My guess is that the best indicator for what this machine is likely to be like is another one of his computers - the Z88. This was an A4 slab with a decent sized keyboard and a teeny LCD (4 lines of 40 characters I think).
I bet it won't come with a modem, but it may have a PCMCIA slot so people can plug in their own. Or he might go the same route as the dreaded WinModem (ie do it in software) to keep down component costs.
I don't think we can make many guesses about clock speed or RAM size, but given how things move in this business I suppose you'd be looking at what is low to mid-range now, so maybe 64Mb RAM and something equivalent to a 300MHz Intel CPU (although obviously not an actual Intel CPU).
I also reckon we'll be looking at an embedded system where the OS and applications are in ROM - there may not even *be* a HD (damned big ROM, of course, which might make it too expensive). I'm thinking as much from a robustness and ease of use perspective as anything else (not that robustness has ever been a big feature of Sinclair kit).
Anyway... I'd have thought the OS will be a minimum install to keep footprint down.
Don't count on being able to do your own kernel upgrades - I doubt this is going to be a hackers' machine.
Windowing system? I'd assume so, but I wouldn't expect to be able to configure it much or to be able to install a window managaer or UI of your own choice.
If all this sounds a bit cynical then I apologise, but Sir Clive is a populariser of technologies rather than a run of the mill hardware vendor.
I'm still glad I bought an Acorn Atom rather than a Spectrum, though.
I read this book when I was sixteen, and it is undoubtedly the profoundest literary influence on my life since then. All of my interests in automata, machine intelligence, formal logic, and mathematical computing can be traced back to reading this book all those years ago.
In all honesty, I think I probably would still have ended up as a programmer without reading this book, but I wouldn't be the same person and I would have less of a sense of wonder about it all.
As it happens, I'm in the middle of rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age - I reckon GEB is A Nerd's Illustrated Primer.
That last quote from Hume summed it all up for me - not only why the Internet is good, but (on a more personally profound level) why I'm an atheist.
The tension here is between those who wish to make their own way in the world (making their own decisions about morality and choices about the manner in which they live their lives), and those who wish to make everybody live their lives in the same way (submitting to the authority of pronouncements and edicts espoused by figureheads). Let's called these groups the Enlightened and the Authoritarians.
The precise terms of the debate may vary, but its form does not - the Enlightened appeal to the rights of the individual, the Authoriatarians appeal to some nominal greater good (whether that be some higher power, or a supposed Big Idea doesn't really matter).
And of course there are extremists and moderates on both sides - Enlightened individuals who wish to tear the scales from the eyes of everybody; Authoritarians who recognise that their Authority may not be for everyone.
As an Enlightened individual, I think there are two important points to bear in mind:
diversity is crucial - if we all drink from the same spring, and that spring is poisoned, then we all die. Two real world examples: the Irish potato famine (where potato blight destroyed a whole crop because all the potatoes had been propagated vegetatively - all the plants were clones, so they were all susceptible to the same strain of disease); and the recent Melissa virus.
not everyone needs choice - there are a lot of people in the middle who don't care; they just want to live their lives. Forcing them to Choose will just alienate them and (perhaps) drive them towards the short term comfortable choice.
Still - that's my tuppence ha'penny (getting on for sixpence three farthings...)
Absolutely - and the crippling level of debt which many developing countries are labouring under doesn't help either.
This is obviously a complicated issue (which I don't claim to understand in any depth) but the West must carry a burden of responsibility for supplying large loans to countries in the 70s and 80s which cannot now be serviced by those countries - when a majority of a nation's GDP is committed to pay interest on a huge loan taken out twenty years ago by a corrupt government, the best will in the world won't stretch to relief of poverty.
So, is that the West's fault?
I don't know - but I do know that in the area of personal finance banks are apportioned some blame for irresponsible lending to (possibly naive) individuals. Also, those who were in charge of the client countries at the time these large loans were sought weren't necessarily thinking about the long term viability of borrowing the money. Embezzlement doesn't just happen in the West, after all.
Presumably, if the heads are small there's less mass to crash into the magnetic surface (although less inertia to resist shock in the first place, of course) - which implies better shock resistance since the drive will get gouged less when you drop it.
Not that I'm in the habit of dropping my hard drives, of course, but it makes high-capacity MP3 players cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
He's a caution, that Sir Clive.
My guess is that the best indicator for what this machine is likely to be like is another one of his computers - the Z88. This was an A4 slab with a decent sized keyboard and a teeny LCD (4 lines of 40 characters I think).
I bet it won't come with a modem, but it may have a PCMCIA slot so people can plug in their own. Or he might go the same route as the dreaded WinModem (ie do it in software) to keep down component costs.
I don't think we can make many guesses about clock speed or RAM size, but given how things move in this business I suppose you'd be looking at what is low to mid-range now, so maybe 64Mb RAM and something equivalent to a 300MHz Intel CPU (although obviously not an actual Intel CPU).
I also reckon we'll be looking at an embedded system where the OS and applications are in ROM - there may not even *be* a HD (damned big ROM, of course, which might make it too expensive). I'm thinking as much from a robustness and ease of use perspective as anything else (not that robustness has ever been a big feature of Sinclair kit).
Anyway... I'd have thought the OS will be a minimum install to keep footprint down.
Don't count on being able to do your own kernel upgrades - I doubt this is going to be a hackers' machine.
Windowing system? I'd assume so, but I wouldn't expect to be able to configure it much or to be able to install a window managaer or UI of your own choice.
If all this sounds a bit cynical then I apologise, but Sir Clive is a populariser of technologies rather than a run of the mill hardware vendor.
I'm still glad I bought an Acorn Atom rather than a Spectrum, though.
In all honesty, I think I probably would still have ended up as a programmer without reading this book, but I wouldn't be the same person and I would have less of a sense of wonder about it all.
As it happens, I'm in the middle of rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age - I reckon GEB is A Nerd's Illustrated Primer.
The tension here is between those who wish to make their own way in the world (making their own decisions about morality and choices about the manner in which they live their lives), and those who wish to make everybody live their lives in the same way (submitting to the authority of pronouncements and edicts espoused by figureheads). Let's called these groups the Enlightened and the Authoritarians.
The precise terms of the debate may vary, but its form does not - the Enlightened appeal to the rights of the individual, the Authoriatarians appeal to some nominal greater good (whether that be some higher power, or a supposed Big Idea doesn't really matter).
And of course there are extremists and moderates on both sides - Enlightened individuals who wish to tear the scales from the eyes of everybody; Authoritarians who recognise that their Authority may not be for everyone.
As an Enlightened individual, I think there are two important points to bear in mind:
- diversity is crucial - if we all drink from the same spring, and that spring is poisoned, then we all die. Two real world examples: the Irish potato famine (where potato blight destroyed a whole crop because all the potatoes had been propagated vegetatively - all the plants were clones, so they were all susceptible to the same strain of disease); and the recent Melissa virus.
- not everyone needs choice - there are a lot of people in the middle who don't care; they just want to live their lives. Forcing them to Choose will just alienate them and (perhaps) drive them towards the short term comfortable choice.
Still - that's my tuppence ha'penny (getting on for sixpence three farthings...)Absolutely - and the crippling level of debt which many developing countries are labouring under doesn't help either.
This is obviously a complicated issue (which I don't claim to understand in any depth) but the West must carry a burden of responsibility for supplying large loans to countries in the 70s and 80s which cannot now be serviced by those countries - when a majority of a nation's GDP is committed to pay interest on a huge loan taken out twenty years ago by a corrupt government, the best will in the world won't stretch to relief of poverty.
So, is that the West's fault?
I don't know - but I do know that in the area of personal finance banks are apportioned some blame for irresponsible lending to (possibly naive) individuals. Also, those who were in charge of the client countries at the time these large loans were sought weren't necessarily thinking about the long term viability of borrowing the money. Embezzlement doesn't just happen in the West, after all.
Presumably, if the heads are small there's less mass to crash into the magnetic surface (although less inertia to resist shock in the first place, of course) - which implies better shock resistance since the drive will get gouged less when you drop it.
Not that I'm in the habit of dropping my hard drives, of course, but it makes high-capacity MP3 players cheaper.