> = Joe
> > = Tim
> > * = Joe
> > * (Am I *really* having to explain this to an audience of NeXT and Apple
> > * fans???)
Don't worry Joe, we're with you. Even those of us who've never touched
a NeXT and the last Apple machine I owned was a ][+.
You've proven your worth at being able to "glimpse the future", even
if you do work for the evil empire, and you are an old OS hack :).
You know Rommel and Montgomery also had a lot of respect for
each other as battlefield soldiers, in spite of the fact
that they worked for different bosses, with , shall we say,
different views of the world order. It was Montgomery and
Eisenhower, if I recall, that hated each other. Or was that
Patton? Any history experts out there?
>
> No. My POINT was, can you explain to me how Microsoft will IMPEDE the
> imminent universal connectivity of everything.
They're not. They're actively promoting it (eg Teledesic).
There evilness is not in impeding the vision, it's in wanting to own
and control it. They get the vision all right - that's what makes
them so scary.
>
> > * But oral commands (input) and visual representations (output) are
> not
> > * mutually exclusive.
> > * [...]
> > * Voice recognition won't catch on until it's easy to use. At some
> point,
> > * we *will* have systems that can understand "when's the next F1 race"
> > * without getting all confused.
> >
> > Well I don't know about you, but I can look at something once and
> remember
> > it far better than listening to it once. I guess it has to do with
> those 3
> > million visual inputs to the brain vrs the 300,000 audio.
>
> Yes, granted, I agree. Visual output is not going away. But voice
> recognition (input) will arrive. And again, they are not mutually
> exclusive.
>
Come on guys , this is model/presentation separation 101. You're quite
right, Joe - they're not mutually exclusive. Whether you come
from the OO/Smalltalk school of Model/View/Controller, or the Web school
of structured document design, independent of presentation,
you wind up at the same place.
Ie, the _model_ (F1 race) exists independently of its presentation.
One moment you want it visual, the next audible and the next
smellable :-). Sometimes you want all 3.
Tim can prefer his visually only - that's his choice, made
independently of the model design. It comes down to personal
preference, the capability of your presentation environment (gotta
get that smell-generator upgrade for my browser :-), etc.
Tim, I sincerely hope those web sites you design for big $$ have
*some* notion of presentation-independence.
As to the many examples you gave of the type of future you
want (Jiffy oil changes, etc.), they're all very good of course,
but any one of them could have come straight out of Wired.
The challenging part, I feel, is not in merely predicting
what a bit-soaked world will look like, as Negroponte & company
like to do, but in figuring out the mapping of the software
technologies needed to make it all happen.
> - Joe
Ron.
---------
Ron Resnick IBM: ron_resnick@vnet.ibm.com
IBM Haifa Research Lab HRL world: resnick@interlog.com
MATAM 31905 Haifa, Israel http://www.interlog.com/~resnick/ron.html
Tel: 972-4-829-6491
"In other words: there's an Orb-like thingie in just about everything,
supporting a queryable BO that can do meaningful things ?"
--Sandor Spruit