[Am-info] Gates: Antitrust trial "a waste of resources"

[Dan Strychalski]

Steve Cohen <stevecoh@my-deja.com> wrote --

> While it's possible, nay, even probable that I am so warped by all my
> experience that I cannot conceive something outside the box, I must say I
> haven't got a clue as to what kind of interfaces Mr. Raskin would be
> satisfied with.  From this fragment, he is cataloguing places where the
> current interfaces fall short and I can agree with many of his points -
> but I find it hard to imagine how improvements along the lines he suggests
> may be created.  Modelessness may be desirable, but modality arose from a
> need to keep the machine's context simple enough to be understood.

Thinking back to how I viewed the system between the time I realized I
was getting a computer and the time I got a handle on words like
"file" and "program" ("document" and "application" these days), and
taking into consideration what I know to be possible now, I can
imagine something along the lines of what Raskin describes.

> If we are to hope that a machine will "know" what we want to do, then we
> must be willing to accept the fact that sometimes it is going to get in
> the way by misintuiting what it thinks we want to do.  The annoying
> "defaults" of Microsoft come most readily to mind.  That is not a road I'm
> necessarily inclined to go down.

Gates talks about making computers anticipate our wishes; I don't
remember Raskin saying anything like that. Maybe I was concentrating too
much on his other ideas; I'll have to check. The person at the console
must be in complete charge at all times; this is a given.

> I can agree, though, that too much effort is spent on getting the
> new user up to minimum acceptable speed and not enough is done to
> help the experienced user do things more easily.

Since we _had_ models that let people get up to light speed in short
order if they were so inclined, we cannot rule out the possibility that
some effort went into _keeping_ people from attaining higher levels of
proficiency.

>                                                  Still, I doubt very
> much that a return to the command line is what Raskin has in mind.

He didn't give the impression that he prefers black socks to gray,
either. What does this have to do with command lines?

Dan Strychalski