3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
7:04 p.m.
On 4 June 2013 00:12, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
I do not own a tablet and I don't want a tablet. I am typing on a 1992
IBM Model M connected by an honest plain-jane PS/2 port, with an
optical mouse and two LCDs. (Sadly my right CRT died last week & I had
to junk it.)
I don't use the things, but I watch everyone around me do it.
You know what? My lodger (house-mate) is a professional developer.
Mainly Perl, but C/C++, Scala, PHP, anything.
He works on a MacBook Pro.
But at home, he only watches movies on it. The computer he uses in the house?
iPad.
Again this smacks of a bias toward "computer" meaning "a box that is
used
to access web sites and email". Yes, I will probably use that A4 tablet for
those purposes. Hell, I use a tablet all the time right now. But do you
really see things like CAD (which, whether YOU do it or not, is something
that is widely done) shifting to tablets?
Yes! Yes, I really do. Huge big ones, two foot across. And I think the
designers will /love/ it. No more separate graphics tablets and
screens - they'll have several and they'll all be /both/ tablets /and/
screens, clustered or coupled, backed up live and continually to the
cloud, able to draw on huge online libraries of pre-drawn components
and parts for the drawings.
And if they want a keyboard, stylus, puck, whatever, of /course/
they'll still be able to buy them.
Do you really think programming will go from
keyboards to speech
recognition? I don't, because I've seen 90%-effective speech recognition
systems in computers, even home computers like Apple ][s, for ~25
years...and speech recognition still hasn't made any inroads...NONE...into
programming.
As I said, none of this stuff means keyboards are going to be banned
or anything. Open your mind a bit. Anything and everything can have a
keyboard today: Nintendo Wii, iPhone, iPad, Android device, Windows 8
tablet - all of them. They all accept keyboards.
People do use computers for things other than
browsing the web and
sending/receiving email. You, as a journalist, have a responsibility to see
that and understand it. These are not niche applications, they are all
around you.
I know. I submit that actually I have more contact with this stuff than you do.
Good heavens, man. You write for The Register.
This is a
largely-technical publication targeted at a largely-techical audience. It's
not friggin' ESPN!
Yup. Which means I see a lot of new technology, and the trends are all
around us.
Here, you might find this discussion on my blog relevant:
http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/34896.html
I have other mates who have views just like yours. I explain in
considerable detail at that link why I think you're both being far too
short-sighted.
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.
Yes, of course. We all know that. The engineers of the world have
developed better ways to perform A SMALL SUBSET of the work that used to be
the exclusive domain of desktop computers.
A small subset.
Since that small subset just happens to include a very large percentage
(perhaps 100%) of what you do, I'm not at all surprised that you have the
point of view that you have. And you know what? It's not wrong. FOR YOU,
and your usage patterns. But others' are different, and that's ok. I
would like for you to
understand that.
I do, more than you think. Please go read the blog comments. I'm not
typing it all twice. It's 3AM here already.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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