN hardware costs ('coz tech support o'head et.c.) to 3* European prices and forces everyone to depend on their shitty overpriced switched centrex - "Feature Line" which is no good for 10 - 20 line installs.
Getting this ISDN right was a *key tenet* of their LICENSE. So after trying to sue me for everything under the sun, they've shut up for a bit and I'm just waiting on legal clearance to put up a nice detailed site to get some fresh air into it all.
I dont care what beef the guys in the US have - shit here we really do have only 1 telco and their running down their networks like crazy to the point nothing interoperates.
Oh and I'm just waiting for my lines to go dead now - some weeks ago i posted a big rant here about government appointed monopolies - minutes later - all quiet. Let's test this out? *grin*
I am trying to understand this. Is this story a review of techreview.com or an endorsement or even an admission along the lines of "aha! here are some guys talking about some really interesting stuff, you should go and look".
My point is, no disrespect to 'Taco, that this story looks to be the latter, and without any additional commentary or question or review of the linked content I think this is a poor and unstructured way to create a discussion.
I mean, I now might have to read a whole other site - all of it - just to see what might be "on topic" or not:-)
In conection with "The end of Moores Law" I want to ask just how much economic value is lost in a system where what you paid for 18 months ago is now worth one quarter, 1/4, 25% of what you paid according to the simple interpretation of that dynamic?
I mean if your salary of 18 months ago were being lost to inflation at that rate, and the effect was spreading throughut the economy, we'd all be in Brazil during the 70's
for the record, Brazil inflated itself to growth on the back of vast loans, much of which originating from Citibank, and all of which collapsed in '82 leading to a massive world wide liquidity crisis.
The net effect of this was deliberately lowered interestrates post - Volker, and contributed to the junk bond (80's) and later equity (90's) booms we have become used to
As the effect of computer obsolescence and the consequent demand for capital and working capital (usually loans) permeates evermore deeply our economy (is this maybe one argument against PC vs big iron trend promoters?) this dependancy becomes more acute.
What I am saying here is that there may be *economic* reasons that bring to a halt technological phoenomena, and that a purely "geek" approach to the issues may yield diverging results from what is happening
Back to my original "complaint" I really think it would be nice is submitted stories came with something at least resembling an editorial viewpoint. Maybe/. is the only place where you can proverbially print your paper and leave the inside pages blank "for reader's notes". Maybe editors here want to avoid infered advocacy.
But surely the editorial point is "We here all have a (personal, financial) interest in the economics and technologlies developed under recent - very interesting and not necessarily fully understood conditions - is this set of linked articles a sign of things to come, or an indicator of impending (local systems) collapse?"
second that. moreover here's what i think *works* when your're trying to get someone to listen (well at least sometimes)
where i work our chairman is a trained musician and egyptologist - and yet the business involves programming (internal) and consulting
what he understands well, as do many professionals from all fields, is that the deeper understanding you can have of the *tools* you use in your work, whether this may be for machine tooling, grass cutting, computation or wordprocessing, the greater your appreciation is the (ceteris paribus) greater control you have over the quality of output
where i think a good deal of highly competant technicians and programmers fail is in a mad urge to dumb down their engagement to LCDs. some of this seems to be intellectual insecurity, and that fits given the young ages of many i meet
okay, ther'll be n% failure if you try to present Office file formats to a sample of users - the point is that that doesn't matter.
A doctor will want his prognosis to be clarly legible and accessible to all the essential people with as little post factum worry as possible (so clarity of formatting and legibility are obviously important here). A businesswoman writing a report will want the clearest and least unencumbered dissemination of her idea (one hopes:-).
Basically don't second guess someone's level of intelligence or ability to understand - appeal to their sense of pride
then call them names or baffle them with the "jargon" if they're real couldn't_care_less_loosers (after all why should you work against your petitioner's intentions):-)
I've been wondering where to put my thougths for a while . . . I have a open question in connection with the above post
"Most users have a hard enough time switching between different versions of Office, let alone Office to StarOffice (or other . . . "
Quite a few comments in differet threads have touched on lost productivity (I'll chime in for that separately) but what I want to know is what is the equivalence, in terms of retooling, re learning, retraining, re working between moder UI and data systems (basically internals such as file formats) and pre existant tools such as e.g. Pen and Scroll, Mechanical Typewriter and Carbon, Electronic Typewriter and menory + ribbon, Telex machines, (maybe closer in complexity to wordprocessing which seems to be a key issue here) Linotype Machines?
In other words what are the econometric and human transformations which are taking place?
I agree with the above poster - interfaces and ultimately visual interfaces which are often redesigned according to influences from internal data structures (i.e. formatting paradigms to basically do a feature in one WP where vendor "A" has IP and "look and feel" copyright and vendor "B" wants to copy, make interoperable and present just differently enough . . ) are very difficult concepts to grasp.
The problem with them is that thay are that - conceptual presentations - and anything other than an approach which enables training at that level is nothing more than an excercise in motor neuron programming. "Click on this - it will do that"
What one other poster above said (i think complainingly) that Cars and Trucks are far easier to learn just reinforces this UI vs. Real World problem - "driving" a UI you just dont get the environmental sensory feedback which is required to *intuitively* (sic) understand something of what you are doing
more briefly I think we still need to ask this question : Will UI/datasystems design for Regular Humans keep getting orders of magnitude more complex / difficult? Or is this actually happening and then can we measure/ do something about this?
the 200LX harks back to the days when - allegedly - the bulk of HP's products were designed by their engineers just trying to find a good tool
think about their test and measurement division for a while, I mean forget TEK scopes - HP rocked
I think products define themselves from the culture in which they are born. It lingers in every aspect of design abd i think what you say about "tactile" is also an issue of human tactility - the idea you are inteacting with an intimately concieved product in which every aspect interlinks and responds
for example the function I loved best was the fact I could use RPN, seeing losts of stack lines in the calculator mode and flip the calculations in and out of fields in the built-in Lotus 1-2-3.
I think its a testament to good ROM use. Everything was there when you needed it. I also remember a lot of vertical interest with medics and the like. Will this vertical interest really continue with products like the Journada which are aimed at *everybody*?
I lost my 200LX and i just reached out for the manual in a fit of nostalgia. Oh how I miss it:(
Put Win2k on my thinkpad - nice, recognised my PC cards and generally saved a day of driver installs, tho' not the TP dsp modem, and IBM is slow with that
I back up the TP to a HP Surestore T20e travan via adaptek scsi pc card. No driver. No software support. Nothing.
HP's site says the drivers will be out Spring 2000. Maybe its still technically Spring where you are, but this is crap. Can't believe HP is so slow on stuff right now.
And I'm stuffed too with having to pay for new sware for my 3100 multifunction laser. HP want me to wait, then pay, then wait again. Sucks even more that you cant just install the driver (to just do basic print) even with their sware
awww hell ... . im going to have to reinstall '98 just to doa backup and print . . .
Its pretty normal for slow thinking incumbant corps who devote the bulk of their resources to marketing outmoded stuff to ever less informed citizens, FIRST stifle the innovation, then throw the innovators public and supporters into disarray with legal threats crocodile tears lobby actions and misinsformation.
A little later the whole thing gets some superficial repackaging and sold to the public at inflated prices, any legitimate innovative competition having been stifled
For those of you disappointed at all the marketing announcements spewing out of Intel (in particular) recently - I'm not certainn I'm even sure what flavour of x86 they're shoving out now - and I am beginning the think fsku that for the company altogether
Unfortunately my co- ordination is adversely affected by a recent nervous condition, which might explain also the somewhat shrill overtones of my posts
There is some inherent conflict in my post. Reading from your other posts you are intelligently and strongly advocating the present circustances with Apple. I do not disagree, and tend to look fondly on the platform and company. But I have strong reservations. I dont want to slate Apple, and so critical view may not appear to fit with this.
How you can guess at my sincerity though I do not know. Can you please be specific about what concerns you enough to question my position?
I am quite open to the idea that the rosy tinted spectacles of my first experiences with computing on Macs does not equate with the perspective of a - now - somewhat more knowledgable user whose needs may be tantalisingly close to being met by the current Apple plans, but who is conscious of a need to run very large back end production apps an wants to do so on the same platform if possible.
In this way I am possibly acting "spoilt" and "want to have it all" But given that Apple so vehemently states that design, including design for print are its key markets (outside iMac, maybe), am I wrong in criticising points where Apple may be tardy on support for particular subsets of these user types? (users who would like to see the architecture scale to v. high end jobs to include e.g. RIPing and separations w/out needign dedicated separate hardware such as FIERY to gain throughput)
Darn, that's not right. I posted from work and the PDFs are output by Adobe Create PDF - so they ought to be fine. I checked the dl myself an dno problems. Dunno what's up then . .
in post number 129 I wondered if there was a redirect in jscript going on the visited page, and if therefore there was some other security problem because i had scripting off as it happens the only redirect was performed by the slashcode engine as it accepted the bogus page's CGI POST data and redirected me to the acknowledgement page but i hadnt time to think about that when I postedall i woul dlike ot know is why my question / post was marked "Offtopic"?
and to think i posted no 129 hoping a ontopic question amid all the bogus posts might restore a karma point lost by being the first sucker to accidentally hit the link (I thought I had clicked the more info link instead. for being the first I got modded down when everyone since "got away with it".
tags, so you dont see . . could someone have done this just to get a thousand click through payments?
slash wont let me quote the source verbatim and drops it so what you see here is edited, but the full source is posted hereabouts. Take a look for yourself . ..
Slashdot Mirror
"Cool" is the operative word here. Read over at The Register that Intel demoed their "2 watt" mobile chips but still spec for mobo manufacturers to allow for 17.8W consumption!!! (hope that's the right number)
I've been well pleased at the idea of a proper TP running linux for a while - and though hard about preordering for our office. But last night, bashing hard on the keyboard for hours on end on my own model, I had to keep lifting the TP off my lap 'cause the darn thing gets to like 90f outside case. Solve that - i.e. give me Transmeta - you got sales.
This is darn cool - but (maybe i'm dumb here) will an OS ever be native for Transmeta Crusoe, or will everything run in code morphing, basically old x86 code?
Remembering the PowerPC TP's IBM did for like all of a week or so (did anyone buy one?) I'd surely love to be able to recompile my apps for Crusoe - or *anything* other than x86 and be able to take them with me :)
==Random idle thoughts, usual dislaimers attributable thereto.==
I'm being late in the day here, as this story is dropping down the front page. But several posts have complained as has The Register in their coverage of the same, that IBM aint been up to much recently.
No I hate to say it but ZDNet has been a little more thorough.
What intrigued me was th ehint in the linked article that IBm was going to release some office products for Linux at the same time. ZDNet's coverage of the same story is more enlightening. In fact better than IBM's linux home IMO.
It's going to take some time to bring Linux into the support levels and consistency that IBM's corporate customers want. But Thinkpads to AS400 and CICS or whatever else is IBM's game. Not one individual product offering or another.
Sometime soon the floodgates will burst and CIOs will *need* to evaluate enterprise Linux solutions seriously. IBM plans to be right there. Check out the links (including a promise for AS/400 port :)
Forget the "article", man was it bad. Somewhere next door I have the spec sheets for NeXT STEP Intel Edition (forget which version) and the hardware support was really minimal, stuck with a few SCSI cards and drives, only basic or one or two video drivers
NeXT STEP's main feature was EOF or Enterprise Object Frameworks, basically a distributed Object-C set of classes with some real nice stuff like regular but quite complex UI widgets, spell checkers and more all there should you want to call on them and write an app damned fast. MacTech wrote some darn fine articles on basically progtramming functional and elegant stuff - with no prior sight of the machine.
EOF, of which Web Objects is apparently i think a subset, is now called Cocoa. Its heritage includes much Intel code and is anyway pretty cross plaform being avail on NT, HP-UX and Solaris (from memory so sorry if any mistakes here.)
It does occur to me there would be a whole load of people interested in NeXT - *ahem* the good bits of OS-X on Intel. One time UnixReview did a feature on NeXT and Macaw Cellular had just bought squillions of intel boxes for their CRM an dcall centers *just* because they loved EOF. So surely bits of OS-X will make their inroads anyway. I expect if a Intel WS solution were available, even on limited hardware, many big companies would be impressed and no way would Apple have to charge a retail price for the OS. I think I would happily pay $500 if i have good intel kit rather than ditch upgrade for mot G4or whatever.erm, if you read my subject line "-with added Mach and Aqua" I figure (at least i thought this was clear) that any micorkernel integration for clustering and GUI on top would be the icing on the cake.
The OS-X kernel is quite extensible and pretty well documented. Since this Free-BSD clusterrelies on network cards between node (prolly not great for memory latency on large datasets tho') I expect you could make some use of reading the Kernel Network Extensions reference for a start.
But what I was thinking about was to replicate Darwin across a cheap cluster and modify the Standard Apple Numerics Environment or its OS-X enquivalent to pass real heavy duty FP to the cluster. Oratleast do something similar in a set of system calls / api in Cocoa or another environment.
Im sorry if my postwas a quickie, but I dont want to open source all of OS-X just maybe open up the hardware hegemony which Apple has at the moment. I mean, can you imagine if OS-X became a serious compute platform / renderfarm candidate. Surely even Jobs would droolCould this mean, at least theoretically, we could see an open source base for clustered OS-X?
The idea could be awesome if it happened. Designers using OS9 are screaming for multiprocessing.
If some OSS team came up and gave them "BeoMac" or whatever, Apple had better watch out or pull its hardware - roll - out - socks up.
No you're not redundant, but here on /. they send the men over the top with guns at their backs to get the info posted.
New slashcode feature required : semantically complete linguistic comment submission non repudiation and meta sub - subject row locking . . think of the serene calm you would enjoy, safe in high s/n ratios. Or not. :^)
And if you log in, maybe you could check out and vote on my story, which I worked on a while today? :^)
Additional commentary can be found at the NYT
AFAIK - and I am quite close to telecoms in the UK - Telecommunications Act '90 and '92 served British Telecommunications Unlimited (the non corporate license holder) the license for its subsidiary, British Telecommunications Plc (trading as BT Plc)with the right to expand into defined areas of mixed media broadcasting e.g. VOD in return for indirect access rights for Cable Co's local loop
These licenses were always allocated to individual companies on a regional basis, ensuring a de facto regional monopoly if they didn'tbuild out.
Since (e.g.)CWC (Cable and Wireless Communications) took direct stakes in cable firms (circa 92-94) it lost the incentive to build out cable runs to areas not already served because its business model - as with a large part of all Cable Co's is to generate voice traffic.
For that CWC e.g. says to me : "Oh, sure we'll provision some ISDN lines for you, BT will put them in .." Thus my lines are BT, and when I had a not small dispute with BT last year they fsked with my CWC lines (which are legally in in CWC's name not mine) including pulling the cables at the exchange on frequent occasions
Oh yeah, and since BT's upstream ISDN is overloaded - as are almost all their local switches in dense areas right now - I cant even get 64/128k ISDN, sometimes throughput is one quarter of that.
For the record my beef with BT is they (disclaimer - my opinion based on evidence) implemented ISDN Q.931 ETSI signalling so poorly - 14 sware variations around the country - esp. with signalling (which is supposed to be X.25 for fskus sake so I cant believe they ballsed that) that I get a BIG line drop rate from overseas POTSloosing me business and generally causing grief (callers hear a ringing or dead tone and this is *not* a CPE set up problem).
the effect of the poor implementation is to drive up ISDN hardware costs ('coz tech support o'head et.c.) to 3* European prices and forces everyone to depend on their shitty overpriced switched centrex - "Feature Line" which is no good for 10 - 20 line installs.
Getting this ISDN right was a *key tenet* of their LICENSE. So after trying to sue me for everything under the sun, they've shut up for a bit and I'm just waiting on legal clearance to put up a nice detailed site to get some fresh air into it all.
I dont care what beef the guys in the US have - shit here we really do have only 1 telco and their running down their networks like crazy to the point nothing interoperates.
Oh and I'm just waiting for my lines to go dead now - some weeks ago i posted a big rant here about government appointed monopolies - minutes later - all quiet. Let's test this out? *grin*
Okay everyone - I think we might have to avoid anything linking to
http://hobbiton.org/~zk65/wow.cgi?nyAHVvq3yc right now.
Something tels me that this is anotherone of those auto posting tricks designed to flood the forum
Like the fact my browser tells me that's a CGI link maybe . .
This happened a while back and was pretty sad - except giving us a interesting survey on browser/ OS usage to read ;^)
I hope this doesn't get out of hand - or no one will read anything interesting todayI am trying to understand this. Is this story a review of techreview.com or an endorsement or even an admission along the lines of "aha! here are some guys talking about some really interesting stuff, you should go and look".
My point is, no disrespect to 'Taco, that this story looks to be the latter, and without any additional commentary or question or review of the linked content I think this is a poor and unstructured way to create a discussion.I mean, I now might have to read a whole other site - all of it - just to see what might be "on topic" or not :-)
In conection with "The end of Moores Law" I want to ask just how much economic value is lost in a system where what you paid for 18 months ago is now worth one quarter, 1/4, 25% of what you paid according to the simple interpretation of that dynamic?
I mean if your salary of 18 months ago were being lost to inflation at that rate, and the effect was spreading throughut the economy, we'd all be in Brazil during the 70's
for the record, Brazil inflated itself to growth on the back of vast loans, much of which originating from Citibank, and all of which collapsed in '82 leading to a massive world wide liquidity crisis.
The net effect of this was deliberately lowered interestrates post - Volker, and contributed to the junk bond (80's) and later equity (90's) booms we have become used toAs the effect of computer obsolescence and the consequent demand for capital and working capital (usually loans) permeates evermore deeply our economy (is this maybe one argument against PC vs big iron trend promoters?) this dependancy becomes more acute.
What I am saying here is that there may be *economic* reasons that bring to a halt technological phoenomena, and that a purely "geek" approach to the issues may yield diverging results from what is happening
Back to my original "complaint" I really think it would be nice is submitted stories came with something at least resembling an editorial viewpoint. Maybe /. is the only place where you can proverbially print your paper and leave the inside pages blank "for reader's notes". Maybe editors here want to avoid infered advocacy.
But surely the editorial point is "We here all have a (personal, financial) interest in the economics and technologlies developed under recent - very interesting and not necessarily fully understood conditions - is this set of linked articles a sign of things to come, or an indicator of impending (local systems) collapse?"
second that. moreover here's what i think *works* when your're trying to get someone to listen (well at least sometimes)
where i work our chairman is a trained musician and egyptologist - and yet the business involves programming (internal) and consulting
what he understands well, as do many professionals from all fields, is that the deeper understanding you can have of the *tools* you use in your work, whether this may be for machine tooling, grass cutting, computation or wordprocessing, the greater your appreciation is the (ceteris paribus) greater control you have over the quality of outputwhere i think a good deal of highly competant technicians and programmers fail is in a mad urge to dumb down their engagement to LCDs. some of this seems to be intellectual insecurity, and that fits given the young ages of many i meet
okay, ther'll be n% failure if you try to present Office file formats to a sample of users - the point is that that doesn't matter.A doctor will want his prognosis to be clarly legible and accessible to all the essential people with as little post factum worry as possible (so clarity of formatting and legibility are obviously important here). A businesswoman writing a report will want the clearest and least unencumbered dissemination of her idea (one hopes:-).
Basically don't second guess someone's level of intelligence or ability to understand - appeal to their sense of pride
then call them names or baffle them with the "jargon" if they're real couldn't_care_less_loosers (after all why should you work against your petitioner's intentions) :-)
I've been wondering where to put my thougths for a while . . . I have a open question in connection with the above post
"Most users have a hard enough time switching between different versions of Office, let alone Office to StarOffice (or other . . . "
Quite a few comments in differet threads have touched on lost productivity (I'll chime in for that separately) but what I want to know is what is the equivalence, in terms of retooling, re learning, retraining, re working between moder UI and data systems (basically internals such as file formats) and pre existant tools such as e.g. Pen and Scroll, Mechanical Typewriter and Carbon, Electronic Typewriter and menory + ribbon, Telex machines, (maybe closer in complexity to wordprocessing which seems to be a key issue here) Linotype Machines?
In other words what are the econometric and human transformations which are taking place?
I agree with the above poster - interfaces and ultimately visual interfaces which are often redesigned according to influences from internal data structures (i.e. formatting paradigms to basically do a feature in one WP where vendor "A" has IP and "look and feel" copyright and vendor "B" wants to copy, make interoperable and present just differently enough . . ) are very difficult concepts to grasp.
The problem with them is that thay are that - conceptual presentations - and anything other than an approach which enables training at that level is nothing more than an excercise in motor neuron programming. "Click on this - it will do that"What one other poster above said (i think complainingly) that Cars and Trucks are far easier to learn just reinforces this UI vs. Real World problem - "driving" a UI you just dont get the environmental sensory feedback which is required to *intuitively* (sic) understand something of what you are doing
more briefly I think we still need to ask this question : Will UI/datasystems design for Regular Humans keep getting orders of magnitude more complex / difficult? Or is this actually happening and then can we measure/ do something about this?
I've been dreaming about this for a long while
the 200LX harks back to the days when - allegedly - the bulk of HP's products were designed by their engineers just trying to find a good tool
think about their test and measurement division for a while, I mean forget TEK scopes - HP rocked
I think products define themselves from the culture in which they are born. It lingers in every aspect of design abd i think what you say about "tactile" is also an issue of human tactility - the idea you are inteacting with an intimately concieved product in which every aspect interlinks and responds
for example the function I loved best was the fact I could use RPN, seeing losts of stack lines in the calculator mode and flip the calculations in and out of fields in the built-in Lotus 1-2-3.
I think its a testament to good ROM use. Everything was there when you needed it. I also remember a lot of vertical interest with medics and the like. Will this vertical interest really continue with products like the Journada which are aimed at *everybody*?
I lost my 200LX and i just reached out for the manual in a fit of nostalgia. Oh how I miss it :(
Totally agree
Put Win2k on my thinkpad - nice, recognised my PC cards and generally saved a day of driver installs, tho' not the TP dsp modem, and IBM is slow with thatI back up the TP to a HP Surestore T20e travan via adaptek scsi pc card. No driver. No software support. Nothing.
HP's site says the drivers will be out Spring 2000. Maybe its still technically Spring where you are, but this is crap. Can't believe HP is so slow on stuff right now.And I'm stuffed too with having to pay for new sware for my 3100 multifunction laser. HP want me to wait, then pay, then wait again. Sucks even more that you cant just install the driver (to just do basic print) even with their sware
awww hell . .. . im going to have to reinstall '98 just to doa backup and print . . .
yeah, nice post Bruce. since you've been bitchslapped there's time for some fun eh?
this bitchslapping thing is going to turn lots of regular accounts into trollers out of solidarity
by the way, when that happens, will someone tell me about how to set comments threshold below -1
I read something about that in the moderation sid two or three weeks ago - then the comment disappeared
Its pretty normal for slow thinking incumbant corps who devote the bulk of their resources to marketing outmoded stuff to ever less informed citizens, FIRST stifle the innovation, then throw the innovators public and supporters into disarray with legal threats crocodile tears lobby actions and misinsformation.
A little later the whole thing gets some superficial repackaging and sold to the public at inflated prices, any legitimate innovative competition having been stifledFor those of you disappointed at all the marketing announcements spewing out of Intel (in particular) recently - I'm not certainn I'm even sure what flavour of x86 they're shoving out now - and I am beginning the think fsku that for the company altogether
How about this? Some prices for the Itanium
Isn't everyone falling over themselves to pre announce / leak / out PR eachother today?How about this? Some prices for the Itanium
Isn't everyone falling over themselves to pre announce / leak / out PR eachother today?That's all right ppal,
Unfortunately my co- ordination is adversely affected by a recent nervous condition, which might explain also the somewhat shrill overtones of my posts
Mea Culpa - or is is Mea Carpel?
Fear not some draconian measure, at least not from me
But wouldnt you want to think that companies might *think* that way (i.e. consciously about their effect on everyone else) just occasionally?
There is some inherent conflict in my post. Reading from your other posts you are intelligently and strongly advocating the present circustances with Apple. I do not disagree, and tend to look fondly on the platform and company. But I have strong reservations. I dont want to slate Apple, and so critical view may not appear to fit with this.
How you can guess at my sincerity though I do not know. Can you please be specific about what concerns you enough to question my position?
I am quite open to the idea that the rosy tinted spectacles of my first experiences with computing on Macs does not equate with the perspective of a - now - somewhat more knowledgable user whose needs may be tantalisingly close to being met by the current Apple plans, but who is conscious of a need to run very large back end production apps an wants to do so on the same platform if possible.
In this way I am possibly acting "spoilt" and "want to have it all" But given that Apple so vehemently states that design, including design for print are its key markets (outside iMac, maybe), am I wrong in criticising points where Apple may be tardy on support for particular subsets of these user types? (users who would like to see the architecture scale to v. high end jobs to include e.g. RIPing and separations w/out needign dedicated separate hardware such as FIERY to gain throughput)
Darn, that's not right. I posted from work and the PDFs are output by Adobe Create PDF - so they ought to be fine. I checked the dl myself an dno problems. Dunno what's up then . .
and to think i posted no 129 hoping a ontopic question amid all the bogus posts might restore a karma point lost by being the first sucker to accidentally hit the link (I thought I had clicked the more info link instead. for being the first I got modded down when everyone since "got away with it".
oh well, there's irony for you - TWICE, :(
loading this script : www.multimania.fr/general/pub/dpop/dpop-ie.js
and then the script itself seems to load dozens of DOUBLECLICK ADS, e.g. thus :
document.writehttp://ad.fr.doubleclick.net/adi/mar ch.mm.net/popup
and all this is loaded in hidden
tags, so you dont see . . could someone have done this just to get a thousand click through payments?slash wont let me quote the source verbatim and drops it so what you see here is edited, but the full source is posted hereabouts. Take a look for yourself . . .