Article: The shift away from user directed projects

Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Myles Wakeham]

I have written an article entitled "The shift away from user directed
projects" and would appreciate any feedback directly to my e-mail
address.

Please feel free to take a look at it, at:

www.techsol.org/tsart.html

Hope it is of interest.

Regards,

Myles Wakeham
Sr. Consultant
Tech Solutions Inc.
Los Angeles, CA
myles@techsol.org

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[�puma]

I feel you analysis pretty interesting but also as a kind of plea 
(?, word) to understand the industry's problematic situation 
when guessing or anticipating future directions in hardware 
and/ or software development.

Maybe, a possible solution to these problems could be based
on a different approach - transfering solutions from industries 
that are 'older' than computer indusrties, but still young enough
to be comparable.

In example, 70 (or so) years ago radios were built as 'all in one',
like computers these days. Today, you still have the 'all in one'
solution (cheap transistors), but you also have high end engines
with tuners etc separated from ... till speakers which allows a 
much better planning for both, users and industries.

Similar: Currently you let software (or the installation 
program) decide which 'type of computer' you will run in the 
end, a 'game computer' (i.e. win98), a server (i.e. freebsd), etc.
(but you still have 'allround computers' with 'allround softwares').

Why not 'construct' computers that are specialized and optimized
for a certain area/ usage (i.e. the 'secretary computer' etc). Then 
you might even offer 'cheap' to 'expensive' solutions within the 
intended area of use. Then-2, your 'only' problem could be
'reduced' to agree on general and international valid i/o standards 
(i.e. for interfaces, modules etc).

In my mind, future computers (and softwares) should be based
rather on modules, maybe even specialized modules,  than on 
'all in one' products.

Sorry for my poor English.

----
On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 12:11:41 -0800, Myles Wakeham <myles@techsol.org>
wrote:

>I have written an article entitled "The shift away from user directed
>projects" and would appreciate any feedback directly to my e-mail
>address.
>
>Please feel free to take a look at it, at:
>
>www.techsol.org/tsart.html
>
>Hope it is of interest.
>
>Regards,
>
>Myles Wakeham
>Sr. Consultant
>Tech Solutions Inc.
>Los Angeles, CA
>myles@techsol.org

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Ted Edwards]

When making predictions of the future of computing, especially on a time
frame greater than a few months, it is wise to consider a quote
appearing in the sig of a young fellow learning to weld.

"
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
weighs 30 tons, computers in the future by the year 2000 may have only
1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons
"
-- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

Ted

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[�puma]

Maybe you might want to download and read the pdf file - 
just like me ?

--------------------
On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 08:06:58 -0500, Ted Edwards
<Ted_E@bc.sympatico.ca> wrote:

>When making predictions of the future of computing, especially on a time
>frame greater than a few months, it is wise to consider a quote
>appearing in the sig of a young fellow learning to weld.
>
>"
>Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
>weighs 30 tons, computers in the future by the year 2000 may have only
>1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons
>"
>-- Popular Mechanics, March 1949
>
>Ted

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Charles E. Bortle, Jr.]

Hello All,

Interesting quote Ted :-)  Reminds me of the quote about
how nobody would ever need more than 4k of memory
(I think that was Bill Gates, but I cannot remember...I need
more memory ;-)

Interesting article Myles.

--
Charles          cbrtjr@ix.netcom.com
"For God So Loved The World, That He Gave His
Only Begotten Son, That Whosoever Believeth
In Him Should Not Perish, But Have Everlasting
Life"John3:16  * http://pw2.netcom.com/~cbrtjr/wrdthing.html *
Ted Edwards <Ted_E@bc.sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:38E1FFF2.7342@bc.sympatico.ca...
> When making predictions of the future of computing, especially on a time
> frame greater than a few months, it is wise to consider a quote
> appearing in the sig of a young fellow learning to weld.
>
> "
> Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
> weighs 30 tons, computers in the future by the year 2000 may have only
> 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons
> "
> -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949
>
> Ted
>

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Lou Zher]

Charles E. Bortle, Jr. <cbrtjr@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:8d5l1b$603$1@slb3.atl.mindspring.net...
> Hello All,
>
> Interesting quote Ted :-)  Reminds me of the quote about
> how nobody would ever need more than 4k of memory
> (I think that was Bill Gates, but I cannot remember...I need
> more memory ;-)

"Nobody will ever need more than 640KB of memory" - IBM engineers, when
deciding to top-load the adapter area to 0xA0000 on the PC.

If you are thinking of the 64KB limit, that is only a limit of what a 16-bit
register can index. That's Intel.

Bill Gates _can_ be blamed for the 32MB HD limit (pre DOS 4). That certainly
seemed short-sighted.

-LZ
[ Do not try to e-mail me. - It is a spam trap. ]

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Charles E. Bortle, Jr.]

Hello Lou,

Good ones too, but no, I _was_ thinking of the 4k comment.
In the early S100 8bit 8080 / Z80 CP/M days someone made
a comment that nobody would ever need more than 4k of memory.
Those machines could use up to a whopping 64k ;-)  I actually
recieved comments similar to the 4k comment when I wanted to
upgrade from 32k to 64k on my S100 machine.

(By the way, I had set up a bank switching system on that machine
well before the PC was a gleam in Phil Estridge's (sp?) eyes and,
of course, before LIMS EMS.  I had 64k RAM plus a 32K EEPROM
board.)

Sorry for the off-topic :-(


--
Charles          cbrtjr@ix.netcom.com
"For God So Loved The World, That He Gave His
Only Begotten Son, That Whosoever Believeth
In Him Should Not Perish, But Have Everlasting
Life"John3:16  * http://pw2.netcom.com/~cbrtjr/wrdthing.html *
Lou Zher <abuse@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:cOsJ4.48135$U4.219264@news1.rdc1.az.home.com...
> Charles E. Bortle, Jr. <cbrtjr@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:8d5l1b$603$1@slb3.atl.mindspring.net...
> > Hello All,
> >
> > Interesting quote Ted :-)  Reminds me of the quote about
> > how nobody would ever need more than 4k of memory
> > (I think that was Bill Gates, but I cannot remember...I need
> > more memory ;-)
>
> "Nobody will ever need more than 640KB of memory" - IBM engineers, when
> deciding to top-load the adapter area to 0xA0000 on the PC.
>
> If you are thinking of the 64KB limit, that is only a limit of what a
16-bit
> register can index. That's Intel.
>
> Bill Gates _can_ be blamed for the 32MB HD limit (pre DOS 4). That
certainly
> seemed short-sighted.
>
> -LZ
> [ Do not try to e-mail me. - It is a spam trap. ]
>
>
>

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen]

Lou Zher wrote:
>Bill Gates _can_ be blamed for the 32MB HD limit (pre DOS 4). That certainly
>seemed short-sighted.

With hindsight it seems short sighted. I don't think anybody really knew at that
time how cheap and large harddrives could become.

If one only considers MSDOS, it was not a bad limit. When windows enters, then
it becomes an entirely different ballgame.


Greetings,

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[Harlan Grove]

You're spamming a lot of newsgroups, but I suppose that's
unavoidable given you want a wide range of developer
responses.

There's an unavoidable tension between horizontal (generic,
IT-directed development) and vertical (industry-
specific/user-directed development) knowledge and
technology. Accounting systems are a good example.

Manufacturers, distributors, industrial and consumer
service providers, banks, insurance and other financial
service providers have significantly different needs when
it comes to accounting systems. Manufacturers and
distributors have much greater concern managing
depreciation and inventories than the other types of
business. Banks, insurance companies and to a lesser extent
other finanical service providers have to have systems that
support risk-based capital analysis, a concept pretty much
foreign to the other types of business. It's not possible
to design a one-size-fits-all accounting solution, at least
not for large corporations.

Once you have to design specific solutions for certain
industrial sectors this nirvana of IT-directed, nonspecific
development dies off. It may work reasonably well for the
(horizontal) software foundation - examples: ODBC, OOP,
RDBMSs, ftp and electronic data transmission in general,
IEEE floating point math, image formats like GIF, TIFF and
JPEG, etc. It doesn't work for satisfying (vertical)
business needs like accounting, decision analysis and
support, EIS, budgetting and forecasting.

As for developers on their own anticipating business and
private user needs, there are a lot of failed products that
have come out over the last 15 years - Compaq's integrated
phone and PC, integrated productivity applications, almost
all 'paperless office' schemes. And arguably the most
widely used programming language, perl, has been designed
by its users (I'm not saying this was a good thing, but it
was apparently a popular thing).

The best model for software development is evolutionary
change, and that's best served by as many design and
development channels as possible. Both user-directed and
ivory tower projects contribute to software progress. Maybe
it's all boils down to answering the question: how much
more could have been achieved in the last 15 years if
software development had remained in IT departments and the
entire shareware and open source phenomena hadn't occurred?
I think my response would differ from yours.


* Sent from AltaVista http://www.altavista.com Where you can also find related Web Pages, Images, Audios, Videos, News, and Shopping.  Smart is Beautiful

Re: Article: The shift away from user directed projects

[�puma]

Thank you for the clarifications. 
I've been leaning too much out of the window.