3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
1:30 p.m.
People may not be aware that a lot of the ideas for Motif/CDE and
Windows and later versions of MSDOS actually came from IBM's Common
User Access.
Not everything came from CUA, but a good chunk of it did.
Microsoft's windows 95 didn't invent all that. The task bar itself
appeared earlier in Arthur OS, I think it was back in 1987. Even
Amiga's Workbench had a lot of the GUI elements although in a more
primitive form.
Did the KDE guys make their DE look a lot like win95? Yeah, I think
they did. So did IceWM and probably other ones. Icewm has a lot of
differences though, it's a lot more light-weight. But even with KDE
3.5.X there's a bunch of things that are different from win95...
On 6/3/13, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 3 June 2013 19:55, Dave McGuire <mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
On 06/03/2013 02:41 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Hey, whatever it takes!
Then don't.
Imagine it's a laptop. Imagine it's a dual-head desktop with 24"
displays. Whatever it takes.
For now, the old form-factors will stick around, but in a decade, if a
"PC" is a flexible A4 tablet, the thickness and weight of thick card,
which connects wirelessly to its peripherals and is driven by touch,
speech and the view from its multiple cameras, I submit that few will
prop it in a stand and drive it from a keyboard. But some will, and I
am sure that for them it will be perfectly possible - possibly driving
a tiled array of large screens which are the thickness (and
approximate power-draw) of paper and similarly can be rolled up for
transport or storage.
Computers are shrinking and using less power. This is more or less a
fact of life. They are not going to remain humming beige desk-side
boxes; those are already in decline, have been for a few years now,
and it's steepening.
I live
in a VERY high-tech
area and even I don't see stuff like that given away. (well, actually,
thinking about that a bit more...There are "clueful" people around
here;
stuff like C2D machines are more likely to be found running Linux or
NetBSD
around here.)
It's rare and I got lucky. Also, I think some people recognise my name
from my written stuff. (Pimps new article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_f…
)
Very well-written as always, but this time I couldn't get past the
first
paragraph. I have great difficulty imagining a day when I could do my job
on
a tablet. The press (as a whole) really needs to
understand that "what sells best
in
department stores" does not define the entirety of, or even a significant
part of, society's computing activities. Everything is WAY too tainted
by
journalists' personal (and sometimes myopic) points of view, something
that
journalism is, well, sorta supposed to be about not doing.
You're right. In businesses, increasingly, the beige boxes are being
replaced by graphical terminals to OS instances running in VMs on
remote hosts.
But either way...fantastic writing, as always.
Thank you.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884