As much as we all like to make fun of President Bush, irregardless is actually correct. The ir- is not a negation, so the word means the same thing as regardless. The same thing is true for flammible and inflammible.
Well, I am sick and tired of people using the analogy of copying somebody else's car for sharing music. I don't care if you copy my car, in much the same way as I don't care if you copy my music (as in CDs that I happen to own, not as in music that I myself made). However, I'm not the one losing money in both cases. In the car side of the analogy, the company that researched, designed, and now produces that car has lost a potential sale to you. In the music side, the artist/RIAA has lost a potential sale to you. Yes, it can be argued that you never would have bought the car/music anyway, but that still doesn't account for all the piracy that occurs.
They lose enough buisness to people who realize that you can get free porn with http://www.thehun.org/ and other TGPs, so that they really don't care about the P2P pr0n. Besides, they really target new internet users who don't realize they can find untold terabytes of pr0n on the internet, and people with unusual (as in anything from scat to tentacle rape) fetishes who need a specialzed site to offer them what they want.
Copying is intrinsically different from theft. Imagine I had a cloning ray, that made copies of cars. Would you begrudge me a copy of your car, at no cost to yourself?
Suppose I make cars for a living. I sell them to dealerships for money, and they sell them to their customers. Now, let's say you walk into a dealership, pick out the most expensive car, copy it, and drive home. Of course I would begrudge you. Yes, you may not have paid for this car if you hadn't been able to copy it. However, you own a car that I took time and effort to design and produce, and you have not given me anything in return. Why should you be permitted to do this?
If an attacker knows that you prioritize a certain service, wouldn't he cause a greater disruption with his DOS with this?
Another thing: couldn't the ??AA get ISPs to use this feature, not to kill P2P sharing, but to reduce its priority (perhaps as a compromise from not being able to kill P2P outright)?
Of course, there are many benefits to this as well, I'm just pointing out possiblities.
Maybe it's just that I started reading at -1 a few weeks ago, but the number of trolls here seems to have increased greatly since the war began. Especially the obligatory ASCII-goatse with tatoos. And it now looks like we're about to get a crapflood that consists of random dirty words pluralized with 'z' and with the third one in each series being capitalized.
(Yes, this is you piss assholez BALLZ cunts, or whatever we should call you).
We all know that Slashdot has too many dupes. So, do we really need Slashbacks? Most stories that warrant updates are normally posted as dupes (or "updates" in the case of the xpde article) again later, so why keep the Slashbacks? Especially ones that cover completely unrelated topics?
With that out of the way, I may as well have a valid, on-topic comment. For the SSN thief, wouldn't it just be easier for a malicious student to install a keylogger? I'm sure that someone would think of doing that in almost every school, so why aren't SSN/Credit Card Numbers/etc stolen more often in this manner? (Maybe they are, but the students don't get caught.)
The more processors we have competing, the more Intel and AMD will push ahead in their research to make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors. Transmeta's upcoming release of the Astro processor will provide this competition for them. I hope we can see improvement in the field of PC processors.
5 years is much longer time than your average x86 PC company would sell a computer for. I'm no Mac fanatic, in fact, I don't even own one, but I guess this goes to show that Apple does make solid products that last for a while.
What happened to Day 1? Does ApacheCon count in reverse? Did absolutely nothing interesting happen?
Pre-emptive slashdotting article(s) post...
on
Bricklin on Tablet PCs
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· Score: -1, Redundant
Tablet PC: First Impressions Back in the early 1990's, I was heavily involved in the pen computing world. I co-founded Slate Corporation which developed application software for GO's Penpoint as well as Microsoft's Windows for Pen Computing and for the Apple Newton. I was exposed to software and hardware development, both at the OS and application level, and had experience using a wide variety of machines. With the release of the new Tablet PCs based upon Microsoft's new software, I felt it was appropriate for me to comment upon that, given my perspective. You will find here my comments based on my general feelings as well as actual experiences using various equipment.
How I decided what to buy
At various points in time, starting with Bill Gate's Comdex 2000 talk, I have been seeing public prototypes of Microsoft's Tablet PC software and the accompanying hardware. Most recently, I got to play with an Acer unit for a few minutes while waiting to get into Jeff Raike's talk at TechXNY (PC Expo). My Thinkpad was well over 3 years old, and I knew it was time for a new laptop. I decided to wait until the Tablet PCs became available, and probably get one of them. I had used a Grid Convertible (a machine from late 1992) for years after it came out, and knew that a convertible could be a fine laptop, even if you didn't take advantage of the pen much, and I needed a lightweight laptop.
Now that the Tablet PCs are shipping, I decided it was time for me to buy. Since I was spending my own money and knew this would have to last me for a while, I looked carefully. Given my needs, I narrowed it down to the Acer, Compaq, and Toshiba. The Acer has a maximum of 256M of RAM, so I decided that wouldn't work for me in case I wanted to do any development work, or run some of the photo manipulation apps I'd probably end up using for my photography work. I was really torn between the Compaq and the Toshiba. From the specs, both looked like they'd meet my needs. The Compaq is supposed to have much better battery life, has a stalk as the keyboard resident pointing device, has more buttons, and is lighter when the keyboard is detached. Its pen, though, is not pressure sensitive. The Toshiba has a bigger and supposedly brighter screen (better for showing pictures and presentations, which I do a lot), faster processor, a touch pad (which I don't like as much as the stalk), and is in a more traditional form factor. Configured as I wanted them, with warranties, etc., they were close enough in price. I've had two Toshiba Portege's over the years, so I was more familiar with them, but I worked with Compaq on a similar, earlier machine, so I had some loyalty (and they ended up with Slate's assets when we closed it down).
In the end, I couldn't find a Compaq to look at, but I found a Toshiba 3505 that was available at a CompUSA store in my area. After looking at it, I decided I might as well get the Toshiba. (I've presented the whole story of how I made my decision here not as an endorsement, but as an example of the type of thinking you might want to go through. I expect to spend time with some of the other units over the next few months, and will comment about them when I can.)
My philosophical feelings about tablet computers
The most important thing to know about the Tablet PC, as far as I'm concerned so far, is that Microsoft did a great job...of naming it. Much as the press wants to call it a "pen" computer, it is a Tablet computer. You must understand that. The basis of the machine is that it is (or can be turned into) a tablet. The pen is secondary, and not always important. I think they did the right thing in concentrating on the tablet aspect.
Being a tablet means that it is much more mobile than laptops or desktops. You can do the things you do with a PC (read, web surf, email, etc.) in more situations (sitting without a desk, standing, etc.). The big change since earlier tablet computers like the Grid Convertible is that so many more people read so much more on a computer. PCs used to be mainly for composing, doing "what if?", etc. Now we use it for those applications, but even more we spend time reading (web, email, emailed documents) and quick communicating of simple stuff (IM). Another big change is that the main thing connected to a PC is not a printer, but rather all of computerdom, through LANs and the Internet. With 802.11, that connection can now be ubiquitous in more locations -- we are no longer tied to a particular wall connector. These factors increase the value of a tablet, and define its use more. When you read, you mainly select things on the screen (which email message to read, which links to follow, or which "favorites" to revisit), or scroll. When you compose, you are much more concerned with text.
The pen is an obvious choice for an input device on a tablet. Since a tablet is often used in a horizontal position, and you can't be sure of a firm place to rest something like a mouse, a pen is appropriate for a pointing device. In a vertical orientation, like on a laptop, the pen isn't as appropriate for a pointing device as a mouse. In those cases we either connect an external mouse, or put up with even more limited pointing devices like touch pads or stalks. (I find the pen a much better pointing device than either a touch pad or stalk.) In both vertical and horizontal orientations, for any large amount of input of plain text, a keyboard (or in some cases dictation) is a very good solution. A mouse is a lousy text input device, and a touch pad even worse. A pen, though, is better than a mouse for text input, using either a touch keyboard on-screen or handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition, though, is not the point of a pen, just like it isn't for a mouse. The pen is also much better than the mouse (or keyboard, touch pad, or stalk) for inputting graphical information, and has been well received in the graphic arts world for years. We've put up with all sorts of kludgy UI workarounds to "draw" with a mouse, and consequently rarely use drawings in informal electronic communications as much as we would in a room with a whiteboard. The pen opens up new areas for applications using drawing, of which "digital ink" is one. Of course, every new input/output device added standard to a PC opens up vast new areas, from laser printers to CD-ROMs to sound cards to modems. The pen will be no different.
So, they are "pen" computers only in that being a tablet to some extent implies a pen. Like the touch pad and stalk in a traditional laptop, they are a reasonable compromise for doing the type of input you want to do with a PC. If you really wanted a "pen" computer, you'd probably want a desktop with a large dedicated writing surface like you find with the excellent pen tablets used by graphic artists. It's much easier to build a good pen system when it doesn't have to run through an electrically noisy color display, and it's much better to make a screen without protection layers for a pen.
Impressions after using it
I'm not going to do my normal job of showing pictures, etc., of the computer in operation, since you can find pretty good Flash and video presentations on the web sites of Microsoft and the manufacturers. I'll just comment on what I've encountered. I assume most readers here have read lots of reviews and other material about the machines and software.
As I write this, I've had the Tablet PC for about a day or so. After I spend more time, I'll publish updated impressions.
It's a geek magnet
Like most any new device, but maybe more so, other people are very interested in seeing it. On the way home from buying it, I stopped to go to a Massachusetts Software and Internet Council committee meeting. When I explained that I was a bit late because I had just bought a Tablet PC, I was immediately kicked out of the meeting until I would go back to the car, get it out of the trunk, and return to show it to everybody. The machine was still in the sealed carton, so I had to open it up and show how the screen turned around and how light/heavy it was. (I didn't take the time from the meeting to turn it on and configure it, though.) Later that night, my friend Bob Frankston strongly encouraged me to come over and show it to him and let him play a bit (he's probably going to get one of the Tablets -- he was also at Slate for part of the time). Anybody I tell about it says the same thing: "Can you bring it over for me to see? Please?" Just a warning.
You have to spend time learning how to set it up best for you
It took some fooling around (and there's still more to be done) to learn how to set up my Tablet PC to work the way that fits me best. For example, the Toshiba had "hibernate" as the default for closing the case, and "power off" for the power switch when it's in battery powered mode. I had to change them both to "standby", so that I can wake up the Tablet in a few (about 5) seconds. I didn't want it to go into portrait mode when I switch to tablet, only on command, so I changed that setting.
Inking problems with my chicken scratch
The most interesting thing for me was discovering something about inking. Just like I think I remember with the Acer prototypes last June, the inking is a little slow for my writing. It lags behind my pen a bit. (I haven't had a chance to compare the effects on different implementations of the pens.) In addition, the ink seems "smoothed" to remove the jaggies from the digitizer or something. It just doesn't seem to sample fast enough for my writing. I write with a quick, jerky, "chicken scratch" style. I print, and almost never use cursive (ever since a teacher in 8th grade told me my handwriting was so bad that I should either print or type from now on for her). In addition, the amount of pressure at which the pen is set to be "touching" feels relatively arbitrary (though consistent). With my way of writing, the combination of smoothing and strict determination of "touching" makes my quick notes look completely different than with a pen, and very difficult for me (or the recognizer) to understand. With cursive writing, done a bit slowly and large for me, things are much better -- but I'm not at all used to cursive writing.
For input, I find that handwriting recognition works OK, so I sometimes use it for input in Tablet mode, and sometimes use the on-screen keyboard (the keyboard is better for passwords...). The combination of cursive recognition and printing recognition is a nice step up from the machines I used in the old days. When I write in a way that my ink is readable (slowly and big), the recognition is surprisingly good, but not wonderful. Still, it sure beats writing with a mouse... For large amounts of text, I'll use the keyboard -- that's why I wanted a convertible. I was buying a new laptop, not replacing a keyboard.
I found a partial solution to the weird ink, though, for note taking: I set the Journal application to use the pressure sensitive feature of the pen. Suddenly, the ink of my handwriting (even printing) looked much better. In fact, while I was trying out the new settings, my cell phone rang, and I had to quickly jot down a number to call, and then take notes during the resulting call. It worked great. I just had to write somewhat bigger than I normally did, but with pressure sensitivity making it do different thicknesses as I pressed down it was readable for me, and using a pen was a lot easier than holding a cell phone to my ear with one hand and typing with the other -- and I got to doodle to boot! The Tablet PC may not be better than paper for taking notes (ignoring the storage and searching features I haven't tried yet), but it's sure makes the PC a more useful device. Some note taking is much better than none. Also, I'm happy I have the Toshiba with its pressure sensitive pen, but I'm waiting to find out how to tune other pen parameters. (I tried downloading Wacom's new driver for Tablet PCs that lets you set sensitivity, etc., but I had problems getting it to calibrate correctly for some reason.)
Buttons help reading and probably other things
An important part of a tablet is being able to read, and an important part of reading on a computer screen is scrolling. The Tablet PCs have buttons you can push. The Compaq has a rocker switch, too. The Toshiba has basically 3 buttons, by default set to Up-Arrow, Down-Arrow, and Enter. This means when you're reading, you barely even need the pen. Very nice. I think buttons are real important, just like on PDAs. Remember, it's a Tablet PC, not a Pen PC...
An interesting thing about reading: I've noticed how pervasive the RIM Blackberry has become with financial people like venture capitalists and analysts. They sit there in meetings, and every once in a while hold their RIM's in their laps and check their email. A Tablet PC with 802.11 or connection to cellular wireless with Bluetooth or its own cell phone PCMCIA card gives you an even better way to read real email and share what you've found with others in a meeting. Having a personal communications or data storage device you can read with on your lap with the right form factor is already successful (the RIM, PDAs). Here is a device with wider applicability and real Internet connectivity and lots of storage, with ink as a socially acceptable reply method/medium. The ability to turn the Tablet PC on or off in about 5 seconds with the push of a button is very helpful. (I think it takes a few more seconds to reconnect to 802.11, though.)
Portrait mode is a win
One of the properties of a tablet is being able to run in portrait as well as landscape mode. For reading on screen this can be very helpful. Much of what you read fits better on a machine the size of a pad of paper when it's in portrait mode, especially when you only have 1024x768 resolution (or is it 768x1024?). I received some email that I read over breakfast that included images of several fax pages. Reading it on my Toshiba in portrait mode was really great. I never needed to scroll, I just tapped the Next Page button every once in a while. Of course, for many regular computer applications and web pages, landscape mode works better. Being able to switch is important. On my big desktop machine, with an 18" 1280x1024 LCD display, I don't mind wasting the screen space when I read a portrait format page. With something I carry around, though, I don't want to have something any bigger than it has to be.
General purpose machine
If reading on screen is so important, why not just build an electronic book for reading? The answer is simple. You need to have a portable general purpose machine like a laptop anyway for composing, calculating, and running specialized applications. By the time you build a good enough "book" machine that can also connect to the Internet with whatever technique you have available (dial up, 100baseT, 802.11) and connect to the devices you'd like (USB), and be upgradable, etc., you're already spending enough for most of a laptop. It's silly to pay twice, so the more general laptop has always won out. It's only in the case of a completely different form factor, and a price down in the range of a software package or PC peripheral (which is what a Palm cost and was positioned as) that you'd buy both. By making the Tablet PC a full-fledged Windows machine, with access to all the normal peripherals and applications, you don't have that tension of needing to pay twice as much.
How far have we come?
Using the Toshiba (and remembering the little time on the Acer, and seeing the demos at conferences and on the web), Bob and I were both struck with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers in some respects. The pen/tablet software and hardware aspects appear just a bit better, especially given the huge increase in speed and capacity of today's computers vs. the ones of the early to mid-1990's (using the Grid Convertible as an example). Of course, making it work with color displays, and integrating things into full Windows XP, did take work, I assume. The advance in features, though, seems more like a "next release" or two of things rather than 10 years passing.
This is not bad, though. Things were pretty good in the old days. The Grid got hammered for its black and white screen just as color became standard (B&W being necessary for some of the digitizers of the day), and there wasn't as much advantage to a tablet back then. As I pointed out above, the big change is the environment in which the PC works. There are finally lots of real reasons for tablet computers. Also, the hardware has improved enough where the cost in weight and price is little different than the amount we've repeatedly spent for other new additions to laptops during that timeframe: CD drives, bigger screens, wireless, etc. Moore's law eventually brought those costs down to where they became standard. Tablet-ability is the latest in that long line of new capabilities.
What's exciting to me, though, is that the way Microsoft is doing this will hopefully encourage tablet-centric innovation to start again throughout the hardware and software industry, so we'll continue these advances, and the rate of improvement will return to what it was in the early 1990's. The wide variations in Tablet PC form factors shows the start of that innovation. There will be trial and error to learn all sorts of important issues, from number and placement of buttons, to inking techniques, to new ways to take advantage of the pen and sound.
Bottom line so far
So, one day in, my verdict: I can't see ever buying a portable laptop that isn't a convertible -- the benefits are too great for me. It's a Tablet PC, not a Pen PC, and not a Clamshell PC, and that's a win. While these are clearly still basically a version 1 or 2, they are still very useful. If you read a lot on a PC, and move your laptop around a lot, and have benefited from 802.11, and don't mind using early software that works but is basic (like the original VisiCalc was), and are in the market for a new laptop, take the next step and move up to a tablet. Corporate evaluators must start learning about these systems, because as they improve and the price difference disappears, you'll have to figure out how to configure them, what type of software to insist upon, etc. If you always wanted to do your composing with a pen, and expect handwriting to be as reliable as a keyboard, stick with the keyboard, and wait for "handwriting computing" to happen, if it ever does. It's not that important. Tablet computing is. It will make reading on a computer even more pervasive. I think Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers who were willing to take a chance trying to advance the state of mainstream personal computing are to be commended for what they've done.
- Dan Bricklin, 14 November 2002
In response to reactions to this essay, I've written another one looking at the reasoning behind some of my assertions. I explore a bit of the history of tablet hardware, as well as the state of application software for them in the early 1990's. I even link to a few patents to get detailed descriptions. See: "About Tablet Computing Old and New".
- Dan Bricklin, 22 November 2002
* * * OTHER ARTICLE * * *
About Tablet Computing Old and New A discussion of PC tablet hardware and software from the 1990's, and why Microsoft's pushing of the new Tablet PCs will bring renewed innovation.
The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg > In my "Tablet PC: First Impressions" essay I made some assertions about the amount of progress in tablet computing represented by the new Tablet PCs. Some sample quotes:
Bob and I were both struck with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers in some respects.
The advance in features, though, seems more like a "next release" or two of things rather than 10 years passing.
Things were pretty good in the old days....the way Microsoft is doing this will hopefully encourage tablet-centric innovation to start again throughout the hardware and software industry, so we'll continue these advances, and the rate of improvement will return to what it was in the early 1990's....[the new machines are] still basically a version 1 or 2...
I think Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers who were willing to take a chance trying to advance the state of mainstream personal computing are to be commended for what they've done.
It's hard for people who worked very hard bringing these new systems to market to hear me say it only looks like a "next release", and at the same time it's hard for others to understand why I believe things will advance so much further because of Microsoft and the manufacturers' recent actions. The purpose of this essay is to provide some of the reason for those statements.
The old hardware and OS software
To understand why it doesn't seem like such an advance, you have to be familiar with the hardware and software of the early 1990's.
The use of pens and tablets, and "light-pens" that you could point at the screen, goes very far back in the history of computers. For example, the SAGE air defense system from the 1950's used a "light gun" to interact with the screen. CAD/CAM systems of the 1960's (like the pioneering SketchPad) and 1970's used light pens or pens on opaque tablets to manipulate items on the screen.
A pen-based desktop system that was part of the personal computer world came from Wang in 1988. Called Wang Freestyle, it let you annotate screen captures, faxes, and scanned images, with "ink" from an electronic pen using an opaque tablet connected to a PC running normal applications, and manipulate thumbnails of those images by dragging them around using the pen. It let you synchronize recorded sound (using an attached telephone) to a recording of the pen motions. It let you then print, email, or fax the results. Freestyle was a big sensation at Comdex when shown. Even today, looking at a video of it in action demonstrated by the project lead Stephen Levine, it is impressive.
The first in the line of the "modern" tablet computers was the GRiDPad in 1989. Developed under R&D head Jeff Hawkins (who later founded Palm and Handspring), it was about 9"x12"x1.4" with a 10MHz 8086 running MSDOS. It had a pen that was at the end of a wire, and worked by making contact with a coating on the screen. It could recognize hand printed characters, and was used for data collection, like filling in forms.
The next really influential tablet system was from GO Corporation. The prototype "Lombard" was 80286 based, and ran a new, GUI operating system called PenPoint. GO was started in 1987. After announcing their product in January 1991, GO upgraded the base system to require an 80386 for the first real customer release (which was in April 1992). Later, as the company named EO, the processor for PenPoint was changed again, this time to the AT&T Hobbit chip. Each time, software developers had to upgrade their software.
After GO started on PenPoint, Microsoft reacted with enhancements to Windows 3.1 to create Windows for Pen Computing, better known as PenWindows. (The head of that project was Jeff Raikes, who now heads Microsoft's Productivity and Business Services Group which includes the Tablet PC.) Some machines produced at the time (such as the 3 lb. NCR 3125 pure tablet) could boot to either PenPoint or PenWindows. A variety of manufacturers made machines for PenWindows, including Samsung and later Compaq. The most interesting PenWindows computer, for me, was the GRiD Convertible, released in mid-1992. (I still have a working one which I used for years -- most of the other pen-enabled computers in my collection are stowed away in a warehouse.) The GRiD Convertible was a normal Windows laptop, but when you closed the screen, it folded down in such a way that the screen faced out -- like a tablet. It was started under Jeff Hawkins before he left to found Palm Computing. (Notice how these two Jeffs' names keep coming up.) NEC also made a variation on it's laptop with a screen you could turn around, like some of today's tablets. Many other manufacturers tried their hands at tablet computers, including Wang and IBM. These computers all used either a Wacom digitizer and battery-less but electronically active pen (the same used in many of today's Tablet PCs, and very popular as a desktop accessory for graphic artists) or a battery powered (or tethered on a wire) active pen from some other manufacturer. The reason for a special pen is to let the computer track the pen's location when it is held near, but not touching, the screen, much like a mouse is moved before clicking. Windows depends upon the ability to show different cursors, have "hovering" effects, etc. Unfortunately, some of the digitizing technology of the day did not work well with color screens which were just coming into a reasonable price range, so digitizers were left off of most later machines.
Another computer of the day was the Momenta, but it had pretty much its own variant of Windows, and a pen like the original GRiDPad -- no hover.
One of the last of that crop of pen-enabled computers was the Apple Newton, first shipped in 1993. While Apple had experimented with other tablet computers, this was the one released to the most fanfare. The Newton's pen, as I recall, did not have hover -- it was more like the later Palm computers which just sensed pressure on the screen from any object.
In all cases, the use of a pen as an input device was integrated into the operating system to varying degrees. The pen could be used for most mouse actions, such as clicking or dragging. Within almost any application, instead of typing on a keyboard, you could write on the screen or tap on a virtual keyboard. There were various "gestures" (special pen movements) that invoked certain functions, for example, Undo, or, like today's Tablet PCs, bring up a writing pad or virtual keyboard. All systems had handwriting recognition of some sort.
Looking at the machines of those days, and given the advances in hardware since, today's Tablet PCs are not very surprising. They are somewhat lighter and with much faster microprocessors and greater memory, but the pen additions and form-factors are similar. The important thing, as I point out in my First Impressions essay, is that today's machines come into an environment where you read more on a computer screen, and wireless connectivity to all of computerdom is commonplace. Now these machines have a much more important reason to exist.
The old applications
The first applications for the GRiDPad were very basic, in line with the simple forms capabilities of a basic browser. With the advent of PenPoint, though, developers started producing much more sophisticated products, pouring millions and millions of dollars into development. PenPoint itself had a very sophisticated, pen-centric UI. Coming before the convertibles, and trying to completely eliminate the keyboard, there were all sorts of user interface advances. Some of those ended up influencing Windows 95. It had OLE-like embedding well before it was viable on Windows, it required just a "tap" to launch apps which avoided the need for double-clicking, and more.
In early 1990, I co-founded a company called Slate Corporation (along with other PC veterans like Vern Raburn, Dottie Hall, and Tom Byers). Our mission was to create application software for the upcoming PenPoint and other tablet/pen operating systems. There were other companies that were creating application software specifically for these machines, but ours was the best funded, produced the most products, and is the one I know best, so I'll talk about it first.
We demonstrated the first of our software when GO announced PenPoint (286 version) in January 1991, and shipped our products in shrink-wrapped boxes in 1992 for both PenPoint and PenWindows. The products we developed were:
PenApps, an application development system somewhat similar to Visual Basic (which was being developed around the same time). It had an object oriented programming language (PenBasic) with support for ink as a data type, a drag and drop interface builder, and more. You could write on a form created with it, and when filling out forms it was smart about targeting the ink you wrote to the correct field (so you didn't have to carefully "writing inside of the lines"). It had "deferred translation" where the ink was kept around so you didn't have to wait for each field to translate as you filled out a form, and you could check translated data against the original ink at any time. It had a built-in database. It was a major product. PenBook, an electronic book creation system. This was similar to Adobe's PDF system (being developed around the same time), but tuned for reading on a tablet computer. It could convert Postscript files output from most any program into its format, and then you could read the "books" with a special reader. The reader supported pen gestures for turning pages, annotating and highlighting, bookmarks that looked like paperclips, and more. It had searching and stored the "book" in a compressed format. At-Hand spreadsheet for PenPoint only. This was a full-fledged spreadsheet (mainly created by Bill Lynch who went on to work with Microsoft's Excel group for years) complete with a BASIC-like programming language with special spreadsheet data-types and operators to react to tapped buttons and other events (developed by Bob Frankston before VBA came out from Microsoft in 1994) and a full graphing package (developed by Buzz Kelley, now with me at Trellix). It could read and write Excel and 1-2-3 files (thanks to Peter Levin, now with me at Trellix). In addition to all this, it was completely operable with a pen, with lots of innovative features. You could write on the spreadsheet cell grid, and it would target your writing to the appropriate cell. If what you wrote was text, you got a label cell; if it was a number, you got a numeric value, appropriately formatted. If it couldn't recognize what you wrote well, you got ink reduced to fit in the cell (ready for correction or to be left alone). For entering formulas, there was a special input dialog tuned to the pen. A couple taps of the pen selected a range of cells, and writing a "+" put the "sum" function where you wrote it. There was a markup layer to annotate things with ink. The graphing system handled most of the popular graph types (including 3D and contour) yet scaled appropriately to work well when embedded on the sheet or elsewhere. A year or so later we created an Excel plug-in called PenPower that added many of those pen-centric capabilities to Excel running under PenWindows. Day-Timer Pen Scheduler for PenPoint or PenWindows. This was an electronic ink-based version of Day-Timer, Inc.'s organizer, with calendar-based day/week/month/year views, notetaking pages, to-do lists, and a name/address book (which used text and ink). With easy zooming, you could use "tiny text" to fit lots of data in any space ("Your pages are uncluttered, yet full of valuable information"). You could circle something of interest, and then file that snippet away in an index by topic, linked back to the original, all with a quick gesture. LooseLeaf Notetaker for PenWindows. This was an ink-based notetaking application for the GRiD Convertible with a variety of pens and markers.
In addition to Slate's products, there were deep, innovative products from other companies. For example, Pensoft produced a personal information manager that used recognized text and a data base. A later company (founded in 1991) was Aha!, which created an ink-based notetaking product with extensive ink editing features. Among other things, it could "word wrap" text still in ink, and do background translation for later conversion or searching. Aha! was bought by Microsoft in 1996, and you can see how the Windows Journal program comes from it (without some of the cool word-wrapping features).
One of the issues we were working on at Slate in the mid-1990's was evangelizing the use of digital ink created with a digitizing pen as a normal data type among applications. We also had to deal with making the ink look true enough to your quick scribbles, so that even when you used a 6"x8" screen to mark up an 8 1/2"x11" fax shrunk to fit, it would look "normal" printed out or re-faxed at full size. We did lots of work with growing and shrinking ink, and related issues. (When you shrink, you don't want the lines to get below a certain thickness or else it sometimes looks weird.) We also worked on some early pocket sized prototypes, as well as software for Apple's Newton when it first shipped.
Learn from old patents
To learn more about the level of thinking that went into these old products, you can read some of the patents that came out of those efforts. Since patents are supposed to teach you what is novel and important, reading them should be like reading a techie-to-techie whitepaper about what's special and why. (Unlike when looking for infringement, just read the main body of these patents, not the claims. I list them here not to say whether or not they apply today, but rather as a source of learning about what was thought about in the past.)
5,613,019: System and methods for spacing, storing and recognizing electronic representations of handwriting, printing and drawings. [Based on filings to the Patent Office done in May 1993.] This has the text of Aha!'s description. I found the middle section (it's a long patent) where it discusses how to determine what's a "word" (getting the dots over the "i"s to be part of the right word, even if written much later) interesting. The patent mentions that the digitizers of those days sampled the pen's position about 200 times a second -- faster than most Tablet PCs today.
5,455,901: Input device with deferred translation. [Based on filings from November 1991.] This describes keeping the ink around to translate later, as well as for verification or instead of translation. It's the Slate PenApps patent. This and the other Slate patents are now owned by Compaq/HP. (Compaq bought Slate Corporation when we ran out of money when people refrained from buying the computers that ran our software.)
5,717,939 and 5,848,187: Method and apparatus for entering and manipulating spreadsheet cell data. [These are based on filings from November 1991.] These are the Slate At-Hand spreadsheet patents (the two have similar text, but different claims). They describe targeting ink to cells, special spreadsheet gestures, improved recognition for a spreadsheet, and more.
5,867,150: Graphic indexing system. [Based on filings from February 1992.] One of the Slate Pen Scheduler patents. This relates to selecting something on the screen by circling it and then quickly adding it to a graphical index or gallery. Sometimes it's easier to just put the image of a piece of a page into an index for quick scanning with your eyes than to type a description. This patent relates to such a feature.
5,231,578: Apparatus for document annotation and manipulation using images from a window source, 5,625,833: Document annotation & manipulation in a data processing system. [Based on filings in 1988.] Some of the Wang Freestyle patents.
So as you can see, the thinking 10 years ago was quite deep, with applications on par with anything being shown today.
Why the machines are version 1 or 2
Looking at some of the machines, you can see that we still haven't learned all the tricks necessary to make a tablet without rough edges. For example, on the Toshiba, which is supposed to have one of the better pen holders, when you put the pen back in its holder, the pen tip is close to the side of the screen and entices the mouse cursor to move over to it, away from where you left it. (This might be when you put the pen away in keyboard mode and use the touchpad, or in tablet mode to use just the arrow buttons for reading.) Worse yet, putting the pen in the holder often presses the tip, signaling a mouse click. If there are buttons or icons on that side of the screen, they sometimes get selected.
The screens vary in their feel and the pens in their weight. The perfect paper-like feel of drag for writing, without muddying up the image with ground glass, hasn't been perfected.
Some of the machines have built-in prop-up stands for reading on a desk in portrait mode, and others don't...yet. (I find that important.) We don't know enough about how many buttons are best, nor how to place them, though manufacturers are experimenting. I'm sure there are other physical attributes to be worked out.
As I pointed out in my First Impressions essay, the default values for things aren't always tuned to tablet use.
On top of all this, the weight and battery life still isn't down far enough, though the 4.25 lbs. of the Toshiba Tablet PC is much better than the 6 lbs. of the old GRiD Convertible. (Since both are normal convertibles with similar batter life, they are a good comparison.)
Why we'll see renewed advancement
In the early 1990's, innovation in tablet and pen computing moved at a rapid rate. Once the hardware and operating systems companies stopped pushing it, though, independent software developers stopped. Without constant trying of new things, and testing them in the marketplace, it is hard to have advancement. The main "new" thing you hear from Microsoft has been about their book reading software, developed for other purposes. While functionally similar to Slate's old PenBook and other products, Microsoft persevered in the image quality area to solve various problems and get a nice improvement in the eyes of many people. This improvement shows what happens when you keep trying.
The big thing from my viewpoint, though, is Microsoft's trying again and going to the trouble of integrating basic tablet and pen functionality into the latest version of Windows, and simultaneously driving better hardware with some minimum requirements. In addition, they are spending the time and money to upgrade their Office products with tablet-specific features and to provide a complete set of APIs for developers of other products.
If developers learn about what was done in the past, they can move ahead and produce better solutions to the problems we were addressing, and discover new areas to be covered. Software development is a continuous process of building on what came before, and then testing with real use. By Microsoft starting with an advanced ink application of the last generation, they've set the bar high enough to give people a boost. If they really leave things open for outside development (from both a technical and business viewpoint), and continue innovating themselves, new ideas can be tested and evaluated by the market. The fact that we now have good hardware with lots of marketing behind it means there will be at least some market for new software.
Remember what happened with the Internet as developers experimented with HTML after the early browsers came out. Compare what web sites looked like in 1994 and 1996 to today. (For example, compare the early browser-based web site authoring systems to later ones like Trellix's, and you'll see huge improvement.) Now that we have a basis to build upon, that type of advancement, like we saw in tablet and pen computing in the early 1990's, can resume where it left off.
Pasadena company's robot is fun, but not very useful -- yet
The ER1 personal robot won't make coffee, pick up the newspaper, vacuum the floors or even walk the dog. With prices starting at $599, it seems most adept at emptying wallets.
But beyond the not-so-cheap shots, the robot has a lot to offer. Like the personal computer kits of the 1970s, much can be learned -- and perhaps someday much money can be made -- on the road to usefulness.
And don't forget the prestige from being the first on the block with a robot smarter than Sony's canine-wannabe AIBO.
The ER1, sold by Pasadena, Calif.-based Evolution Robotics Inc., resembles neither a dog nor the robotic stars of science-fiction movies.
The 2-foot-tall, 20-pound machine is a three-wheeled platform that holds a laptop, its brains and has a staff that carries a Web camera, its eye. Some might confuse it with an industrial table.
All parts are included except the most expensive -- a laptop running the Windows operating system. Plan on spending at least another $1,000 if you don't already have one.
For the mechanically challenged, Evolution sells an assembled robot for $699 (still minus the computer). But anyone who opts to plunk an extra $100 for the assembled version is missing half the fun.
The ER1 is more of a hobby than a toy. It's not recommended for children under 14, unless they're supervised. Schools might be interested in using the robot to introduce the basics of robotics and programming.
It took about two hours to assemble my ER1, which came in dozens of pieces tightly packed in a box along with 100 screws. Two Universal Serial Bus cables plug into the laptop.
Once installed on the laptop, the software shows a live shot of what the robot's camera sees, various behavioral options and the robot's battery levels.
The instruction manual is especially well done, rare for a high-tech product. It clearly outlined all 32 steps to finish the job and made sense out of the various trusses, gussets, set screws and U clips.
After a few hours of charging the battery, we were ready for our first test -- a routine in which the ER1 recognizes its box and moves toward it.
My ER1 immediately recognized the box but instead of driving toward it, it backed away as though it had been abused at the factory. (Turns out the camera pointed in the wrong direction. The test worked fine after I adjusted it.)
Such tricks -- including most of the other 50 or so suggested in the manual -- are neat for showing off to neighbors or entertaining at parties. Besides following its box, the ER1 can play music, sing when it hears a loud noise, teach words to a parrot and even warn that it spots a beer can.
The recognition scheme is quite impressive. It could tell the difference between different denominations of currency. It even recognized me as long as I was wearing the shirt I had on when my image was originally captured. It didn't know me from Adam when I put on another shirt.
But the true power of the ER1 is in the ability to layer programs on top of one another, leading to more complex behaviors. Users familiar with the scripting language Python can create even more complicated tasks.
The possibilities are limited only by imagination and hardware. Evolution also plans to sell expansion kits, such as a gripper ($199) for grabbing that beer, and infrared sensors (price to be determined).
Evolution says the 12-volt rechargeable battery that powers the robot's motors can last up to three hours. My laptop battery died long before that.
I had the most fun driving the ER1 around using my home wireless connection. Because my laptop is wireless-capable, I could control the unit from my desktop computer and see everything the robot could see through that computer.
In fact, I could have controlled the thing from anywhere in the world over the Internet, provided I left a few holes open in my firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
Doh! Nevermind, apparently the same dictionary entry that said that later states that it is still incorrect, despite popular usage.
As much as we all like to make fun of President Bush, irregardless is actually correct. The ir- is not a negation, so the word means the same thing as regardless. The same thing is true for flammible and inflammible.
Well, I am sick and tired of people using the analogy of copying somebody else's car for sharing music. I don't care if you copy my car, in much the same way as I don't care if you copy my music (as in CDs that I happen to own, not as in music that I myself made). However, I'm not the one losing money in both cases. In the car side of the analogy, the company that researched, designed, and now produces that car has lost a potential sale to you. In the music side, the artist/RIAA has lost a potential sale to you. Yes, it can be argued that you never would have bought the car/music anyway, but that still doesn't account for all the piracy that occurs.
They lose enough buisness to people who realize that you can get free porn with http://www.thehun.org/ and other TGPs, so that they really don't care about the P2P pr0n. Besides, they really target new internet users who don't realize they can find untold terabytes of pr0n on the internet, and people with unusual (as in anything from scat to tentacle rape) fetishes who need a specialzed site to offer them what they want.
Copying is intrinsically different from theft. Imagine I had a cloning ray, that made copies of cars. Would you begrudge me a copy of your car, at no cost to yourself?
Suppose I make cars for a living. I sell them to dealerships for money, and they sell them to their customers. Now, let's say you walk into a dealership, pick out the most expensive car, copy it, and drive home. Of course I would begrudge you. Yes, you may not have paid for this car if you hadn't been able to copy it. However, you own a car that I took time and effort to design and produce, and you have not given me anything in return. Why should you be permitted to do this?
If an attacker knows that you prioritize a certain service, wouldn't he cause a greater disruption with his DOS with this?
Another thing: couldn't the ??AA get ISPs to use this feature, not to kill P2P sharing, but to reduce its priority (perhaps as a compromise from not being able to kill P2P outright)?
Of course, there are many benefits to this as well, I'm just pointing out possiblities.
Maybe it's just that I started reading at -1 a few weeks ago, but the number of trolls here seems to have increased greatly since the war began. Especially the obligatory ASCII-goatse with tatoos. And it now looks like we're about to get a crapflood that consists of random dirty words pluralized with 'z' and with the third one in each series being capitalized.
(Yes, this is you piss assholez BALLZ cunts, or whatever we should call you).
We all know that Slashdot has too many dupes. So, do we really need Slashbacks? Most stories that warrant updates are normally posted as dupes (or "updates" in the case of the xpde article) again later, so why keep the Slashbacks? Especially ones that cover completely unrelated topics?
With that out of the way, I may as well have a valid, on-topic comment. For the SSN thief, wouldn't it just be easier for a malicious student to install a keylogger? I'm sure that someone would think of doing that in almost every school, so why aren't SSN/Credit Card Numbers/etc stolen more often in this manner? (Maybe they are, but the students don't get caught.)
The more processors we have competing, the more Intel and AMD will push ahead in their research to make even faster (and hopefully cooler) processors. Transmeta's upcoming release of the Astro processor will provide this competition for them. I hope we can see improvement in the field of PC processors.
5 years is much longer time than your average x86 PC company would sell a computer for. I'm no Mac fanatic, in fact, I don't even own one, but I guess this goes to show that Apple does make solid products that last for a while.
Soon we'll have to deal with a computer generated version of Friends.
What happened to Day 1? Does ApacheCon count in reverse? Did absolutely nothing interesting happen?
Tablet PC: First Impressions
...the way Microsoft is doing this will hopefully encourage tablet-centric innovation to start again throughout the hardware and software industry, so we'll continue these advances, and the rate of improvement will return to what it was in the early 1990's. ...[the new machines are] still basically a version 1 or 2...
Back in the early 1990's, I was heavily involved in the pen computing world. I co-founded Slate Corporation which developed application software for GO's Penpoint as well as Microsoft's Windows for Pen Computing and for the Apple Newton. I was exposed to software and hardware development, both at the OS and application level, and had experience using a wide variety of machines. With the release of the new Tablet PCs based upon Microsoft's new software, I felt it was appropriate for me to comment upon that, given my perspective. You will find here my comments based on my general feelings as well as actual experiences using various equipment.
How I decided what to buy
At various points in time, starting with Bill Gate's Comdex 2000 talk, I have been seeing public prototypes of Microsoft's Tablet PC software and the accompanying hardware. Most recently, I got to play with an Acer unit for a few minutes while waiting to get into Jeff Raike's talk at TechXNY (PC Expo). My Thinkpad was well over 3 years old, and I knew it was time for a new laptop. I decided to wait until the Tablet PCs became available, and probably get one of them. I had used a Grid Convertible (a machine from late 1992) for years after it came out, and knew that a convertible could be a fine laptop, even if you didn't take advantage of the pen much, and I needed a lightweight laptop.
Now that the Tablet PCs are shipping, I decided it was time for me to buy. Since I was spending my own money and knew this would have to last me for a while, I looked carefully. Given my needs, I narrowed it down to the Acer, Compaq, and Toshiba. The Acer has a maximum of 256M of RAM, so I decided that wouldn't work for me in case I wanted to do any development work, or run some of the photo manipulation apps I'd probably end up using for my photography work. I was really torn between the Compaq and the Toshiba. From the specs, both looked like they'd meet my needs. The Compaq is supposed to have much better battery life, has a stalk as the keyboard resident pointing device, has more buttons, and is lighter when the keyboard is detached. Its pen, though, is not pressure sensitive. The Toshiba has a bigger and supposedly brighter screen (better for showing pictures and presentations, which I do a lot), faster processor, a touch pad (which I don't like as much as the stalk), and is in a more traditional form factor. Configured as I wanted them, with warranties, etc., they were close enough in price. I've had two Toshiba Portege's over the years, so I was more familiar with them, but I worked with Compaq on a similar, earlier machine, so I had some loyalty (and they ended up with Slate's assets when we closed it down).
In the end, I couldn't find a Compaq to look at, but I found a Toshiba 3505 that was available at a CompUSA store in my area. After looking at it, I decided I might as well get the Toshiba. (I've presented the whole story of how I made my decision here not as an endorsement, but as an example of the type of thinking you might want to go through. I expect to spend time with some of the other units over the next few months, and will comment about them when I can.)
My philosophical feelings about tablet computers
The most important thing to know about the Tablet PC, as far as I'm concerned so far, is that Microsoft did a great job...of naming it. Much as the press wants to call it a "pen" computer, it is a Tablet computer. You must understand that. The basis of the machine is that it is (or can be turned into) a tablet. The pen is secondary, and not always important. I think they did the right thing in concentrating on the tablet aspect.
Being a tablet means that it is much more mobile than laptops or desktops. You can do the things you do with a PC (read, web surf, email, etc.) in more situations (sitting without a desk, standing, etc.). The big change since earlier tablet computers like the Grid Convertible is that so many more people read so much more on a computer. PCs used to be mainly for composing, doing "what if?", etc. Now we use it for those applications, but even more we spend time reading (web, email, emailed documents) and quick communicating of simple stuff (IM). Another big change is that the main thing connected to a PC is not a printer, but rather all of computerdom, through LANs and the Internet. With 802.11, that connection can now be ubiquitous in more locations -- we are no longer tied to a particular wall connector. These factors increase the value of a tablet, and define its use more. When you read, you mainly select things on the screen (which email message to read, which links to follow, or which "favorites" to revisit), or scroll. When you compose, you are much more concerned with text.
The pen is an obvious choice for an input device on a tablet. Since a tablet is often used in a horizontal position, and you can't be sure of a firm place to rest something like a mouse, a pen is appropriate for a pointing device. In a vertical orientation, like on a laptop, the pen isn't as appropriate for a pointing device as a mouse. In those cases we either connect an external mouse, or put up with even more limited pointing devices like touch pads or stalks. (I find the pen a much better pointing device than either a touch pad or stalk.) In both vertical and horizontal orientations, for any large amount of input of plain text, a keyboard (or in some cases dictation) is a very good solution. A mouse is a lousy text input device, and a touch pad even worse. A pen, though, is better than a mouse for text input, using either a touch keyboard on-screen or handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition, though, is not the point of a pen, just like it isn't for a mouse. The pen is also much better than the mouse (or keyboard, touch pad, or stalk) for inputting graphical information, and has been well received in the graphic arts world for years. We've put up with all sorts of kludgy UI workarounds to "draw" with a mouse, and consequently rarely use drawings in informal electronic communications as much as we would in a room with a whiteboard. The pen opens up new areas for applications using drawing, of which "digital ink" is one. Of course, every new input/output device added standard to a PC opens up vast new areas, from laser printers to CD-ROMs to sound cards to modems. The pen will be no different.
So, they are "pen" computers only in that being a tablet to some extent implies a pen. Like the touch pad and stalk in a traditional laptop, they are a reasonable compromise for doing the type of input you want to do with a PC. If you really wanted a "pen" computer, you'd probably want a desktop with a large dedicated writing surface like you find with the excellent pen tablets used by graphic artists. It's much easier to build a good pen system when it doesn't have to run through an electrically noisy color display, and it's much better to make a screen without protection layers for a pen.
Impressions after using it
I'm not going to do my normal job of showing pictures, etc., of the computer in operation, since you can find pretty good Flash and video presentations on the web sites of Microsoft and the manufacturers. I'll just comment on what I've encountered. I assume most readers here have read lots of reviews and other material about the machines and software.
As I write this, I've had the Tablet PC for about a day or so. After I spend more time, I'll publish updated impressions.
It's a geek magnet
Like most any new device, but maybe more so, other people are very interested in seeing it. On the way home from buying it, I stopped to go to a Massachusetts Software and Internet Council committee meeting. When I explained that I was a bit late because I had just bought a Tablet PC, I was immediately kicked out of the meeting until I would go back to the car, get it out of the trunk, and return to show it to everybody. The machine was still in the sealed carton, so I had to open it up and show how the screen turned around and how light/heavy it was. (I didn't take the time from the meeting to turn it on and configure it, though.) Later that night, my friend Bob Frankston strongly encouraged me to come over and show it to him and let him play a bit (he's probably going to get one of the Tablets -- he was also at Slate for part of the time). Anybody I tell about it says the same thing: "Can you bring it over for me to see? Please?" Just a warning.
You have to spend time learning how to set it up best for you
It took some fooling around (and there's still more to be done) to learn how to set up my Tablet PC to work the way that fits me best. For example, the Toshiba had "hibernate" as the default for closing the case, and "power off" for the power switch when it's in battery powered mode. I had to change them both to "standby", so that I can wake up the Tablet in a few (about 5) seconds. I didn't want it to go into portrait mode when I switch to tablet, only on command, so I changed that setting.
Inking problems with my chicken scratch
The most interesting thing for me was discovering something about inking. Just like I think I remember with the Acer prototypes last June, the inking is a little slow for my writing. It lags behind my pen a bit. (I haven't had a chance to compare the effects on different implementations of the pens.) In addition, the ink seems "smoothed" to remove the jaggies from the digitizer or something. It just doesn't seem to sample fast enough for my writing. I write with a quick, jerky, "chicken scratch" style. I print, and almost never use cursive (ever since a teacher in 8th grade told me my handwriting was so bad that I should either print or type from now on for her). In addition, the amount of pressure at which the pen is set to be "touching" feels relatively arbitrary (though consistent). With my way of writing, the combination of smoothing and strict determination of "touching" makes my quick notes look completely different than with a pen, and very difficult for me (or the recognizer) to understand. With cursive writing, done a bit slowly and large for me, things are much better -- but I'm not at all used to cursive writing.
For input, I find that handwriting recognition works OK, so I sometimes use it for input in Tablet mode, and sometimes use the on-screen keyboard (the keyboard is better for passwords...). The combination of cursive recognition and printing recognition is a nice step up from the machines I used in the old days. When I write in a way that my ink is readable (slowly and big), the recognition is surprisingly good, but not wonderful. Still, it sure beats writing with a mouse... For large amounts of text, I'll use the keyboard -- that's why I wanted a convertible. I was buying a new laptop, not replacing a keyboard.
I found a partial solution to the weird ink, though, for note taking: I set the Journal application to use the pressure sensitive feature of the pen. Suddenly, the ink of my handwriting (even printing) looked much better. In fact, while I was trying out the new settings, my cell phone rang, and I had to quickly jot down a number to call, and then take notes during the resulting call. It worked great. I just had to write somewhat bigger than I normally did, but with pressure sensitivity making it do different thicknesses as I pressed down it was readable for me, and using a pen was a lot easier than holding a cell phone to my ear with one hand and typing with the other -- and I got to doodle to boot! The Tablet PC may not be better than paper for taking notes (ignoring the storage and searching features I haven't tried yet), but it's sure makes the PC a more useful device. Some note taking is much better than none. Also, I'm happy I have the Toshiba with its pressure sensitive pen, but I'm waiting to find out how to tune other pen parameters. (I tried downloading Wacom's new driver for Tablet PCs that lets you set sensitivity, etc., but I had problems getting it to calibrate correctly for some reason.)
Buttons help reading and probably other things
An important part of a tablet is being able to read, and an important part of reading on a computer screen is scrolling. The Tablet PCs have buttons you can push. The Compaq has a rocker switch, too. The Toshiba has basically 3 buttons, by default set to Up-Arrow, Down-Arrow, and Enter. This means when you're reading, you barely even need the pen. Very nice. I think buttons are real important, just like on PDAs. Remember, it's a Tablet PC, not a Pen PC...
An interesting thing about reading: I've noticed how pervasive the RIM Blackberry has become with financial people like venture capitalists and analysts. They sit there in meetings, and every once in a while hold their RIM's in their laps and check their email. A Tablet PC with 802.11 or connection to cellular wireless with Bluetooth or its own cell phone PCMCIA card gives you an even better way to read real email and share what you've found with others in a meeting. Having a personal communications or data storage device you can read with on your lap with the right form factor is already successful (the RIM, PDAs). Here is a device with wider applicability and real Internet connectivity and lots of storage, with ink as a socially acceptable reply method/medium. The ability to turn the Tablet PC on or off in about 5 seconds with the push of a button is very helpful. (I think it takes a few more seconds to reconnect to 802.11, though.)
Portrait mode is a win
One of the properties of a tablet is being able to run in portrait as well as landscape mode. For reading on screen this can be very helpful. Much of what you read fits better on a machine the size of a pad of paper when it's in portrait mode, especially when you only have 1024x768 resolution (or is it 768x1024?). I received some email that I read over breakfast that included images of several fax pages. Reading it on my Toshiba in portrait mode was really great. I never needed to scroll, I just tapped the Next Page button every once in a while. Of course, for many regular computer applications and web pages, landscape mode works better. Being able to switch is important. On my big desktop machine, with an 18" 1280x1024 LCD display, I don't mind wasting the screen space when I read a portrait format page. With something I carry around, though, I don't want to have something any bigger than it has to be.
General purpose machine
If reading on screen is so important, why not just build an electronic book for reading? The answer is simple. You need to have a portable general purpose machine like a laptop anyway for composing, calculating, and running specialized applications. By the time you build a good enough "book" machine that can also connect to the Internet with whatever technique you have available (dial up, 100baseT, 802.11) and connect to the devices you'd like (USB), and be upgradable, etc., you're already spending enough for most of a laptop. It's silly to pay twice, so the more general laptop has always won out. It's only in the case of a completely different form factor, and a price down in the range of a software package or PC peripheral (which is what a Palm cost and was positioned as) that you'd buy both. By making the Tablet PC a full-fledged Windows machine, with access to all the normal peripherals and applications, you don't have that tension of needing to pay twice as much.
How far have we come?
Using the Toshiba (and remembering the little time on the Acer, and seeing the demos at conferences and on the web), Bob and I were both struck with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers in some respects. The pen/tablet software and hardware aspects appear just a bit better, especially given the huge increase in speed and capacity of today's computers vs. the ones of the early to mid-1990's (using the Grid Convertible as an example). Of course, making it work with color displays, and integrating things into full Windows XP, did take work, I assume. The advance in features, though, seems more like a "next release" or two of things rather than 10 years passing.
This is not bad, though. Things were pretty good in the old days. The Grid got hammered for its black and white screen just as color became standard (B&W being necessary for some of the digitizers of the day), and there wasn't as much advantage to a tablet back then. As I pointed out above, the big change is the environment in which the PC works. There are finally lots of real reasons for tablet computers. Also, the hardware has improved enough where the cost in weight and price is little different than the amount we've repeatedly spent for other new additions to laptops during that timeframe: CD drives, bigger screens, wireless, etc. Moore's law eventually brought those costs down to where they became standard. Tablet-ability is the latest in that long line of new capabilities.
What's exciting to me, though, is that the way Microsoft is doing this will hopefully encourage tablet-centric innovation to start again throughout the hardware and software industry, so we'll continue these advances, and the rate of improvement will return to what it was in the early 1990's. The wide variations in Tablet PC form factors shows the start of that innovation. There will be trial and error to learn all sorts of important issues, from number and placement of buttons, to inking techniques, to new ways to take advantage of the pen and sound.
Bottom line so far
So, one day in, my verdict: I can't see ever buying a portable laptop that isn't a convertible -- the benefits are too great for me. It's a Tablet PC, not a Pen PC, and not a Clamshell PC, and that's a win. While these are clearly still basically a version 1 or 2, they are still very useful. If you read a lot on a PC, and move your laptop around a lot, and have benefited from 802.11, and don't mind using early software that works but is basic (like the original VisiCalc was), and are in the market for a new laptop, take the next step and move up to a tablet. Corporate evaluators must start learning about these systems, because as they improve and the price difference disappears, you'll have to figure out how to configure them, what type of software to insist upon, etc. If you always wanted to do your composing with a pen, and expect handwriting to be as reliable as a keyboard, stick with the keyboard, and wait for "handwriting computing" to happen, if it ever does. It's not that important. Tablet computing is. It will make reading on a computer even more pervasive. I think Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers who were willing to take a chance trying to advance the state of mainstream personal computing are to be commended for what they've done.
- Dan Bricklin, 14 November 2002
In response to reactions to this essay, I've written another one looking at the reasoning behind some of my assertions. I explore a bit of the history of tablet hardware, as well as the state of application software for them in the early 1990's. I even link to a few patents to get detailed descriptions. See: "About Tablet Computing Old and New".
- Dan Bricklin, 22 November 2002
* * * OTHER ARTICLE * * *
About Tablet Computing Old and New
A discussion of PC tablet hardware and software from the 1990's, and why Microsoft's pushing of the new Tablet PCs will bring renewed innovation.
The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg >
In my "Tablet PC: First Impressions" essay I made some assertions about the amount of progress in tablet computing represented by the new Tablet PCs. Some sample quotes:
Bob and I were both struck with how little advance there had been since the last try for pen computers in some respects.
The advance in features, though, seems more like a "next release" or two of things rather than 10 years passing.
Things were pretty good in the old days.
I think Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers who were willing to take a chance trying to advance the state of mainstream personal computing are to be commended for what they've done.
It's hard for people who worked very hard bringing these new systems to market to hear me say it only looks like a "next release", and at the same time it's hard for others to understand why I believe things will advance so much further because of Microsoft and the manufacturers' recent actions. The purpose of this essay is to provide some of the reason for those statements.
The old hardware and OS software
To understand why it doesn't seem like such an advance, you have to be familiar with the hardware and software of the early 1990's.
The use of pens and tablets, and "light-pens" that you could point at the screen, goes very far back in the history of computers. For example, the SAGE air defense system from the 1950's used a "light gun" to interact with the screen. CAD/CAM systems of the 1960's (like the pioneering SketchPad) and 1970's used light pens or pens on opaque tablets to manipulate items on the screen.
A pen-based desktop system that was part of the personal computer world came from Wang in 1988. Called Wang Freestyle, it let you annotate screen captures, faxes, and scanned images, with "ink" from an electronic pen using an opaque tablet connected to a PC running normal applications, and manipulate thumbnails of those images by dragging them around using the pen. It let you synchronize recorded sound (using an attached telephone) to a recording of the pen motions. It let you then print, email, or fax the results. Freestyle was a big sensation at Comdex when shown. Even today, looking at a video of it in action demonstrated by the project lead Stephen Levine, it is impressive.
The first in the line of the "modern" tablet computers was the GRiDPad in 1989. Developed under R&D head Jeff Hawkins (who later founded Palm and Handspring), it was about 9"x12"x1.4" with a 10MHz 8086 running MSDOS. It had a pen that was at the end of a wire, and worked by making contact with a coating on the screen. It could recognize hand printed characters, and was used for data collection, like filling in forms.
The next really influential tablet system was from GO Corporation. The prototype "Lombard" was 80286 based, and ran a new, GUI operating system called PenPoint. GO was started in 1987. After announcing their product in January 1991, GO upgraded the base system to require an 80386 for the first real customer release (which was in April 1992). Later, as the company named EO, the processor for PenPoint was changed again, this time to the AT&T Hobbit chip. Each time, software developers had to upgrade their software.
After GO started on PenPoint, Microsoft reacted with enhancements to Windows 3.1 to create Windows for Pen Computing, better known as PenWindows. (The head of that project was Jeff Raikes, who now heads Microsoft's Productivity and Business Services Group which includes the Tablet PC.) Some machines produced at the time (such as the 3 lb. NCR 3125 pure tablet) could boot to either PenPoint or PenWindows. A variety of manufacturers made machines for PenWindows, including Samsung and later Compaq. The most interesting PenWindows computer, for me, was the GRiD Convertible, released in mid-1992. (I still have a working one which I used for years -- most of the other pen-enabled computers in my collection are stowed away in a warehouse.) The GRiD Convertible was a normal Windows laptop, but when you closed the screen, it folded down in such a way that the screen faced out -- like a tablet. It was started under Jeff Hawkins before he left to found Palm Computing. (Notice how these two Jeffs' names keep coming up.) NEC also made a variation on it's laptop with a screen you could turn around, like some of today's tablets. Many other manufacturers tried their hands at tablet computers, including Wang and IBM. These computers all used either a Wacom digitizer and battery-less but electronically active pen (the same used in many of today's Tablet PCs, and very popular as a desktop accessory for graphic artists) or a battery powered (or tethered on a wire) active pen from some other manufacturer. The reason for a special pen is to let the computer track the pen's location when it is held near, but not touching, the screen, much like a mouse is moved before clicking. Windows depends upon the ability to show different cursors, have "hovering" effects, etc. Unfortunately, some of the digitizing technology of the day did not work well with color screens which were just coming into a reasonable price range, so digitizers were left off of most later machines.
Another computer of the day was the Momenta, but it had pretty much its own variant of Windows, and a pen like the original GRiDPad -- no hover.
One of the last of that crop of pen-enabled computers was the Apple Newton, first shipped in 1993. While Apple had experimented with other tablet computers, this was the one released to the most fanfare. The Newton's pen, as I recall, did not have hover -- it was more like the later Palm computers which just sensed pressure on the screen from any object.
In all cases, the use of a pen as an input device was integrated into the operating system to varying degrees. The pen could be used for most mouse actions, such as clicking or dragging. Within almost any application, instead of typing on a keyboard, you could write on the screen or tap on a virtual keyboard. There were various "gestures" (special pen movements) that invoked certain functions, for example, Undo, or, like today's Tablet PCs, bring up a writing pad or virtual keyboard. All systems had handwriting recognition of some sort.
Looking at the machines of those days, and given the advances in hardware since, today's Tablet PCs are not very surprising. They are somewhat lighter and with much faster microprocessors and greater memory, but the pen additions and form-factors are similar. The important thing, as I point out in my First Impressions essay, is that today's machines come into an environment where you read more on a computer screen, and wireless connectivity to all of computerdom is commonplace. Now these machines have a much more important reason to exist.
The old applications
The first applications for the GRiDPad were very basic, in line with the simple forms capabilities of a basic browser. With the advent of PenPoint, though, developers started producing much more sophisticated products, pouring millions and millions of dollars into development. PenPoint itself had a very sophisticated, pen-centric UI. Coming before the convertibles, and trying to completely eliminate the keyboard, there were all sorts of user interface advances. Some of those ended up influencing Windows 95. It had OLE-like embedding well before it was viable on Windows, it required just a "tap" to launch apps which avoided the need for double-clicking, and more.
In early 1990, I co-founded a company called Slate Corporation (along with other PC veterans like Vern Raburn, Dottie Hall, and Tom Byers). Our mission was to create application software for the upcoming PenPoint and other tablet/pen operating systems. There were other companies that were creating application software specifically for these machines, but ours was the best funded, produced the most products, and is the one I know best, so I'll talk about it first.
We demonstrated the first of our software when GO announced PenPoint (286 version) in January 1991, and shipped our products in shrink-wrapped boxes in 1992 for both PenPoint and PenWindows. The products we developed were:
PenApps, an application development system somewhat similar to Visual Basic (which was being developed around the same time). It had an object oriented programming language (PenBasic) with support for ink as a data type, a drag and drop interface builder, and more. You could write on a form created with it, and when filling out forms it was smart about targeting the ink you wrote to the correct field (so you didn't have to carefully "writing inside of the lines"). It had "deferred translation" where the ink was kept around so you didn't have to wait for each field to translate as you filled out a form, and you could check translated data against the original ink at any time. It had a built-in database. It was a major product.
PenBook, an electronic book creation system. This was similar to Adobe's PDF system (being developed around the same time), but tuned for reading on a tablet computer. It could convert Postscript files output from most any program into its format, and then you could read the "books" with a special reader. The reader supported pen gestures for turning pages, annotating and highlighting, bookmarks that looked like paperclips, and more. It had searching and stored the "book" in a compressed format.
At-Hand spreadsheet for PenPoint only. This was a full-fledged spreadsheet (mainly created by Bill Lynch who went on to work with Microsoft's Excel group for years) complete with a BASIC-like programming language with special spreadsheet data-types and operators to react to tapped buttons and other events (developed by Bob Frankston before VBA came out from Microsoft in 1994) and a full graphing package (developed by Buzz Kelley, now with me at Trellix). It could read and write Excel and 1-2-3 files (thanks to Peter Levin, now with me at Trellix). In addition to all this, it was completely operable with a pen, with lots of innovative features. You could write on the spreadsheet cell grid, and it would target your writing to the appropriate cell. If what you wrote was text, you got a label cell; if it was a number, you got a numeric value, appropriately formatted. If it couldn't recognize what you wrote well, you got ink reduced to fit in the cell (ready for correction or to be left alone). For entering formulas, there was a special input dialog tuned to the pen. A couple taps of the pen selected a range of cells, and writing a "+" put the "sum" function where you wrote it. There was a markup layer to annotate things with ink. The graphing system handled most of the popular graph types (including 3D and contour) yet scaled appropriately to work well when embedded on the sheet or elsewhere. A year or so later we created an Excel plug-in called PenPower that added many of those pen-centric capabilities to Excel running under PenWindows.
Day-Timer Pen Scheduler for PenPoint or PenWindows. This was an electronic ink-based version of Day-Timer, Inc.'s organizer, with calendar-based day/week/month/year views, notetaking pages, to-do lists, and a name/address book (which used text and ink). With easy zooming, you could use "tiny text" to fit lots of data in any space ("Your pages are uncluttered, yet full of valuable information"). You could circle something of interest, and then file that snippet away in an index by topic, linked back to the original, all with a quick gesture.
LooseLeaf Notetaker for PenWindows. This was an ink-based notetaking application for the GRiD Convertible with a variety of pens and markers.
In addition to Slate's products, there were deep, innovative products from other companies. For example, Pensoft produced a personal information manager that used recognized text and a data base. A later company (founded in 1991) was Aha!, which created an ink-based notetaking product with extensive ink editing features. Among other things, it could "word wrap" text still in ink, and do background translation for later conversion or searching. Aha! was bought by Microsoft in 1996, and you can see how the Windows Journal program comes from it (without some of the cool word-wrapping features).
One of the issues we were working on at Slate in the mid-1990's was evangelizing the use of digital ink created with a digitizing pen as a normal data type among applications. We also had to deal with making the ink look true enough to your quick scribbles, so that even when you used a 6"x8" screen to mark up an 8 1/2"x11" fax shrunk to fit, it would look "normal" printed out or re-faxed at full size. We did lots of work with growing and shrinking ink, and related issues. (When you shrink, you don't want the lines to get below a certain thickness or else it sometimes looks weird.) We also worked on some early pocket sized prototypes, as well as software for Apple's Newton when it first shipped.
Learn from old patents
To learn more about the level of thinking that went into these old products, you can read some of the patents that came out of those efforts. Since patents are supposed to teach you what is novel and important, reading them should be like reading a techie-to-techie whitepaper about what's special and why. (Unlike when looking for infringement, just read the main body of these patents, not the claims. I list them here not to say whether or not they apply today, but rather as a source of learning about what was thought about in the past.)
5,613,019: System and methods for spacing, storing and recognizing electronic representations of handwriting, printing and drawings. [Based on filings to the Patent Office done in May 1993.] This has the text of Aha!'s description. I found the middle section (it's a long patent) where it discusses how to determine what's a "word" (getting the dots over the "i"s to be part of the right word, even if written much later) interesting. The patent mentions that the digitizers of those days sampled the pen's position about 200 times a second -- faster than most Tablet PCs today.
5,455,901: Input device with deferred translation. [Based on filings from November 1991.] This describes keeping the ink around to translate later, as well as for verification or instead of translation. It's the Slate PenApps patent. This and the other Slate patents are now owned by Compaq/HP. (Compaq bought Slate Corporation when we ran out of money when people refrained from buying the computers that ran our software.)
5,717,939 and 5,848,187: Method and apparatus for entering and manipulating spreadsheet cell data. [These are based on filings from November 1991.] These are the Slate At-Hand spreadsheet patents (the two have similar text, but different claims). They describe targeting ink to cells, special spreadsheet gestures, improved recognition for a spreadsheet, and more.
5,867,150: Graphic indexing system. [Based on filings from February 1992.] One of the Slate Pen Scheduler patents. This relates to selecting something on the screen by circling it and then quickly adding it to a graphical index or gallery. Sometimes it's easier to just put the image of a piece of a page into an index for quick scanning with your eyes than to type a description. This patent relates to such a feature.
5,231,578: Apparatus for document annotation and manipulation using images from a window source, 5,625,833: Document annotation & manipulation in a data processing system. [Based on filings in 1988.] Some of the Wang Freestyle patents.
So as you can see, the thinking 10 years ago was quite deep, with applications on par with anything being shown today.
Why the machines are version 1 or 2
Looking at some of the machines, you can see that we still haven't learned all the tricks necessary to make a tablet without rough edges. For example, on the Toshiba, which is supposed to have one of the better pen holders, when you put the pen back in its holder, the pen tip is close to the side of the screen and entices the mouse cursor to move over to it, away from where you left it. (This might be when you put the pen away in keyboard mode and use the touchpad, or in tablet mode to use just the arrow buttons for reading.) Worse yet, putting the pen in the holder often presses the tip, signaling a mouse click. If there are buttons or icons on that side of the screen, they sometimes get selected.
The screens vary in their feel and the pens in their weight. The perfect paper-like feel of drag for writing, without muddying up the image with ground glass, hasn't been perfected.
Some of the machines have built-in prop-up stands for reading on a desk in portrait mode, and others don't...yet. (I find that important.) We don't know enough about how many buttons are best, nor how to place them, though manufacturers are experimenting. I'm sure there are other physical attributes to be worked out.
As I pointed out in my First Impressions essay, the default values for things aren't always tuned to tablet use.
On top of all this, the weight and battery life still isn't down far enough, though the 4.25 lbs. of the Toshiba Tablet PC is much better than the 6 lbs. of the old GRiD Convertible. (Since both are normal convertibles with similar batter life, they are a good comparison.)
Why we'll see renewed advancement
In the early 1990's, innovation in tablet and pen computing moved at a rapid rate. Once the hardware and operating systems companies stopped pushing it, though, independent software developers stopped. Without constant trying of new things, and testing them in the marketplace, it is hard to have advancement. The main "new" thing you hear from Microsoft has been about their book reading software, developed for other purposes. While functionally similar to Slate's old PenBook and other products, Microsoft persevered in the image quality area to solve various problems and get a nice improvement in the eyes of many people. This improvement shows what happens when you keep trying.
The big thing from my viewpoint, though, is Microsoft's trying again and going to the trouble of integrating basic tablet and pen functionality into the latest version of Windows, and simultaneously driving better hardware with some minimum requirements. In addition, they are spending the time and money to upgrade their Office products with tablet-specific features and to provide a complete set of APIs for developers of other products.
If developers learn about what was done in the past, they can move ahead and produce better solutions to the problems we were addressing, and discover new areas to be covered. Software development is a continuous process of building on what came before, and then testing with real use. By Microsoft starting with an advanced ink application of the last generation, they've set the bar high enough to give people a boost. If they really leave things open for outside development (from both a technical and business viewpoint), and continue innovating themselves, new ideas can be tested and evaluated by the market. The fact that we now have good hardware with lots of marketing behind it means there will be at least some market for new software.
Remember what happened with the Internet as developers experimented with HTML after the early browsers came out. Compare what web sites looked like in 1994 and 1996 to today. (For example, compare the early browser-based web site authoring systems to later ones like Trellix's, and you'll see huge improvement.) Now that we have a basis to build upon, that type of advancement, like we saw in tablet and pen computing in the early 1990's, can resume where it left off.
- Dan Bricklin, 22 November 2002
Pasadena company's robot is fun, but not very useful -- yet
The ER1 personal robot won't make coffee, pick up the newspaper, vacuum the floors or even walk the dog. With prices starting at $599, it seems most adept at emptying wallets.
But beyond the not-so-cheap shots, the robot has a lot to offer. Like the personal computer kits of the 1970s, much can be learned -- and perhaps someday much money can be made -- on the road to usefulness.
And don't forget the prestige from being the first on the block with a robot smarter than Sony's canine-wannabe AIBO.
The ER1, sold by Pasadena, Calif.-based Evolution Robotics Inc., resembles neither a dog nor the robotic stars of science-fiction movies.
The 2-foot-tall, 20-pound machine is a three-wheeled platform that holds a laptop, its brains and has a staff that carries a Web camera, its eye. Some might confuse it with an industrial table.
All parts are included except the most expensive -- a laptop running the Windows operating system. Plan on spending at least another $1,000 if you don't already have one.
For the mechanically challenged, Evolution sells an assembled robot for $699 (still minus the computer). But anyone who opts to plunk an extra $100 for the assembled version is missing half the fun.
The ER1 is more of a hobby than a toy. It's not recommended for children under 14, unless they're supervised. Schools might be interested in using the robot to introduce the basics of robotics and programming.
It took about two hours to assemble my ER1, which came in dozens of pieces tightly packed in a box along with 100 screws. Two Universal Serial Bus cables plug into the laptop.
Once installed on the laptop, the software shows a live shot of what the robot's camera sees, various behavioral options and the robot's battery levels.
The instruction manual is especially well done, rare for a high-tech product. It clearly outlined all 32 steps to finish the job and made sense out of the various trusses, gussets, set screws and U clips.
After a few hours of charging the battery, we were ready for our first test -- a routine in which the ER1 recognizes its box and moves toward it.
My ER1 immediately recognized the box but instead of driving toward it, it backed away as though it had been abused at the factory. (Turns out the camera pointed in the wrong direction. The test worked fine after I adjusted it.)
Such tricks -- including most of the other 50 or so suggested in the manual -- are neat for showing off to neighbors or entertaining at parties. Besides following its box, the ER1 can play music, sing when it hears a loud noise, teach words to a parrot and even warn that it spots a beer can.
The recognition scheme is quite impressive. It could tell the difference between different denominations of currency. It even recognized me as long as I was wearing the shirt I had on when my image was originally captured. It didn't know me from Adam when I put on another shirt.
But the true power of the ER1 is in the ability to layer programs on top of one another, leading to more complex behaviors. Users familiar with the scripting language Python can create even more complicated tasks.
The possibilities are limited only by imagination and hardware. Evolution also plans to sell expansion kits, such as a gripper ($199) for grabbing that beer, and infrared sensors (price to be determined).
Evolution says the 12-volt rechargeable battery that powers the robot's motors can last up to three hours. My laptop battery died long before that.
I had the most fun driving the ER1 around using my home wireless connection. Because my laptop is wireless-capable, I could control the unit from my desktop computer and see everything the robot could see through that computer.
In fact, I could have controlled the thing from anywhere in the world over the Internet, provided I left a few holes open in my firewall.
Even for 2.5.50? It is apparently already there.
With repetition like this, who needs Slashbacks?