Here in Wisconsin, two years ago ATT came to the Capitol with more than a dozen lobbyists and started handing out campaign contributions. They picked a conservative Democrat and a Republican from the Senate and Assembly who would play ball. They handed them a "bill mill" draft of how they'd like to revamp Wisconsin's cable television laws. They did not invite anyone else to the meetings. They didn't invite the over-the-air broadcasters, they didn't invite the cable industry, they didn't invite the community television stations. They listened to ATT. They removed local city control and oversight of cable franchises and replaced it with a state-level franchise system with little to no oversight. They assigned minimal regulatory powers to the department of financial institutions - not the existing Public Service Commission that handles all other telecom. The only powers they assigned were to accept the annual $5,000 franchise application. They were not given any powers to reject any applications. They sunset the ability of cities to assign a surcharge on bills to fund their community television operations. All this, in the name of allowing ATT to be able to cherry-pick which neighborhoods would get U-Verse, without having to offer it to entire communities.
Back in the middle 80s, when I was writing for computer magazines, I was amazed that a young pup writer like me could get an interview with someone as famous as Mr. Crunch. I remember reading the Esquire blue-box article when I was a teen.
I met him at a trade show. When I asked for some time to sit down for the interview, he repeatedly insisted we go back to his hotel and conduct the interview in the gym while we worked out. I balked, eventually only getting a few quotes and a picture.
It took me a while before I figured out what he really wanted. The other more experienced journalists laughed and laughed when I explained my puzzlement. Apparently Mr. Crunch thought I was cute.
Back in the middle 80s, when I was writing for computer magazines, I was amazed that a young pup writer like me could get an interview with someone as famous as Mr. Crunch. I remember reading the Esquire blue-box article when I was a teen.
I met him at a trade show. When I asked for some time to sit down for the interview, he insisted we go back to his hotel and conduct the interview in the gym. I balked, eventually only getting a few quotes and a picture. It took me a while before I figured out what he really wanted. Apparently Mr. Crunch thought I was cute.
They sell one-channel versions and four-channel versions, at $5K and $11K respectively. Rackmount, up to 1.6 TB. Run Linux and 'mplayer'. Includes scheduling software in a web interface, lower-third graphics, etc. http://www.princetonservergroup.com/
In the late 80s / early 90s there was a system called X*PRESS that broadcast a stream of data at 9600 baud over cable TV. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X*Press_X*Change. It is of my favorite "before its time" technologies. I bought mine for about $120 in the late 80s. Cable in, serial out. No additional charge for the base level of data! They also offered a $20/month service to get 15-minute-delayed stock quotes, which required regular reactivation pinging of a cartridge that plugged in the back.
It was remarkable for its time. 9600 baud continuous and uncompressed was quite delightful in the days of 2400 baud modems. Megabytes a day! They had a packeted proprietary protocol. In the stream, you'd get various second-rate wire-service news stories and syndicated columns. They could also send files - you'd see a menu of files that were going to be sent over the next 24 hours, and select which you wanted, and it would grab them and store to your hard disk.
There were message boards, but the uplink was done by long-distance call to an incredibly lame BBS system running on a mainframe. I think they were aiming it at the educational market as well as stock market players. I remember late-night TV commercials for it.
They missed the boat. With better software, they could've made lots of money selling these boxes to all the people who were using BBSes at the time. Instead of a sole national head-end, city or regional co-adminstration would've made it much more interesting.
Today, I think it still makes sense for all sorts of data. Isn't this one of the issues at the core of the argument about a tiered Internet? They want to shuffle the big one-way files (like movies) into an extra tier because they're clogging the regular Internet.
There are plenty of large files you'd be willing to wait for, no? You already wait an indefinite amount of time for a large file to be delivered. What if you could go to a web site, select a big file you'd like to receive, and know that by tomorrow it would be delivered to your hard disk? Yes, that sounds exactly like FTP/torrent/whatever. You don't care how the file is delivered. You just want to know you'll get it soon. Or, like X*PRESS, the web could show a list of all the files scheduled to come down the pike, and you could choose to grab one when they go by.
Imagine if your existing cable modem not only handled your bidirectional interactive Internet connection but also one of these separate one-way data streams. You'd get more data from your existing connection. Arguably, I'd say this scheme consumes far less of the cable company's resources. It's one-way broadcast. With today's technology, how many gigs per day could you squeeze into one digital or analog channel on a cable system?
NAV/NIS does have plenty of problems. I don't know how they can ship this stuff. I would guess that they are oblivious to surveying their actual users. In my consultancy, I see NAV problems all the time.
The most common is someone with an older NAV that's expired, they let it lapse for while, then they buy the upgrade, either from the store or online. They try to install, it doesn't detect the presence of the older copy of itself, and it fails to install. Then it fails to uninstall, and I've made another $100 to fix it. Sometimes even SynNRT (their removal tool) doesn't work, you need to manually clean the registry and remove all folders (including the ones in Common Files).
And then there's the people who can't follow the upgrade procedure, so they've paid their money (and the 365 days start ticking) and they leave the 40 meg installer sitting on their desktop and never install it, thinking it's installed.
Don't you think Symantec would want to make it easy to take people's money and leave them satisfied? But then I remember that the short-term objective is to take their money regardless of the reason.
Then there's NAV's troubles not being able to handle multiple simultaneous email POP3/SMTP fetch/sends. Or the overhead it puts on the processor. Or the way it gets confused by malware in temporary files that disappear after detection (like email attachments written to temporary files) and then reports that as a "failed to delete" (AVG does this, too). Or the way it still needs to download 40 meg of crap after you just installed 40 meg of crap. Or the way that LiveUpdate wants to run, reboot, run, reboot, run, reboot, and requires user intervention to click "OK" and "Next" all along the way. It's downright Microsoft-ian. Or the way that LiveUpdate doesn't properly detect that an instance of itself is already running, and complains.
Or the unnecessary complicated nature of NAV's Corporate editions, with a complexity far beyond the abilities of the average 2-10 user small office that they sell it to. At only a slight discount. So the frustration grows, and the prospect of hands-on install on N workstations looks better than trying to figure out the Corporate Edition.
I've had Linksys's own firmware re-flashing fail for reasons not apparent to me. I know what I'm doing, I've done many of the firmware upgrades, I read the readme, yet I have two VP41 and one SX41 sitting here that were working fine before the firmware upgrade, yet died immediately when I flashed them. Out of warranty, so now I own some bricks. Isn't there some JTAG method of repairing these?
Many of the consumer-level "bridge" products today are not true layer 2 bridges. (Some are marketed explicitly as bridges, others offer a switch between AP or bridge modes.) The packets of the other end all appear to come from the same MAC address of that remote wireless device. (To confuse matters, as well as not fix the problem, some of these devices give you an option to clone the MAC of either the WLAN card or the Ethernet client.)
A Cisco wireless bridge doesn't do this, but they cost much more.
In the past year or two, a number of "hot deals" sites have featured Dell's low-end servers without pre-installed OS at nice prices in the $249-$349 range.
I recall model numbers 400SC and SC420 among others, decent Intel motherboards that you'd otherwise find in Dell's mid- to top workstations, P4 1.8 to 2.8 Ghz, various combos of RAM and HD, some bundles with flat panels, free shipping, etc. I remember one deal for the 400SC with buy-one-get-one-free 10K 70 gig SCSI drives; another deal for dual CPU low-end servers.
These make very nice desktops for the average business or home user - certainly they're a step above what Dell normally sells in the big ads in the consumer marketplace for roughly the same cash.
As with many hot-deals, you'll find plenty of these units - parted out and not - on eBay. The shipping is crazy, but the overall price is often still low.
Standard wireless marketing claptrap. You see it in WiFi and WiMax, too. "Up to X miles". Or better yet, exploit metric ignorance and quote the distance in kilometers. The number will be larger and it'll seem much farther. Unless you know the conditions (antenna, radiated power, terrain, etc.) these specs are useless. Why bother quoting point-to-point highly directional links while selling the omnidrectional aspects of the technology? Because the "max distance" specs (see above) make it seem so much more exciting. At least until everyone figures it out.
Except then you'd be worrying about whether the ZigBee network and nodes were all functioning properly.
From five years into the future...
on
Happy Birthday, Amiga
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Amiga was a fine example of the persistent techie belief that "better" should always win. It doesn't. We whacked our heads against that one for years in the Amiga market.
So we started out trumpeting the advantage of sound (few PCs had sound; the guys who eventually successfully marketed the original Sound Blaster were refugees from the Amiga market) or color (remember, VGA was rare and expensive when the Amiga was released) or video compatibility with deep color (Targa cards were rather static and very expensive) or windows (GEM? Windows 1.x?) or video manipulation or color desktop publishing or 3D animation or emulation (we had Mac, Win, DOS, Atari, etc.) or persistent RAM drives or hypertext help systems or any number of other whizzy features, and the PC and Mac marketroids would *successfully* say "Who needs that?". Rinse, lather, repeat.
The distillation of my Amiga market experience came from the lips of a drunken Amiga dealer at a party in 1992 or so. Of course, a popular topic of conversation at these events was discussing why the so-obviously-superior-to-us-annointed Amiga wasn't outpacing the Mac and PC in sales.
This dealer said of the past few years (at that time) that "It was like we were all from five years into the future, back in the days of radio."
I did say this guy was drunk, didn't I?
But he was right. It was as if we'd all seen what television was like, but we were trying to sell to people who really liked radio and couldn't imagine the value of audio plus moving pictures.
We all knew they'd want television someday, but it was always hard to hear they didn't want to buy it.
If you haven't actaully tried to restore your systems from your backup mechanism, you only think you have backups.
If you don't have detailed records about how the system was created, how every app was installed and configured and maintained, it'll be hard to restore in a disaster.
Too many organizations think it's far too expensive to have a replacement server at the ready, even if the cost of 36 hours of downtime would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
Once upon a time, my company published a version of DECnet for the Amiga. We'd licensed an Apple Pascal version from Thursby Software and ported it to C. Thursby are the people who later made DAVE for the Mac, the way you'd connect to a Windows SMB network before OS X came along. They'd had a DECnet product before DAVE. I have a DEC Pro 350 in the basement that we used for debugging and development.
Although Wisconsin's Open Records law is quite clear about the open nature of electronic records, the law also lets county offices recoup the cost of providing real estate information like this. It's called "cost recovery". Therefore you see county offices charging stiff amounts to title companies for real-time access to property records, for example. To do this, you'd need to pay the fees to get a copy of each county's databases, then find a way to integrate all that info. Maybe most of them use ArcInfo. I suspect you'll see the most populous counties (Dane, Milwaukee, Waukesha, etc.) move towards more open public access to their databases first, but there's always a balancing concern that the info will be harvested for junk mail purposes. And I thought the printed plat books were about $10-15.
$1800 a month? $22000 a year? That's next to nothing. They spend an order of magnitude or two more on color brochures to promote the city, I'm sure. And who measures how effective the brochures are? The Orlando Convention and Visitor's Bureau had a $22 million budget in 1998. They collect a 5% room tax. They could spend a tiny fraction of that and put access points every 200 yards along the main drags of Orlando, partially subsidized by local businesses. Make it a captive portal, pushing a web ad at people for a few seconds after they DHCP and try to access a web site.
Apple-raised interface theorist, Bruce Tognazzini, http://www.asktog.com/ believes (and claims to have tested and proved) that keyboard-based, chording shortcut users engage in a momentary lapse of consciousness in which they recall and then position their hands for the keystroke, and that although they *think* they're faster than a mouse, they're not. See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was faster than keyboarding. His explanation for this is that deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand, Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste CTRL/C/V) result in solid productivity gains. Around page 180, where in fact he discusses Raskin's Cat interface and the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find", Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move. This reminds me of the old joke about voice interface word processors: "Up, up, up, left, left, left, left, no right, stop, yes, right there... delete that word." Or the other half of the joke, where people poke their head over a cubicle wall and shout a command like "format c: yes i am sure". Want to learn something? Go Google "therbligs".
So why bring up the Amiga? Seems like Dvorak likes to drag a stick across the cages of owners of computers whose market share never exceeds five percent, then uses it as evidence that they're rabid. Puhlease! It's not as if the Linux market is a unified entity.
Slashdot Mirror
It is much easier for the telcos to prevent this at the state level, than fight the battle in individual towns.
Here in Wisconsin, two years ago ATT came to the Capitol with more than a dozen lobbyists and started handing out campaign contributions. They picked a conservative Democrat and a Republican from the Senate and Assembly who would play ball. They handed them a "bill mill" draft of how they'd like to revamp Wisconsin's cable television laws. They did not invite anyone else to the meetings. They didn't invite the over-the-air broadcasters, they didn't invite the cable industry, they didn't invite the community television stations. They listened to ATT. They removed local city control and oversight of cable franchises and replaced it with a state-level franchise system with little to no oversight. They assigned minimal regulatory powers to the department of financial institutions - not the existing Public Service Commission that handles all other telecom. The only powers they assigned were to accept the annual $5,000 franchise application. They were not given any powers to reject any applications. They sunset the ability of cities to assign a surcharge on bills to fund their community television operations. All this, in the name of allowing ATT to be able to cherry-pick which neighborhoods would get U-Verse, without having to offer it to entire communities.
John Walker, you mean. www.fourmilab.ch .
Back in the middle 80s, when I was writing for computer magazines, I was amazed that a young pup writer like me could get an interview with someone as famous as Mr. Crunch. I remember reading the Esquire blue-box article when I was a teen.
I met him at a trade show. When I asked for some time to sit down for the interview, he repeatedly insisted we go back to his hotel and conduct the interview in the gym while we worked out. I balked, eventually only getting a few quotes and a picture.
It took me a while before I figured out what he really wanted. The other more experienced journalists laughed and laughed when I explained my puzzlement. Apparently Mr. Crunch thought I was cute.
Back in the middle 80s, when I was writing for computer magazines, I was amazed that a young pup writer like me could get an interview with someone as famous as Mr. Crunch. I remember reading the Esquire blue-box article when I was a teen.
I met him at a trade show. When I asked for some time to sit down for the interview, he insisted we go back to his hotel and conduct the interview in the gym. I balked, eventually only getting a few quotes and a picture. It took me a while before I figured out what he really wanted. Apparently Mr. Crunch thought I was cute.
They sell one-channel versions and four-channel versions, at $5K and $11K respectively. Rackmount, up to 1.6 TB. Run Linux and 'mplayer'. Includes scheduling software in a web interface, lower-third graphics, etc. http://www.princetonservergroup.com/
In the late 80s / early 90s there was a system called X*PRESS that broadcast a stream of data at 9600 baud over cable TV. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X*Press_X*Change. It is of my favorite "before its time" technologies. I bought mine for about $120 in the late 80s. Cable in, serial out. No additional charge for the base level of data! They also offered a $20/month service to get 15-minute-delayed stock quotes, which required regular reactivation pinging of a cartridge that plugged in the back.
It was remarkable for its time. 9600 baud continuous and uncompressed was quite delightful in the days of 2400 baud modems. Megabytes a day! They had a packeted proprietary protocol. In the stream, you'd get various second-rate wire-service news stories and syndicated columns. They could also send files - you'd see a menu of files that were going to be sent over the next 24 hours, and select which you wanted, and it would grab them and store to your hard disk.
There were message boards, but the uplink was done by long-distance call to an incredibly lame BBS system running on a mainframe. I think they were aiming it at the educational market as well as stock market players. I remember late-night TV commercials for it.
They missed the boat. With better software, they could've made lots of money selling these boxes to all the people who were using BBSes at the time. Instead of a sole national head-end, city or regional co-adminstration would've made it much more interesting.
Today, I think it still makes sense for all sorts of data. Isn't this one of the issues at the core of the argument about a tiered Internet? They want to shuffle the big one-way files (like movies) into an extra tier because they're clogging the regular Internet.
There are plenty of large files you'd be willing to wait for, no? You already wait an indefinite amount of time for a large file to be delivered. What if you could go to a web site, select a big file you'd like to receive, and know that by tomorrow it would be delivered to your hard disk? Yes, that sounds exactly like FTP/torrent/whatever. You don't care how the file is delivered. You just want to know you'll get it soon. Or, like X*PRESS, the web could show a list of all the files scheduled to come down the pike, and you could choose to grab one when they go by.
Imagine if your existing cable modem not only handled your bidirectional interactive Internet connection but also one of these separate one-way data streams. You'd get more data from your existing connection. Arguably, I'd say this scheme consumes far less of the cable company's resources. It's one-way broadcast. With today's technology, how many gigs per day could you squeeze into one digital or analog channel on a cable system?
NAV/NIS does have plenty of problems. I don't know how they can ship this stuff. I would guess that they are oblivious to surveying their actual users. In my consultancy, I see NAV problems all the time.
The most common is someone with an older NAV that's expired, they let it lapse for while, then they buy the upgrade, either from the store or online. They try to install, it doesn't detect the presence of the older copy of itself, and it fails to install. Then it fails to uninstall, and I've made another $100 to fix it. Sometimes even SynNRT (their removal tool) doesn't work, you need to manually clean the registry and remove all folders (including the ones in Common Files).
And then there's the people who can't follow the upgrade procedure, so they've paid their money (and the 365 days start ticking) and they leave the 40 meg installer sitting on their desktop and never install it, thinking it's installed.
Don't you think Symantec would want to make it easy to take people's money and leave them satisfied? But then I remember that the short-term objective is to take their money regardless of the reason.
Then there's NAV's troubles not being able to handle multiple simultaneous email POP3/SMTP fetch/sends. Or the overhead it puts on the processor. Or the way it gets confused by malware in temporary files that disappear after detection (like email attachments written to temporary files) and then reports that as a "failed to delete" (AVG does this, too). Or the way it still needs to download 40 meg of crap after you just installed 40 meg of crap. Or the way that LiveUpdate wants to run, reboot, run, reboot, run, reboot, and requires user intervention to click "OK" and "Next" all along the way. It's downright Microsoft-ian. Or the way that LiveUpdate doesn't properly detect that an instance of itself is already running, and complains.
Or the unnecessary complicated nature of NAV's Corporate editions, with a complexity far beyond the abilities of the average 2-10 user small office that they sell it to. At only a slight discount. So the frustration grows, and the prospect of hands-on install on N workstations looks better than trying to figure out the Corporate Edition.
I've had Linksys's own firmware re-flashing fail for reasons not apparent to me. I know what I'm doing, I've done many of the firmware upgrades, I read the readme, yet I have two VP41 and one SX41 sitting here that were working fine before the firmware upgrade, yet died immediately when I flashed them. Out of warranty, so now I own some bricks. Isn't there some JTAG method of repairing these?
Not quite Twain, not quite Will Rogers, but perhaps Josh Billings:m 06.2/msg00022.htm
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2000
And I believe Gibson was recapitulating Barlow, who said cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone.
Many of the consumer-level "bridge" products today are not true layer 2 bridges. (Some are marketed explicitly as bridges, others offer a switch between AP or bridge modes.) The packets of the other end all appear to come from the same MAC address of that remote wireless device. (To confuse matters, as well as not fix the problem, some of these devices give you an option to clone the MAC of either the WLAN card or the Ethernet client.)
A Cisco wireless bridge doesn't do this, but they cost much more.
Ah, Slashdot: Smart enough to use the big words, not smart enough to spell correctly.
In the past year or two, a number of "hot deals" sites have featured Dell's low-end servers without pre-installed OS at nice prices in the $249-$349 range.
I recall model numbers 400SC and SC420 among others, decent Intel motherboards that you'd otherwise find in Dell's mid- to top workstations, P4 1.8 to 2.8 Ghz, various combos of RAM and HD, some bundles with flat panels, free shipping, etc. I remember one deal for the 400SC with buy-one-get-one-free 10K 70 gig SCSI drives; another deal for dual CPU low-end servers.
These make very nice desktops for the average business or home user - certainly they're a step above what Dell normally sells in the big ads in the consumer marketplace for roughly the same cash.
As with many hot-deals, you'll find plenty of these units - parted out and not - on eBay. The shipping is crazy, but the overall price is often still low.
Standard wireless marketing claptrap. You see it in WiFi and WiMax, too. "Up to X miles". Or better yet, exploit metric ignorance and quote the distance in kilometers. The number will be larger and it'll seem much farther.
Unless you know the conditions (antenna, radiated power, terrain, etc.) these specs are useless. Why bother quoting point-to-point highly directional links while selling the omnidrectional aspects of the technology? Because the "max distance" specs (see above) make it seem so much more exciting. At least until everyone figures it out.
Except then you'd be worrying about whether the ZigBee network and nodes were all functioning properly.
The Amiga was a fine example of the persistent techie belief that "better" should always win. It doesn't. We whacked our heads against that one for years in the Amiga market.
So we started out trumpeting the advantage of sound (few PCs had sound; the guys who eventually successfully marketed the original Sound Blaster were refugees from the Amiga market) or color (remember, VGA was rare and expensive when the Amiga was released) or video compatibility with deep color (Targa cards were rather static and very expensive) or windows (GEM? Windows 1.x?) or video manipulation or color desktop publishing or 3D animation or emulation (we had Mac, Win, DOS, Atari, etc.) or persistent RAM drives or hypertext help systems or any number of other whizzy features, and the PC and Mac marketroids would *successfully* say "Who needs that?". Rinse, lather, repeat.
The distillation of my Amiga market experience came from the lips of a drunken Amiga dealer at a party in 1992 or so. Of course, a popular topic of conversation at these events was discussing why the so-obviously-superior-to-us-annointed Amiga wasn't outpacing the Mac and PC in sales.
This dealer said of the past few years (at that time) that "It was like we were all from five years into the future, back in the days of radio."
I did say this guy was drunk, didn't I?
But he was right. It was as if we'd all seen what television was like, but we were trying to sell to people who really liked radio and couldn't imagine the value of audio plus moving pictures.
We all knew they'd want television someday, but it was always hard to hear they didn't want to buy it.
I have a developer A1000, serial number 36 or so.
If you haven't actaully tried to restore your systems from your backup mechanism, you only think you have backups.
If you don't have detailed records about how the system was created, how every app was installed and configured and maintained, it'll be hard to restore in a disaster.
Too many organizations think it's far too expensive to have a replacement server at the ready, even if the cost of 36 hours of downtime would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
Once upon a time, my company published a version of DECnet for the Amiga.
We'd licensed an Apple Pascal version from Thursby Software and ported it to C. Thursby are the people who later made DAVE for the Mac, the way you'd connect to a Windows SMB network before OS X came along. They'd had a DECnet product before DAVE.
I have a DEC Pro 350 in the basement that we used for debugging and development.
An on-point discussion of the Open Records law regarding land info records can be found at http://www.wlia.org/standards/PrivacyOpenRecordsHa ndbook.htm .
Although Wisconsin's Open Records law is quite clear about the open nature of electronic records, the law also lets county offices recoup the cost of providing real estate information like this. It's called "cost recovery".
Therefore you see county offices charging stiff amounts to title companies for real-time access to property records, for example. To do this, you'd need to pay the fees to get a copy of each county's databases, then find a way to integrate all that info. Maybe most of them use ArcInfo.
I suspect you'll see the most populous counties (Dane, Milwaukee, Waukesha, etc.) move towards more open public access to their databases first, but there's always a balancing concern that the info will be harvested for junk mail purposes.
And I thought the printed plat books were about $10-15.
$1800 a month? $22000 a year? That's next to nothing. They spend an order of magnitude or two more on color brochures to promote the city, I'm sure. And who measures how effective the brochures are?
The Orlando Convention and Visitor's Bureau had a $22 million budget in 1998. They collect a 5% room tax. They could spend a tiny fraction of that and put access points every 200 yards along the main drags of Orlando, partially subsidized by local businesses.
Make it a captive portal, pushing a web ad at people for a few seconds after they DHCP and try to access a web site.
Geez. All the effort of hype and PR, and these State-employed lifers can't open the greenhouse on a Saturday.
Apple-raised interface theorist, Bruce Tognazzini, http://www.asktog.com/ believes (and claims to have tested and proved) that keyboard-based, chording shortcut users engage in a momentary lapse of consciousness in which they recall and then position their hands for the keystroke, and that although they *think* they're faster than a mouse, they're not. /V) result in solid productivity gains. ... delete that word." Or the other half of the joke, where people poke their head over a cubicle wall and shout a command like "format c: yes i am sure".
See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was faster than keyboarding.
His explanation for this is that deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand, Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste CTRL/C
Around page 180, where in fact he discusses Raskin's Cat interface and the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find", Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move.
This reminds me of the old joke about voice interface word processors: "Up, up, up, left, left, left, left, no right, stop, yes, right
there
Want to learn something? Go Google "therbligs".
Gee, that's reaching deep into the bag of tricks: insult one group by insulting another that's well-known for fanaticism.
m ag.html
s p
Here's Dvorak's own words about his Amiga:
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1996/961003-pc
And only a few months ago, he was insulting the Mac community by comparing them to the Amiga:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1745930,00.a
So why bring up the Amiga? Seems like Dvorak likes to drag a stick across the cages of owners of computers whose market share never exceeds five percent, then uses it as evidence that they're rabid. Puhlease! It's not as if the Linux market is a unified entity.