A bit of vaporware (or "Microsoft's Secret Newton Killer")
One of the funniest things about Microsoft is how predictable they are. Each and every time they perceive a threat to their cash cows - be it Windows, Office or completely new models of software distribution, they have the power of concocting an underwhelming and barely credible product that is either utterly fictitious, as to damage the sales of their competitors that actually have taken the time to develop real products, or is so infuriatingly flawed that it hampers the credibility of the whole model its competition is trying to steer the market towards.
I first observed it with Windows for Pen Computing, a response to the Newton, to the Momenta and to the GEOS-based Tandy and Casio über-PDAs. Then there was the Cairo/WinFS database/file system that was never delivered, a more generic confusion tool for the times some other vendor promised a better way to manage data. It span decades without as much as a working prototype.
I also remember the flurry of multi-touch things after Jeff Han demo went viral. From Surface to silly interaction on a precariously balanced notebook screen. There was a video of that one here, but Microsoft canned Soapbox as soon as they realized they could not compete with a Google-backed YouTube and the video is toast.
More recently, we saw Project Natal overpromise a sci-fi worthy way of interacting with games, complete with a special-effects covered video, over the more realistic and obviously less impressive offerings from Sony and Nintendo that were actually being launched. Did you see articles on the stuff being introduced at the same show? Me neither. It was all Project Natal.
Milo and Kate is quite impressive, but if Microsoft can do that, I don't know why they are wasting their time launching Windows versions - they could release a notebook version of HAL-9000. Or Skynet.
And now, under the buzz of a gigantic iPod Touch, an iNewton or whatever the Apple tablet may be called, Microsoft shows this: the "astonishing" (according to Gizmodo) Microsoft tablet, with software working so well you can't possibly trace its Windows heritage.
It's like Apple pretending the Knowledge Navigator was to be a real product about to launch instead of a fancy concept.
But, again, that's the Microsoft and that's why we love them.
At least I do. They make me laugh.
And, just to finish it off, the classic video of the Longhorn PDC2003 video. Unless you want to be disappointed with Courier or Natal, consider how this video relates to the actual shipping Windows Vista:
An Emacs cheatsheet as a mindmap
I have been using Emacs for some time now. It has a very steep learning curve, but its power and elegance make it my editor of choice for just about everything. So, inspired by this article, I decided to create my own Emacs cheatsheet. There are many Emacs cheatsheets, but all of them use a tabular format that is not, in my noob opinion, the best way to convey such information: you can interpret the Emacs commands as a tree-like keystroke structure and many important commands use two or more steps.
I started a mind-map for the keystroke trees with the commands I use the most (and some of the ones I find the most amusing). The plan is to make a navigable cheat sheet like the Mercurial and Git ones you can get here and here, plus some tips on what to add to your ~/emacs.d/init.el file.
You can get the very, very early version of the mind-map (in Freemind format) here or just look into the image that follows.
All the heavy magic is also missing, like the "smart paste" Marco Baringer does about 1:45 into the What is Ajax screencast that relates to the David Crane
I would appreciate any advice from Emacs veterans and newbies alike, so, feel free to comment.
Se o outro é o Jesusphone, como esse vai se chamar?
O mercado de gadgets às vezes passa um tempo sem grandes novidades, mas, de vez em quando, aparece um produto que provoca uma revoluçãozinha. Estamos falando não do iPhone (que acordou a indústria de smartphones do seu sono tedioso), mas do Palm Pre, a "tábua de salvação" da Palm.
A Palm pode não ter inventado o smartphone, mas eles compraram depressinha quem inventou, a Handspring. Ainda hoje, alguns dos smartphones da empresa usam o nome Treo, herdado da finada (ou assimilada) Handspring.
Infelizmente, essa foi a última decisão inteligente que a empresa tomou por muitos e muitos anos. Sério... Para dar uma idéia da seriedade do problema, eles compraram o BeOS depois da Be morrer.
Agora, finalmente, parece que a Palm resolveu que ia deitar e morrer como os analistas esperaram, mas sim fazer um daqueles gadgets que todo mundo vai querer ter.
Eu, pelo menos, quero um.
E, como se isso não bastasse, ele ainda roda todos os zilhões de programas que existem para a plataforma Palm atual (aquela que eles espertamente venderam para a Access)...
Um passo pequeno
Fiz ontem uma pequena mudança aqui - acrescentei uma imagem de fundo à barra de topo.
OK. Não é tão menos "plônico" do que o que estava lá antes (ou seja, o site ainda se parece muito com um Plone "recém saído da caixa"), mas é um começo.
A imagem da barra tem sua própria relação com o nome do site. "Dieblinkenlights" é uma referência ao jargão hacker, onde "blinkenlights" eram aquelas luzinhas que os computadores mais antigos tinham e que serviam para se "olhar dentro" da CPU e ver exatamente o que estava acontecendo nela. À medida em que computadores ficavam mais rápidos as luzes e os painéis foram sendo substituídos por consoles com terminais, primeiro com impressoras e depois com CRTs. Isso também indica que ninguém pronuncia essa palavra há várias décadas.
O terminal da foto está no meio desses dois mundos. É um terminal 2260 da IBM, ligado a um mainframe da série 360 (que ainda tinham painéis com luzes). A foto data de 1975 e foi tirada em um dos laboratórios da faculdade de ciência da computação da universidade de Waterloo no Canadá.
Espero que eles não me mandem tirar a foto do cabeçalho. O site precisava dela.
