Re: Questions

[Bradley <trig5rt pacbell net>]

I could be wrong, but I have the feeling that a lot of people think the
prevailing GUI of today is the best it can be simply because nobody's
come up with anything else. It isn't like there are all kinds of
different sorts of GUIs out there and may the best man win -- there
isn't really anything else out there, period! So what can you compare
Windows, or MacOS, or GNOME, or KDE, or BeOS, or QNX, or whatever, with?

There's gotta to be more to life than windows and icons!

Jared

___________

You aren't alone in that line of thinking.  Current interfaces and operating
systems do a poor job of facilitating easy management of information.  One
person who has recently addressed this topic is David Gelernter, who feels
the next big evolution in computer technology will be in interface (and
operating system) design.

Gelernter published a "manifesto" on this topic at Edge.org.  I think it is
a really informative read.  His ideas should prove useful in the development
of Gnome.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge70.html

I think Gelernter raises some great points and hints at some ways people can
think "out of the box." It seems Eazel was attempting to incorporate one of
the ideas Gelernter discusses into Nautilus (search features).

I don't know if you guys have covered Gelernter's work before.  If so, I
apologize for reposting this.  If not, then here is a little info on
Gelernter (from the article):

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter entered the public mind one morning
in January '92 when The New York Sunday Times ran his picture on the front
page of the business section; it filled nearly the whole page. The text of
the accompanying story occupied almost another whole page inside.

In 1991 Gelernter had published a book for technologists (an extended
research paper) called Mirror Worlds, claiming in effect that one day, there
would be something like the Web. As well as forecasting the Web, the book,
according to the people who built these systems, also helped lay the basis
for the internet programming language "Java" and Sun Microsystems' "Jini."

Gelernter's earlier work on his parallel programming language "Linda" (which
allows you to distribute a computer program across a multitude of processors
and thus break down problems into a multitude of parts in order to solve
them more quickly) and "tuple spaces" underlies such modern-day systems as
Sun's JavaSpaces, IBM's T-Spaces, a Lucent company's new "InfernoSpaces" and
many other descendants worldwide.

By mid-'92 this set of ideas had taken hold and was exerting a strong
influence . By 1993 the Internet was growing fast, and the Web was about to
be launched. Gelernter's research group at Yale was an acknowledged world
leader in network software and more important, it was known for "The Vision
Thing", for the big picture.

In June '93 everything stopped for Gelernter when he was critically injured
by a terrorist [unabomber] mailbomb. He was out of action for the rest of
'93 and most of '94 as the Web took off, the Internet become an
international phenomenon and his aggressive forecasts started to come true.
Gelernter endured numerous surgeries through 95, and then a long
recuperation period.

Now Gelernter is back. In this audacious manifesto, "The Second Coming", he
writes: "Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a
magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.""