On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 05:52:27PM -0800, Tom Sparks wrote:
----- Original Message -----
A big part of the reason IMO for the excitement
in the earlier years of
computing technology was that models were varying and unique, whereas today
they are uniform and ubiquitous. There's not much today that differentiates
computers from the desktop machine on up to super computers except for the
scale. "Back then" computers used a variety of different processors
and had
different models had strong points to them, storage technology was
different, etc.
Not to say that modern day computing technology isn't impressive. But we
have since at least the last decade or two entered an era of incremental
changes rather than radical ones.
-- Geoffrey Oltmans
I feel the guis have also stagnated as there is none-thing radical different between
windows, Mac and linux
excepted underlying operating system
It doesn't help that *cough* some Linux developers either think they have
to copy Windows to appeal to the masses ("the crap you know" approach) or
copy Apple because "Apple GUIs are just perfect". Except they are both
wrong and annoy the competent.
Me, I've been using WindowMaker (inspired by NeXT GUI) for 15+ years now.
It works fine, hasn't changed in that time, has a virtual desktop concept
that fits my working style _very_ well and is pretty much fully keyboard-
controllable. I don't _want_ to experiment with new, shiny GUIs - I want
to get work done. But then, I'm one of those crazy buggers who think that
X is a really nifty graphical terminal multiplexer - I typically have
anything between 20 and 40+ xterms running on my desktops (home and work).
the only system that really worth looking at are the
homebrew/clones/single-board-computers system
Funny you should mention those .. I'm currently playing around with a nice
_pile_ of ARM boards: Raspberry, OLinuxino, Hackberry, ODroid X2/U2 and two
more incoming ;-)
It's amazing what you can get these days for surprisingly little money.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison