Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
Below. On Dec 16, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Wesley Smith wesley.h...@gmail.com wrote: Some things are just expensive. No one has found an acceptable solution. These are things we should avoid in the infrastructure underneath a personal computing experience:) Or figure out how to amortize them over time. I think recent raytracing apps are a good example of this. You can preview the image as it is rendered to see if it's just right and if not, tweak it. Another example is scraping data to build a database that will inform autocompletion and other productivity enhancing UI effects. Sometimes gather and parsing out the data to put in the database can be expensive, but it can easily be done in a background thread without any cost to responsiveness. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. wes Totally. Look for new ways to make expensive things cheap. Look for ways to turn NP-complete linear! And never ever stop trying. Just don't put factorial complexity in my email client if you can avoid it:);):P ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
That's really funny:) On Dec 16, 2011, at 7:13 PM, John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:10 PM, John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. je...@merlintec.com wrote: Steve Dekorte wrote: [NeXTStation memories versus reality] I still have a running Apple II. My slowest working PC is a 33MHz 486, so I can't directly do the comparison I mentioned. But I agree we shouldn't trust what we remember things feeling like. -- Jecel The Apple booting up faster was not simply a feeling, but a fact owing to its human-computer interaction demands. They set fast boot speeds as a design criteria. Jef Raskin talks about this in the book The Humane Interface. Even modern attempts to reduce boot speed have not been that good, such as upstart, an event-driven alternative to init. Eugen has some very good points about human limits of managing performance details, though. Modern approaches to performance are already moving away from such crude methods. By the way, slight tangent: Modern operating systems, with all their hot-swapping requirements, do a poor job distinguishing device error from continuously plugging-in and plugging-out the device. For example, if you have an optical mouse and damage it, it might slowly die and your entire system will hang because 99% of your CPU will be handling plugin and plugout events. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 02:16:41PM -0800, Steve Dekorte wrote: Is speed really the bottleneck for making computers more useful? Many major scientific problems or even gaming are resource-constrained. I personally would have no difficulties keeping astronomical numbers of nodes at 100% CPU for years and decades. Consider what a BlueGene/Q on every desktop would mean. Even if Moore continues to hold, it will be a great long while until it happens. Personally, I don't find myself waiting on my computer much anymore. Most of my time is instead spent trying to tell the machine what to do while it sits there, idling. All the big clusters are booked out. It's the main reason why people are building their own clusters. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
This idea was tried by the Engelbartians with chord keyboards integrated with the mouse mechanism. In their design, there wasn't enough stability to do positioning well (although one could imagine other technologies that would do both good pointing with both hands and allow all fingers to be used). Cheers, Alan From: Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.com To: Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com; Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:07 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU Below. On Dec 16, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: And what Engelbart was upset about was that the hands out -- hands together style did not survive. The hands out had one hand with the 5 finger keyboard and the other with the mouse and 3 buttons -- this allowed navigation and all commands and typing to be done really efficiently compared to today. Hands together on the regular keyboard only happened when you had bulk typing to do. Are you talking about the so-called chording keyboard? I had an idea years ago to have a pair of twiddlers (the one chording keyboard I'd seen was called a twiddler) which tracked movement of both hands over the desktop, basically giving you two pointing devices and a keyboarding solution at the same time. Now it's all trackpads and touch screens, and my idea seems almost Victorian:) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
