I've been wanting to see a briefcase computer for a number of years now as I like my screens big - though the scale of my new home setup of dual 21" 1600x1200 lcds is a bit further away in such a portable form as a briefcase.
I did use (and still have) a laptop (15") for the last 3 or so years as my main machine - not sure I ever once actually put it on my lap though - so heat or weight there was not a problem for me.
I think a 24" screen may be about the limit for a briefcase computer, until screen folding or rolling comes on the scene. Most professional men used to carry briefcases to and from work as a matter of course not that long ago (30 yrs? 20?) - and had been for decades, if not longer. No reason for it not to come back.
Size and weight (and expense) are the main factors to improve on for now, but as we all know technology marches on, and now finally laptop tech, perhaps now that laptop sales are surpassing desktop sales and lcds are getting a lot cheaper.
The most interesting thing to happen with briefcase computers will be social I predict. All of a sudden a rather major reason for rooting employees in a building together - where their big-screen desktop computers are rooted - just evaporates. Calls into question the need for a common building, or at least what kind of building, if everyone can carry their work world with them and access everything else they need remotely.
Of course this issue is already playing out at the macro-level with national and international work teams/partners/clients/etc, but soon it will be playing at the micro-local-level too. Physical buildings are expensive...
o While fancy X11 visual effects remind me of fancy Movie effects - usually shallow but entertaining eye candy - perhaps they might inspire and enable new UI approaches.
o One of these days we are going to get beyond pixel-addressed GUIs and get back to the future with display postscript or similar resolution independent display technology. Just waiting for the display devices to get to decent resolution I know, (a significant fraction of paper would be nice), but with all the effort going towards displays of all kinds, particularly for computers, cell phones, HDTV (woefully lo-res that it is - your cell phone may soon have higher res), and better yet, digital cinema, the research into display technologies is roaring as people really want it. Now if the software (legacy windowing systems for example) will be able to keep up...
o If IBM or Sun or ? ever really wanted to take market share from MS the answer is pretty obvious - just make Linux into a viable desktop platform. It all starts from there. Sure MS Office replacements are an essential part of any such strategy (and apparently coming along), but the main thing is to get the apps onto Linux. And what does this have to do with X11? Think OSX. Put a cool, professionally designed face on Linux and get vendors to write their apps to it. Same as OSX. But with Linux and its current apps as well as the apps IBM and/or Sun could bring to the party there is more than enough to prime the pump for the commercial vendors (I'm suggesting IBM/Sun/etc donate a lot of stuff up front like they already have). So my feeling is that X11 visual effects are one thing, but a professional OSX-level platform is the larger and much more significant vision.
TB
PS. Agree with the parent about HCI - why is Apple about the only major computer system vendor that has a clue in this area? Maybe some companies haven't figured out most EEs and CSs don't know F about UI design (it's not the code stupid).
Yet another toe-hold on the slippery slope of Liberty has been snatched out from beneath us. A few more fall, everytime.
Hardly seems like this is what America was supposed to be about, but then again the secretive and big-government-spying happy Rebuplicans are currently in power, so this is right in line with their ideology.
This has inspired a t-shirt design - feel free to use it if you like.
My First Name is "Fuck",
my Last Name is "the Supreme Court".
I've been doing RAID 1 with 2 disks and a raid card for a few months and I like the margin of storage safety it gives me. However, I have been having some problems with my card (or setup) and my raid array has failed occasionally lately.
One problem revealed by this is something I've not seen discussed here, and that is that I have to manually reset my raid and reboot my system to get back online (usually have to break the array and re-duplicate one of the disks to re-create the array).
What I'd like is a RAID that keeps on working as long as there is at least one good image of the disk, and lets me fix it whenever I get around to it.
For instance, if I am running a webserver and one of my mirror disks crashes in the night I would like the webserver to keep on chugging like nothing happened because there is still one good disk there. Does anyone know of any non-stop RAID cards or software or systems or research?
Thanks, Tom
(-; Does sig advertising work? Just did! Email me for rates!;-)
Bit of faulty thinking there - just because the methods to produce something are well researched and time proven doesn't say anything about the end products. More intelligent rats anyone? We used safe techniques!
: Premature optimization - that other thing over-excited engineers are premature about. - tb
If I am housing their property on my property, then I think it's only fair that they pay me monthy storage fees. Quality heated and air conditioned storage facilities are not cheap, and it's my facility so my prices.
It would be funny if this got to court and they had to argue that since they sent the book unsolicited that they actually no longer owned the book (per, apparently, US Postal regulations) and thus were not liable for any storage fees.
Reminds me of the situation M$ was apparently almost forced into 5 or 6 years ago when it turned out someone else owned the trademark to the word Windows, and they went to court over it. The guy caved and settled out of court (he only got $5M when it was worth at least $50M to M$ to not have to change the name, but he had a daughter with leukemia or the like and needed sure money). I read that M$ was prepared to argue that the word Windows was too generic to be a valid trademark, so that the guy would not have any trademark claims on them.
The Real TB
: No great Religion requires you to believe in it.
This last week three different people's email to me bounced back to them. I only found out by them telling me later. They came from three different systems, one was yahoo.com. I found out that my ISP was responsible, they said they had a filter of some sort that automatically popped up when they detected they were under a "spam attack".
I am only a little familiar with the technology of spam defenses, but I feel the bottom line is this: whenever a legitimate email is rejected, it represents a failure of the mail system. The penultimate goal, I feel, of any mail system is that legitimate mail gets through! This means that spam rejection is a secondary goal, and must be subservient to legitimate mail.
I am quite aware that the current state of non-neuron-based decision systems is inadequate to differentiate between spam and legitimate mail, and in the limit even neuron-based systems, e.g. humans, cannot guarantee 100% correct decisions everytime. However, this is not the issue.
The issue is the structure of the defenses. Why is my ISP making decisions for me, without my (real) consent, about what mail I receive? Isn't this like the local post office pawing through my snail mail and throwing away stuff that looks like junkmail? Of course it is. There are very strict laws against this in the US. That is why snail mail is now more reliable than the email I get via my ISP. What's up with that? (As well hopefully someday email will enjoy the same kinds of protections snail mail does in the US).
I am not for spam, I am against spam. I want tools to fight spam, and they don't have to be free. But more than that I want my legitimate email. When you throw the baby out with the bath water, as in the current situation, you have a broken system, no two ways about it.
Well, kinda fooled me for a little while, getting mad even, until I realized it was really a PR piece rather than a real news story. An MS-seemingly kind of tactic, double for a Linux release producer, let alone the one that owns fair Slashdot. Where was the way lost? Can infomercials be far behind?
I'm not doubting the incident, that MS really did seemingly quite unfairly, perhaps unconstitutionally, bar a group of people from distributing free Linux CDs and magazines at the conference, just that the story of it, as Homer would say, "Phew!"
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wanting to see a briefcase computer for a number of years now as I like my screens big - though the scale of my new home setup of dual 21" 1600x1200 lcds is a bit further away in such a portable form as a briefcase.
I did use (and still have) a laptop (15") for the last 3 or so years as my main machine - not sure I ever once actually put it on my lap though - so heat or weight there was not a problem for me.
I think a 24" screen may be about the limit for a briefcase computer, until screen folding or rolling comes on the scene. Most professional men used to carry briefcases to and from work as a matter of course not that long ago (30 yrs? 20?) - and had been for decades, if not longer. No reason for it not to come back.
Size and weight (and expense) are the main factors to improve on for now, but as we all know technology marches on, and now finally laptop tech, perhaps now that laptop sales are surpassing desktop sales and lcds are getting a lot cheaper.
The most interesting thing to happen with briefcase computers will be social I predict. All of a sudden a rather major reason for rooting employees in a building together - where their big-screen desktop computers are rooted - just evaporates. Calls into question the need for a common building, or at least what kind of building, if everyone can carry their work world with them and access everything else they need remotely.
Of course this issue is already playing out at the macro-level with national and international work teams/partners/clients/etc, but soon it will be playing at the micro-local-level too. Physical buildings are expensive...
+
Sigless in Gaza.
Various thoughts:
o While fancy X11 visual effects remind me of fancy Movie effects - usually shallow but entertaining eye candy - perhaps they might inspire and enable new UI approaches.
o One of these days we are going to get beyond pixel-addressed GUIs and get back to the future with display postscript or similar resolution independent display technology. Just waiting for the display devices to get to decent resolution I know, (a significant fraction of paper would be nice), but with all the effort going towards displays of all kinds, particularly for computers, cell phones, HDTV (woefully lo-res that it is - your cell phone may soon have higher res), and better yet, digital cinema, the research into display technologies is roaring as people really want it. Now if the software (legacy windowing systems for example) will be able to keep up...
o If IBM or Sun or ? ever really wanted to take market share from MS the answer is pretty obvious - just make Linux into a viable desktop platform. It all starts from there. Sure MS Office replacements are an essential part of any such strategy (and apparently coming along), but the main thing is to get the apps onto Linux. And what does this have to do with X11? Think OSX. Put a cool, professionally designed face on Linux and get vendors to write their apps to it. Same as OSX. But with Linux and its current apps as well as the apps IBM and/or Sun could bring to the party there is more than enough to prime the pump for the commercial vendors (I'm suggesting IBM/Sun/etc donate a lot of stuff up front like they already have). So my feeling is that X11 visual effects are one thing, but a professional OSX-level platform is the larger and much more significant vision.
TB
PS. Agree with the parent about HCI - why is Apple about the only major computer system vendor that has a clue in this area? Maybe some companies haven't figured out most EEs and CSs don't know F about UI design (it's not the code stupid).
Yet another toe-hold on the slippery slope of
Liberty has been snatched out from beneath
us. A few more fall, everytime.
Hardly seems like this is what America was
supposed to be about, but then again the
secretive and big-government-spying happy
Rebuplicans are currently in power, so this
is right in line with their ideology.
This has inspired a t-shirt design - feel
free to use it if you like.
My First Name is "Fuck",
my Last Name is "the Supreme Court".
--
> There's no police state brewing, move along.
I've been doing RAID 1 with 2 disks and a raid card for a few months and I like the margin of storage safety it gives me. However, I have been having some problems with my card (or setup) and my raid array has failed occasionally lately.
;-)
One problem revealed by this is something I've not seen discussed here, and that is that I have to manually reset my raid and reboot my system to get back online (usually have to break the array and re-duplicate one of the disks to re-create the array).
What I'd like is a RAID that keeps on working as long as there is at least one good image of the disk, and lets me fix it whenever I get around to it.
For instance, if I am running a webserver and one of my mirror disks crashes in the night I would like the webserver to keep on chugging like nothing happened because there is still one good disk there. Does anyone know of any non-stop RAID cards or software or systems or research?
Thanks,
Tom
(-; Does sig advertising work? Just did! Email me for rates!
Bit of faulty thinking there - just because the methods to produce something are well researched and time proven doesn't say anything about the end products. More intelligent rats anyone? We used safe techniques!
: Premature optimization - that other thing over-excited engineers are premature about. - tb
If I am housing their property on my property, then I think it's only fair that they pay me monthy storage fees. Quality heated and air conditioned storage facilities are not cheap, and it's my facility so my prices.
It would be funny if this got to court and they had to argue that since they sent the book unsolicited that they actually no longer owned the book (per, apparently, US Postal regulations) and thus were not liable for any storage fees.
Reminds me of the situation M$ was apparently almost forced into 5 or 6 years ago when it turned out someone else owned the trademark to the word Windows, and they went to court over it. The guy caved and settled out of court (he only got $5M when it was worth at least $50M to M$ to not have to change the name, but he had a daughter with leukemia or the like and needed sure money). I read that M$ was prepared to argue that the word Windows was too generic to be a valid trademark, so that the guy would not have any trademark claims on them.
The Real TB
: No great Religion requires you to believe in it.
Some guys are working on a portable software emulator of the TI Explorer II Lisp machine.
An LVM anyone?
http://www.unlambda.com/lispm/
Give in to deliciousness!
This last week three different people's email to me bounced back to them. I only found out by them telling me later. They came from three different systems, one was yahoo.com. I found out that my ISP was responsible, they said they had a filter of some sort that automatically popped up when they detected they were under a "spam attack".
I am only a little familiar with the technology of spam defenses, but I feel the bottom line is this: whenever a legitimate email is rejected, it represents a failure of the mail system. The penultimate goal, I feel, of any mail system is that legitimate mail gets through! This means that spam rejection is a secondary goal, and must be subservient to legitimate mail.
I am quite aware that the current state of non-neuron-based decision systems is inadequate to differentiate between spam and legitimate mail, and in the limit even neuron-based systems, e.g. humans, cannot guarantee 100% correct decisions everytime. However, this is not the issue.
The issue is the structure of the defenses. Why is my ISP making decisions for me, without my (real) consent, about what mail I receive? Isn't this like the local post office pawing through my snail mail and throwing away stuff that looks like junkmail? Of course it is. There are very strict laws against this in the US. That is why snail mail is now more reliable than the email I get via my ISP. What's up with that? (As well hopefully someday email will enjoy the same kinds of protections snail mail does in the US).
I am not for spam, I am against spam. I want tools to fight spam, and they don't have to be free. But more than that I want my legitimate email. When you throw the baby out with the bath water, as in the current situation, you have a broken system, no two ways about it.
Tom
I'm not doubting the incident, that MS really did seemingly quite unfairly, perhaps unconstitutionally, bar a group of people from distributing free Linux CDs and magazines at the conference, just that the story of it, as Homer would say, "Phew!"
+
: I cogitated it up!