🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BOB.90Feb12125228@volitans.MorningStar.Com>, bob@MorningStar.Com
(Bob Sutterfield) writes:
> Too many issues are not yet fully
> understood, and premature standards stifle real progress.  Worse, too
> many standards are being declared for political and marketing reasons,
> not technical.  Troubling times, these.

Indeed.  Another problem, which I find most troubling, is that the computer
industry is not yet mature, either from a marketing standpoint or an
engineering one.  Premature adoption and enforcement of "standards" for
political reasons is tantamount to enforcing a set of design compromises
and guesses that may no longer be appropriate by the time the "standard"
hits people's desks.

Open Look and Motif are both reasonable and useful approaches to using today's
workstations, but them darn hardware hackers are already building tomorrow's.
In the Indy 500, the technology is contrained to past limitations.  This
may make for an interesting sporting event, but the technology industry has
more on the line.  In a couple of years, when we have workstations that can
maintain 75-100 scalar MIPS, with memory cheap and fast enough to handle
big, fast 24+8 bit screens, are we going to happy with having "standardized"
on interfaces designed for the likes of the Sun 3/50 & 3/60?  I won't.  Among
the reasons that interfaces keep changing are:

 - Hardware gets faster and cheaper, thus changing the raw materials that
   software designers have to work with.

 - More and more people are using these things for more and more different
   purposes.  This is teaching us a lot about what actually makes for an
   effective user interface, but we still have a lot to learn.

 - Things that were impractical n years ago will be well worth the effort
   in n more years.  In 1980, a 20 MIPS workstation would have been pie in
   the sky, and  waste except for special high-demand applications.  Last
   month at Uniforum they were all over the place.  In 1980, Live full-motion
   video overlaying a 19" color screen was a dream.  Today, it's only pricey.

If I had a crystal ball I'd predict that for the next couple of decdes,
anyway, any place that "standardizes" on a uniform interface will end up
restandardizing every 3-5 years.  It would be nice to be able to do, but
we just ain't there yet.  This industry is just starting to hit adolescence,
and you know what that's like... :-).

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation

"Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view."
	--Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Return of the Jedi"