30 Sep
2010
30 Sep
'10
6:56 a.m.
On 30 September 2010 14:47, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, that would be cool!
They cheat. It does have conventional fans, with blades, they're just
concealed within the base. No whizzy electrostatic impellers or
anything here. Nothing to see, move along. :?)
Conceded.
Oh, it's coming. Much argument over techniques and standards. They'll
squabble for a while then make it work.
Aha! I think this particular one is a relative youngster, from 1993.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508
Liam Proven wrote:
Interesting. I have played with a fairly primitive X setup, no modern
window managers and so on, and yes, it did some of that, but I'd not
registered the direction-switching bit, which (for my money) is the
core usability feature. ISTR going "ooh, it's like RISC OS", playing
to see if the features I liked were there, and being disappointed -
but I might have missed it.
Mind
you, I preferred the system on the Acorn Archimedes, where
left-clicking a scrollbar arrow scrolled in the direction it pointed
but *right*-clicking it scrolled the opposite way. This was so simple
and efficient that there was no need for a wheel, really.
Hmm, I think X windows had something similar at one time - middle button to
drag the bar, left button to automatically go up and page and right button
to go down a page (if I remember right, it did jump by a screenful, rather
than smaller increments) Nobody has
ever implemented 3-button mouse support as efficiently and gracefully
as Acorn RISC OS did, to my mind.
I've got some internal Acorn emails from that era related to their UI design
- one day I'll have to see about 'releasing' them. It's interesting
reading,
seeing their thoughts about what features they should implement, and their
analysis of what the competition was up to. The last
hold-out is the cooling fan and they are a real point of
weakness, as they clog up with dust and cause the system to fail. I
hope to see some improved, solid-state cooling mechanisms come along
and deliver sealed-box, airtight PCs with no moving parts or airflow
inside.
Hmm, those Dyson bladeless fans, maybe? (No idea how that technology works,
or if it needs a minimum size to do so effectively). I think that *good* bladed fans rarely fail, though -
it's just that 99% of
those inside modern PCs are cheap junk. Oh, and I've had old all-metal fans
of around 5" or so which are very quiet in comparison to modern
plastic-bladed, smaller versions. Maybe systems just need better airflow
design/ducting and a single larger-but-quieter fan. That and sensible
grilles - a lot of PCs just have stamped grilles with rough slot edges, and
they create a huge amount of noise (as well as collecting dust) compared to
grilles of old which were formed from round metal stock.
You may be right there, although I've seen round-metal-bar
brazed-together grilles clog, albeit in fairly extreme conditions.
But like it or not, the PC is moving toward being a consumer
appliance, like TVs or phones. There are no commercial TV or phone
repairmen around any more; the PC will go the same way.
The question is, will they do it well or not?
And if the big players don't, is there room for a small company to
make money doing it right?
Then the only
bits that move will be the keyboards and mice. Mice I
regard as relatively disposable; optical ones are cheap and work well,
so despite my initial reservations about the "waste" of CPU power on
tracking the movement of the desk surface underneath the sensor, hell,
it's worth it. They're cheap, simple, need next to no cleaning or
maintenance and last for ages. Some of mine are now pushing a decade
old, work fine and have outlived 2, 3 or 4 PCs.
It's rare I've had a traditional rodent fail on me and be unfixable, though
- a good clean now and then, and the odd microswitch is about it. What I
really dislike are mice that try to be too ergonomic (OK if you have an
average hand size and are right-handed, bad for everyone else) or which have
too many unnecessary buttons (3 is good, more is pointless)
Entirely agree. But no buttons is also an infinite number of buttons,
in a way. Apple /were/ right, like it or not - there are abundant
figures to prove it. 1 button *is* the easiest for novices.
Mind you, come to that, as ordinary user PCs migrate to being
multi-touch-operated slates, it could be that mice will disappear
altogether. Keyboards too, when the speech recognition gets good
enough.
I want the
thing to have a damned cable, though, not a wireless
transciever and batteries.
Yes, me too - I like the reliability of cables. There was a lot of hoo-hah
about wireless charging a couple of years ago, but that seems to have gone
quiet for the moment (it'd at least solve the battery swap problem) As for
keyboards, well, some of my Model Ms are now pushing 25, so I
am not worried about their longevity. :?)
Yes, this one turns 25 next year :-)