Faster computer has increased everyone's free time, which in turn are being used to eat other persons free time. Does that means computer will never increase our free time ? ( Or increase and eat up in point less video games and ad watching ? ). The ultimate benefit I think is, because millions use computer for point less thing, but ultimately investing their time and money in to it, are kind of crowd sourcing the technology advances that are other wise was not possible. So on that look out, kudos to cat video and ads. It that is what it takes to make human kind forward so be it.
What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
121–130 of 138 posts
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#122Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He brought the iPhone to me, put it in my hands, and asked: “Alan, is this good enough to be criticized?”. My reply was to make a shape with my hands the size of an iPad: “Steve, make it this size and you’ll rule the world”. I find this especially telling after Apple's recent education-focused announcement[1], where Apple continues trying to push the iPad as an educational tool. Is this Tim Cook trying to continue…
Where as both Steve Jobs and Alan Kay believed in the Dynabook, I find it interesting how starkly different their views are on the stylus. One of the first things Alan Kay had after seeing the iPad was try using a stylus [0], where as Steve Jobs was heavily anti the stylus [0]. So I can imagine a fairly interesting back and forth over the topic. But Alan has only ever mentioned the following two sentences: > And he s…
In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just because the learning curve is lower.
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most common place for me to see iPads these days is point-of-sale, everything from sales at small cafes to the front desks of car mechanics and childcare. (The second-most common place is as a distraction device given to three-year-olds.)
I agree with your observations. I can't speak for Kay but I think his comment to Jobs about the size was based on the premis that the iPad would be a production device. The percentage of users that use computing devices primarily for something other than content consumption is pretty small. I actually think an argument could be made that phones are used more for productive tasks than tablets.
But the deep point of the inventions of personal computing and the Internet was not primarily to make old media more convenient, but to "augment human intellect" by making the next qualitative media after writing and the printing press. The commercialization of these went after the lowest simplest properties, and this hid from most people what the computer is really about.
Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers.
Getting fixated on a poor problem can mask the problems that need to be worked on. A big one is "real education". Another is "real governance and democracy".
An analogy is to the Kennedy moonshot, which set back space travel more than 50 years. Real space travel has to be done quite differently than just relying on chemical rocketry, and the better ways to do it were swamped by the "stunt" to this day.
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#125> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…
What I'm curious about is what is the Parc Alto of today?
Self-driving cars
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? I assume your family doesn't use their tablets with candycrush-like apps unlike some of my acquaintances. Which apps do they use to make it worth it? I tend to assume that the burden of the proof of value is on the new tool, otherwise we just keep changing and nothin…
> As a starting point, can you quote any evidence that a tablet is better than a paper book? Both for reading and for more general educational activities? Have we regressed to the point where the simplest statement requires third party ("scientific" references)? A table offers 100x the functionality of a paper book. Even just in reading mode, it can carry 1000s of books in it, one can take notes, highlight, search th…
Sorry I should have phrased it better than I have, I hope the following makes what I meant clearer.
I do agree with your statement that a tablet has more functionalities than any given book. Indeed, as you point out, a tablet can contain thousands of them.
What I tried and failed to express was that, in an educational setting, these functionalities are sometimes poorly used. This obviously depends on the teacher, if there is one.
It is not clear to me how teachers are supposed to use a tablet to enhance their classes, and in my (admittedly limited) experience, they are left to their own devices or with poor guidance to say the least. It could be that teachers more familiar with technology (beyond just using it) know what to do with it while teaching, but to which extent? I would have assumed that using tablets instead of books is at least as expensive; is this cost worth it in terms of gains?
In the Alan Kay interview which has already been linked in this thread[0]:
[quote]
I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
[/quote]
That doesn't sound so promising in terms of education, unless I am missing something. From time to time, I see parents leaving their phone or tablet to their kid, who invariably plays some game like candy crush. How do you transform a device that was made for entertainment into an educational tool?
There have also been stories in the past about big tech leaders sending their children to "boring" schools without much in terms of technology, and mostly pen and paper, which suggests that better technology is not necessarily better for education.
Regarding the more limited scope of "just reading", I read a lot on my phone, but it is easier for me to get distracted since I can do so many things with a phone or a tablet. Granted it's the user's fault, but you don't need any self-discipline when using a simple book, which is at least one advantage.
[0]: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
Edit: I should have seen that TeMPOraL's comment already says it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836634
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#127> (the Mac was done in 1984, 11 years after the more powerful and capable Parc Alto, which started working in 1973). I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sure, the Alto may have been more powerful, but if it was financially out of reach of almost everybody, it'…
> I find this comment mildly irritating. The Alto apparently cost $40k [1] in (or around) 1973, which was equivalent to $95k in 1984 (or $232k today). Compare with the Mac which cost $2.5k in 1984. Sorry, but what is really irritating is the comparison you are making. 1973 component prices are in no way comparable to 1984 component prices, and Xerox's target market and desired margins were completely different from A…
> The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to large corporate clients, and in terms of price/performance their offerings were very competitive.
http://oldcomputers.net/xerox-820.html
This was a rather plain CP/M computer released almost at the same time as the Star. Pretty sad when you think how much better it would have been for them to just make the 3 year old Notetaker with no changes instead.
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were you disappointed that both the Mac and iPhone didn't have the underpinning of a Smalltalk-like reprogrammable environment? We had to wait for HyperCard on the Mac and I'm not sure such a thing even exists on modern phones.
I was disappointed that something better than Smalltalk wasn't on the Mac and iPhone (Smalltalk was truly wonderful in the context of the 70s, but we considered it just a step in a good direction). Not understanding Hypercard was one of Apple's largest mistakes in the world of end-users. It was a real breakthrough in something that end-users could really handle and be usefully programmable by them. Besides not unders…
Inspired by HyperCard, we (old Sun NeWS hands) also pleaded until we were blue in the face to make HyperLook (a NeWS/PostScript/network based reinterpretation of HyperCard) the window manager / editable scriptable desktop environment!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...
>Who Should Manage the Windows, X11 or NeWS?
>This is a discussion of ICCCM Window Management for X11/NeWS. One of the horrible problems of X11/NeWS was window management. The X people wanted to wrap NeWS windows up in X frames (that is, OLWM). The NeWS people wanted to do it the other way around, and prototyped an ICCCM window manager in NeWS (mostly object oriented PostScript, and a tiny bit of C), that wrapped X windows up in NeWS window frames.
>Why wrap X windows in NeWS frames? Because NeWS is much better at window management than X. On the surface, it was easy to implement lots of cool features. But deeper, NeWS is capable of synchronizing input events much more reliably than X11, so it can manage the input focus perfectly, where asynchronous X11 window managers fall flat on their face by definition.
>Our next step (if you'll pardon the allusion) was to use HyperNeWS (renamed HyperLook, a graphical user interface system like HyperCard with PostScript) to implemented a totally customizable X window manager!
http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html
>What is HyperLook? It's a user interface environment for NeWS, that was designed by Arthur van Hoff, at the Turing Institute in Glasgow. HyperLook was previously known as HyperNeWS, and GoodNeWS before that.
>Open windows with HyperLook
>HyperLook is an interactive application design system, that lets you develop advanced multimedia systems, via simple direct manipulation, property sheets, and object oriented programming. It releases the full power of OpenWindows to the whole spectrum of users, ranging from casual users who want a configurable desktop and handy presentation tools, to professional programmers who want to push the limits in interactive mulltimedia.
>You design interfaces by taking fully functional components from an object warehouse. You lay them out in your own window, configure them with menus and property sheets, define their appearance in colorful PostScript fonts and graphics, and write scripts to customize their behavior.
>You can write applications in C or other languages, that communicate with HyperLook by sending high level messages across the network. They need not worry about details like layout, look and feel, or fonts and colors. You can edit HyperLook applications while they're running, or deliver them in an uneditable runtime form.
>HyperLook is totally extensible and open ended. It comes with a toolkit of user interface classes, property sheets, and warehouses of pre-configured components with useful behavior.
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were machines like the Commodore C64 - and later to some extent the Amiga as well - that more fully embraced and valued computing in that they booted into an environment which allowed you to create programs right away. With the C64 in particular there was no real distinction between the operating system and the programming language, the programming language actually WAS the operating system. The machine booted…
My memory on this is super vague because this was way back in the mists of time, but I think some old versions of DOS used to have a BASIC interpreter built in, where you could just start writing BASIC code at the DOS prompt.
Some versions of DOS had a QBasic interpreter included as a utility. I stumbled upon it by accident when I was about 10 years old.
Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS and Android turn tablets into oversized phones, so no surprise they lose against phones - they have the same (or usually worse, at a given price point) capabilities while being larger, thus less convenient to carry and more fragile. These days I'm not using much Windows for desktop (HN took over the time I had for games), but I do sincerely hope this OS will live on for at least couple more years, because Microso…
Windows did try the same as Android and iOS with Windows RT, thankfully that was a disaster. Netbooks are ridiculously useful, I used to have a 15 minute bus ride to work with an Asus EEE and would manage to fill that 15 minutes with active moonlighting development time every day. The work I did on that bus became the frontend for what now 10 years later is a $50m company. I realise I'm making a slightly different po…
Sadly, netbooks seem to be gone. Even chromebooks are full-size, full-weight.
Do you know of termux.com, for linux without rooting? It's basically a linux distribution, adjusted for android's slightly odd filesystem. The app itself is tiny, and you install from its repository. e.g. there's latex, youtube-dl, curl, vim, clang, ecj, python, ruby, perl, lua, erlang etc.
A bluetooth keyboard completes the DIY linux netbook... sadly, bluetooth keyboards are also almost gone, presumably as people adjust themselves to "touch" typing.