Does no one else remember the Ministry of Information and Technology of Taiwan (name is approximate) purchasing the intellectual property of Go Corporation back when MS had finally succeeded in driving Go Corp. out of business? (For those who don't remember this, go read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ which should be available from your local library).
Go was a pen computing pioneer and PenPoint was their operating system / interface---way cool cutting edge stuff which in a lot of ways hasn't been caught up to yet by anyone (resolution independent UI, etc.)
I've always assumed that they used it as a club to keep Microsoft's licensing down, but have never seen any further indication of it:(
I'd dearly love to see it come back---using Pen Services for Windows just doesn't compare.
William
Wild Cards books w/ real world physics
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 1
Was kinda surprised that there was no mentrion of this series by George R. Martin, Roger Zelazny, etc. (it's a shared universe series)
Nifty series, but only just now coming back into print (and I still need to lay my hands on the last book...)
I think you need to try out some more modern software. Abby Software's Finereader Pro v5 gets 99.9--99.999% correct (we just used it for scanning a ~600 page legal textbook here at work (doing a new edition of it)). It seems to use a dictionary-based lookup system, but there're dictionaries for just about everything (but math, still having stuff which is equation-heavy keyed)
Although handwriting recognition on the early Newtons wasn't all that great (I've got an MP 100), for those with patience who were willing to exert some effort ot improve their handwriting, it's quite acceptable (and it did a lot to make my handwriting much better). Newtons running Newt OS 2 and later were amazingly good and recognized as fast as anyone I've ever met can write (and a ``handwriting repair instructor'' who's one of the world's fastest at penmanship finds it quite fast enough and advocates it highly). For some reason, Steve Jobs pulled Newton, Inc. back under the Apple umbrella and refused to let anyone else have access to the technology (people tried). Sad.
For my part, I've given up on Apple doing a pen slate (when I first saw the G4 iMac my first hope was that the display was detachable and included a processor, storage and battery and had pen input a la the Wacom Cintiq (which is an LCD w/ an integrated Wacom graphics tablet)), and've finally purchased a pen slate, which I've almost completed setting up and configuring, and am very much enjoying.
Advantages of pen input systems:
- quiet (no clicking of keys)
- non-threatening (a lot of my college professors refused to let me use a laptop to take notes---no one ever gainsaid the Newton)
- allows one to draw naturally (I'm a graphic designer by trade, and can't bear to use a system which doesn't have a Wacom or other graphics tablet). Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.
- excellent for annotating / marking up a document---we use Adobe Acrobat.pdfs for proofs for our customers and it's a nuisance trying to do traditional proofreader's marks with a mouse.
Drawbacks
- tends to be expensive
- limited choices for hardware / software (nothing for Mac OS, no cursive recognizer for Linux AFAICT)
- handwriting recognition requires some discipline to write in a fashion readily recognized by the system.
Such phrases (sentences which contain all the letters of a given alphabet) are called ``pangrams'' or abecedariums (or abecedarian sentences).
There's an Adobe employee who ``collects'' them, and his collection has been published a couple of times---I was doing that for a time (collecting), but got bored with it---did write one of my own which I used in the ``Typeface Terminology'' broadside which is in my portfolio on my web page at http://members.aol.com/willadams
1 - pathetic typographic controls / tools. It can't even baseline shift beyond super/sub script, and its H&J algorithm is basic, brain-dead, one-line at a time, similarly, controlling where it adds space requires manual intervention at _every_ point (no equivalent to/vskip 36pt +1fil), fakes small caps, no automatic ligatures beyond fi and fl, etc.
2 - Really, painfully bad equation editor
3 - Bad pre-press, it prefers RGB for colour models, and getting spot colour out of it is a nightmare
4 - no Linux version, they did it in beta, then pulled it leaving testers high and dry.
There's lots more, but I've gotta hurry home to finish up a ~400 page, 2 colour book which is being done in FM 'cause the author insisted on getting.fm files back.:(
Guess you missed the pen computing revolution that wasn't in the '90s?
Go read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ and look up Go Corporation, PenPoint and Momenta.
Look up Apple tablet-sized Newton prototypes
For more up-to-date stuff go to www.pencomputing.com and read up on Microsoft's ``Tablet PC'' project.
Also check out Fujitsu and Mitsubishi for pen computers and Wacom for the nifty Cintiq (only $1900 now!)
William
(who wants a pen slate with docking station to replace his NeXT Cube, Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet, Newton, ThinkPad and Dock I and NCR-3125 pen slate)
Actually, if you look up the OpenStep specification, you'll see that the OS is ``OPENSTEP'', and the API implementation (which while publicly available, had a disclaimer that said availability did not constitute permission to implement---one was supposed to contact NeXT for licensing arrangements).
The API specification is at www.gnustep.org and ftp.peak.org/pub.next (dig around a little, you'll learn lots).
Black Parrot said:
>The problem for people who want to really push
>the idea is that the Tolkien mythos doesn't
>have any Redeemer, which is the central concept
>of the Christian mythos.
It's not a precise analogue, but Turin Turambar is to reappear at the final conflict (see Tolkien's _Unfinished Tales_) so as to redeem himself and by extension humanity.
Just got back from the local Mall, and there were a _lot_ of games which're only ~$12 or so (and a fair number $10 or less---Hexen II for Linux for $6.99, almost bought it, Quake III Arena for Linux in the spiffy metal tin was just $9.99).
'course, some of these games are almost 10 years old....
But Diablo I is scarcely 4 years old, and just $11.95.
Nice thing 'bout buying the older games like this is all the patches are already integrated into the CD, and one knows which ones are decent games, with good sequels....
in Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper of all places....
It's the size and shape of a cassette, and in addition to holding 64MB of music (or files?) and working as an MP3 player with headphone jack, it'll actually play when placed in a cassette player (say in one's car---does it respond to ffwd and rwnd controls?)
Didn't trouble to look to closely since it's $230...
As much as I too would like to see an Apple PDA, I just can't see that happening given what Apple has said in the past:(
A couple of these are now free on General Mills cereal boxes (Boggle, Monopoly Jr. come to mind). Some boxes of Cheerios even have the new Disney Atlantis game.... A far cry from Chex Quest, no? The GM games are the Win-PC versions only though:(
My wife likes the educational Maxis Sim games and is playing SimAnt at home, and SimSafari at the library (gotta find her a copy for Christmas....)
No, but did you ever look up ``BookStacks UnlimitedTM''? They've since been bought out by Barnes & Noble (probably to get their nifty ``books.com'' domain name), but they were a dial-up BBS with a database directory of pretty much all books in print (at the time I bought Peter Karow's book _Font Technology_ from them, the only copy in the US library system was being catalogued by the Library of Congress)
gig said:
> Because they include a lot of stuff
>with every Mac.
>Every one has FireWire, and iMovie, and
>a PostScript interpreter
?!?
Where's the PostScript interpreter---NeXT had Display PostScript, Macs don't.
Theyhave to have lousy bitmap.eps previews, can't display an arbitrary.ps file on-screen without third-party software, and Mac OS X can't use Multiple Master fonts 'cause they tossed Display PostScript.
> PDF printing
That's free with Adobe Acrobat Reader, xpdf, or a PostScript Level 3 RIP, 's not in Mac OS 9- save as a third-party thing. Mac OS X gets it with ``Quartz'' (Display PDF) but it's funky with weird colour-matching:(
Stuff Apple tossed to save money:
- Display PostScript (not much choice here)
- Pantone colour library licensing
- {\sc unix}\textregistered
Stuff Apple left out 'cause of third-party encumbrances:
- TAR based.pkg format which pretty much worked
- File / directory compression built into the Workspace
- Fax modem support for send / receive with full PostScript
- Webster's
- Oxford's Book of Quotations
William
(Who wishes Mac OS X had a ``Digital Gutenberg'' by default)
Not everybody understands phones and they're not all that intuitive these days (ever try to explain to a child why a number has to be punched in to talk to Grandma? Or been on hold waiting to be transferred and get disconnected instead?
Books, sometimes Kindergarden teachers have to explain how to tell which end is up, how to turn pages, etc. Once learned though, quite workable.
Notepad---this one I'll pretty much grant.
I wish I had a system to replace my NCR-3125 which ran PenPoint and Windows for Pens (only used the latter for FutureWave's wonderful SmartSketch program though). Actually, I want a system which could replace my Newton, ThinkPad and NeXT Cube. I want a pen slate with a gesture-oriented UI, hand-writing recognition which works, a robust OS with a decent UI, and a cordless pen which inputs at least 64 pressure levels. Colour would be nice, and I'd like to have a docking station which used the tablet as a monitor.
1 - see ``JIGS'', Java Interface for GNUstep, a new version was just posted to www.freshmeat.net
2 - If you want to write it, sure. The OpenStep spec though specifies DPS, and the FSF paid a fair chunk of change to get Display GhostScript written. One can access any other drawing interface one might be inclined to.
Interestingly, TeX's H&J algorithm is used by Adobe in their InDesign product---they got it by way of URW which used it as the basis for their ``HZ'' algorithm (named for Prof. Hermann Zapf, designer of Palatino, Optima and the eponymous ZapfChancery and Dingbats and many other typefaces).
William
(who has a reward check for 1 1/2 errors in DEK's book _Digital Typography_;)
Display PostScript also made some interesting things possible---there were.eps files one could put in NeXTMail docs which would take over the windowserver on the receiving machine when they were opened.
Also, look at www.this.net/~frank for a description of ``Akira'' a project to study and provide a solution for that sort of thing.
NeXT did provide an option to turn off the public windowserver though, as well as to run.eps files safely.
No one remembers Go Corp., PenPoint, the original source of the name ``ThinkPad'' (the first ThinkPad was to run PenPoint and was a tablet design), nor GRiD, or their Convertible and other pen systems, nor the Newton either.
All got run into the ground 'cause they weren't controlled by Microsoft---see Jerry Kaplan's book _Startup_ for the insider's view.
Sadly, no one is making a system I'd like to buy. It'd have to replace my NeXT Cube, ThinkPad w/docking station, Newton, NCR-3125, Wacom graphics tablet and Newton.
I want:
- pressure sensitive input (a Wacom stylus or something better)
- docking station which uses the system as a display, a la the Mitsubishi Amity SP/VP
- a drawing program like FutureWave's SmartSketch which really uses the pen
- handwriting/gesture recognition
- a NoteBook UI like PenPoint, or at least as good as the Newton
- robust, reliable OS.
The closest thing these days is the IBM ThinkPad Transnote:(
There were two TRS-badged ``Pocket Computers'' the PC-1, and PC-2. The latter had a dot-addressable display, and the spiffy color ink pen plotter as a printer module. The former had a dot-matrix printer which uses tiny ribbons...
Haven't used it much since I got my Newton, but it does bring back memories....
In Mac OS X, the Apple menu has at once been deprecated (no longer used as a system launcher/customization tool), and brought forward (important system commands stored there).
The one was 'cause customization was Byzantine (dig around in the System Folder for a Folder to use to customize it), the latter 'cause it's supported by the menu hierarchy they're putting forward
(System-level stuff -> App -> situational)
In UI tests, failing to realize the Apple menu was a menu was a common stumbling block for naive users on Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
Does no one else remember the Ministry of Information and Technology of Taiwan (name is approximate) purchasing the intellectual property of Go Corporation back when MS had finally succeeded in driving Go Corp. out of business? (For those who don't remember this, go read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ which should be available from your local library).
:(
Go was a pen computing pioneer and PenPoint was their operating system / interface---way cool cutting edge stuff which in a lot of ways hasn't been caught up to yet by anyone (resolution independent UI, etc.)
I've always assumed that they used it as a club to keep Microsoft's licensing down, but have never seen any further indication of it
I'd dearly love to see it come back---using Pen Services for Windows just doesn't compare.
William
Was kinda surprised that there was no mentrion of this series by George R. Martin, Roger Zelazny, etc. (it's a shared universe series)
Nifty series, but only just now coming back into print (and I still need to lay my hands on the last book...)
William
Yes.
.pdfs for proofs for our customers and it's a nuisance trying to do traditional proofreader's marks with a mouse.
I think you need to try out some more modern software. Abby Software's Finereader Pro v5 gets 99.9--99.999% correct (we just used it for scanning a ~600 page legal textbook here at work (doing a new edition of it)). It seems to use a dictionary-based lookup system, but there're dictionaries for just about everything (but math, still having stuff which is equation-heavy keyed)
Although handwriting recognition on the early Newtons wasn't all that great (I've got an MP 100), for those with patience who were willing to exert some effort ot improve their handwriting, it's quite acceptable (and it did a lot to make my handwriting much better). Newtons running Newt OS 2 and later were amazingly good and recognized as fast as anyone I've ever met can write (and a ``handwriting repair instructor'' who's one of the world's fastest at penmanship finds it quite fast enough and advocates it highly). For some reason, Steve Jobs pulled Newton, Inc. back under the Apple umbrella and refused to let anyone else have access to the technology (people tried). Sad.
For my part, I've given up on Apple doing a pen slate (when I first saw the G4 iMac my first hope was that the display was detachable and included a processor, storage and battery and had pen input a la the Wacom Cintiq (which is an LCD w/ an integrated Wacom graphics tablet)), and've finally purchased a pen slate, which I've almost completed setting up and configuring, and am very much enjoying.
Advantages of pen input systems:
- quiet (no clicking of keys)
- non-threatening (a lot of my college professors refused to let me use a laptop to take notes---no one ever gainsaid the Newton)
- allows one to draw naturally (I'm a graphic designer by trade, and can't bear to use a system which doesn't have a Wacom or other graphics tablet). Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.
- excellent for annotating / marking up a document---we use Adobe Acrobat
Drawbacks
- tends to be expensive
- limited choices for hardware / software (nothing for Mac OS, no cursive recognizer for Linux AFAICT)
- handwriting recognition requires some discipline to write in a fashion readily recognized by the system.
William
Such phrases (sentences which contain all the letters of a given alphabet) are called ``pangrams'' or abecedariums (or abecedarian sentences).
There's an Adobe employee who ``collects'' them, and his collection has been published a couple of times---I was doing that for a time (collecting), but got bored with it---did write one of my own which I used in the ``Typeface Terminology'' broadside which is in my portfolio on my web page at http://members.aol.com/willadams
William
FrameMaker has a _lot_ of problems.
/vskip 36pt +1fil), fakes small caps, no automatic ligatures beyond fi and fl, etc.
.fm files back. :(
1 - pathetic typographic controls / tools. It can't even baseline shift beyond super/sub script, and its H&J algorithm is basic, brain-dead, one-line at a time, similarly, controlling where it adds space requires manual intervention at _every_ point (no equivalent to
2 - Really, painfully bad equation editor
3 - Bad pre-press, it prefers RGB for colour models, and getting spot colour out of it is a nightmare
4 - no Linux version, they did it in beta, then pulled it leaving testers high and dry.
There's lots more, but I've gotta hurry home to finish up a ~400 page, 2 colour book which is being done in FM 'cause the author insisted on getting
William
Guess you missed the pen computing revolution that wasn't in the '90s?
Go read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ and look up Go Corporation, PenPoint and Momenta.
Look up Apple tablet-sized Newton prototypes
For more up-to-date stuff go to www.pencomputing.com and read up on Microsoft's ``Tablet PC'' project.
Also check out Fujitsu and Mitsubishi for pen computers and Wacom for the nifty Cintiq (only $1900 now!)
William
(who wants a pen slate with docking station to replace his NeXT Cube, Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet, Newton, ThinkPad and Dock I and NCR-3125 pen slate)
Actually, if you look up the OpenStep specification, you'll see that the OS is ``OPENSTEP'', and the API implementation (which while publicly available, had a disclaimer that said availability did not constitute permission to implement---one was supposed to contact NeXT for licensing arrangements).
The API specification is at www.gnustep.org and ftp.peak.org/pub.next (dig around a little, you'll learn lots).
William
Black Parrot said:
>The problem for people who want to really push
>the idea is that the Tolkien mythos doesn't
>have any Redeemer, which is the central concept
>of the Christian mythos.
It's not a precise analogue, but Turin Turambar is to reappear at the final conflict (see Tolkien's _Unfinished Tales_) so as to redeem himself and by extension humanity.
William
I dunno.
Just got back from the local Mall, and there were a _lot_ of games which're only ~$12 or so (and a fair number $10 or less---Hexen II for Linux for $6.99, almost bought it, Quake III Arena for Linux in the spiffy metal tin was just $9.99).
'course, some of these games are almost 10 years old....
But Diablo I is scarcely 4 years old, and just $11.95.
Nice thing 'bout buying the older games like this is all the patches are already integrated into the CD, and one knows which ones are decent games, with good sequels....
William
Objective-C was done by Brad Cox of Stepstone first. NeXT licensed it from him and later purchased it in its entirety.
:(
You should be able to find some articles by Brad Cox in back issues of Byte in a decent library, but his book on Objective C is long OOP
William
Here's what I'd like to see a laptop built around:
:(
http://www.wacom.com/lcdtablets/index.cfm
Wacom's new ``Cintiq'' LCD / tablet display unit.
Sadly Fujitsu switched from an active digitizer to a passive, so this sort of thing seems to be going backwards
William
in Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper of all places....
:(
It's the size and shape of a cassette, and in addition to holding 64MB of music (or files?) and working as an MP3 player with headphone jack, it'll actually play when placed in a cassette player (say in one's car---does it respond to ffwd and rwnd controls?)
Didn't trouble to look to closely since it's $230...
As much as I too would like to see an Apple PDA, I just can't see that happening given what Apple has said in the past
William
A couple of these are now free on General Mills cereal boxes (Boggle, Monopoly Jr. come to mind). Some boxes of Cheerios even have the new Disney Atlantis game.... A far cry from Chex Quest, no? The GM games are the Win-PC versions only though :(
My wife likes the educational Maxis Sim games and is playing SimAnt at home, and SimSafari at the library (gotta find her a copy for Christmas....)
William
``dingbat'' said:
> I never had Amazon@Fidonet
No, but did you ever look up ``BookStacks UnlimitedTM''? They've since been bought out by Barnes & Noble (probably to get their nifty ``books.com'' domain name), but they were a dial-up BBS with a database directory of pretty much all books in print (at the time I bought Peter Karow's book _Font Technology_ from them, the only copy in the US library system was being catalogued by the Library of Congress)
William
gig said:
.eps previews, can't display an arbitrary .ps file on-screen without third-party software, and Mac OS X can't use Multiple Master fonts 'cause they tossed Display PostScript.
:(
.pkg format which pretty much worked
> Because they include a lot of stuff
>with every Mac.
>Every one has FireWire, and iMovie, and
>a PostScript interpreter
?!?
Where's the PostScript interpreter---NeXT had Display PostScript, Macs don't.
Theyhave to have lousy bitmap
> PDF printing
That's free with Adobe Acrobat Reader, xpdf, or a PostScript Level 3 RIP, 's not in Mac OS 9- save as a third-party thing. Mac OS X gets it with ``Quartz'' (Display PDF) but it's funky with weird colour-matching
Stuff Apple tossed to save money:
- Display PostScript (not much choice here)
- Pantone colour library licensing
- {\sc unix}\textregistered
Stuff Apple left out 'cause of third-party encumbrances:
- TAR based
- File / directory compression built into the Workspace
- Fax modem support for send / receive with full PostScript
- Webster's
- Oxford's Book of Quotations
William
(Who wishes Mac OS X had a ``Digital Gutenberg'' by default)
Not everybody understands phones and they're not all that intuitive these days (ever try to explain to a child why a number has to be punched in to talk to Grandma? Or been on hold waiting to be transferred and get disconnected instead?
Books, sometimes Kindergarden teachers have to explain how to tell which end is up, how to turn pages, etc. Once learned though, quite workable.
Notepad---this one I'll pretty much grant.
I wish I had a system to replace my NCR-3125 which ran PenPoint and Windows for Pens (only used the latter for FutureWave's wonderful SmartSketch program though). Actually, I want a system which could replace my Newton, ThinkPad and NeXT Cube. I want a pen slate with a gesture-oriented UI, hand-writing recognition which works, a robust OS with a decent UI, and a cordless pen which inputs at least 64 pressure levels. Colour would be nice, and I'd like to have a docking station which used the tablet as a monitor.
William
1 - see ``JIGS'', Java Interface for GNUstep, a new version was just posted to www.freshmeat.net
2 - If you want to write it, sure. The OpenStep spec though specifies DPS, and the FSF paid a fair chunk of change to get Display GhostScript written. One can access any other drawing interface one might be inclined to.
William
I've been working on this off and on for a time now.
h tml
f
For those who're unfamiliar with the wonder of NeXTstep, this may help somewhat:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/gnustep/
It was originally going to be www.gnustep.net, but ran out of time to help with that.
Also, http://members.aol.com/willadams/whatsnext/index.
There're also these things from my portfolio:
http://members.aol.com/mistweaver/brochure-1.pd
http://members.aol.com/tgcovault/brochure-2.pdf
the second file has a time-line and both have neat quotes 'bout NeXTstep.
William
Try again.
TeX is in the public domain (and intentionally so). There're a number of notable extensions to it available, in particular Han The Thanh's pdfTeX.
William
Interestingly, TeX's H&J algorithm is used by Adobe in their InDesign product---they got it by way of URW which used it as the basis for their ``HZ'' algorithm (named for Prof. Hermann Zapf, designer of Palatino, Optima and the eponymous ZapfChancery and Dingbats and many other typefaces).
;)
William
(who has a reward check for 1 1/2 errors in DEK's book _Digital Typography_
Display PostScript also made some interesting things possible---there were .eps files one could put in NeXTMail docs which would take over the windowserver on the receiving machine when they were opened.
.eps files safely.
Also, look at www.this.net/~frank for a description of ``Akira'' a project to study and provide a solution for that sort of thing.
NeXT did provide an option to turn off the public windowserver though, as well as to run
William
No one remembers Go Corp., PenPoint, the original source of the name ``ThinkPad'' (the first ThinkPad was to run PenPoint and was a tablet design), nor GRiD, or their Convertible and other pen systems, nor the Newton either.
:(
All got run into the ground 'cause they weren't controlled by Microsoft---see Jerry Kaplan's book _Startup_ for the insider's view.
Sadly, no one is making a system I'd like to buy. It'd have to replace my NeXT Cube, ThinkPad w/docking station, Newton, NCR-3125, Wacom graphics tablet and Newton.
I want:
- pressure sensitive input (a Wacom stylus or something better)
- docking station which uses the system as a display, a la the Mitsubishi Amity SP/VP
- a drawing program like FutureWave's SmartSketch which really uses the pen
- handwriting/gesture recognition
- a NoteBook UI like PenPoint, or at least as good as the Newton
- robust, reliable OS.
The closest thing these days is the IBM ThinkPad Transnote
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
There were two TRS-badged ``Pocket Computers'' the PC-1, and PC-2. The latter had a dot-addressable display, and the spiffy color ink pen plotter as a printer module. The former had a dot-matrix printer which uses tiny ribbons...
Haven't used it much since I got my Newton, but it does bring back memories....
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
In Mac OS X, the Apple menu has at once been deprecated (no longer used as a system launcher/customization tool), and brought forward (important system commands stored there).
The one was 'cause customization was Byzantine (dig around in the System Folder for a Folder to use to customize it), the latter 'cause it's supported by the menu hierarchy they're putting forward
(System-level stuff -> App -> situational)
In UI tests, failing to realize the Apple menu was a menu was a common stumbling block for naive users on Macs.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Corwin's blade is Greyswandir, Brand's Werewindle
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use