• Intel Mobile Pentium II processor @ 266 MHz
• Industry-leading AGP implementation with a dedicated 66 MHz graphics bus and 4 MB SGRAM video memory (I have no idea what an AGP implementation is and, unsurprisingly, there is no explanation within the ad)
• 5 GB hard drive
• 64 MB RAM
• 33.6 Kbps modem
• All yours for the low price of $5,399!

We’ve come a long way since then–today, for $600, you can buy a low-end Dell laptop with a 1.5 Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive.

In the same magazine, just a few pages after the Compaq ad, I found another full page spread for a Ford Taurus. The bullet points:

• 100,000 miles between tune-ups
• Second generation dual airbags
• Safety cell construction (I don’t know what this means)
• Speed-sensitive power steering

Hmm. Looks like what you might see if you went to a Ford dealership today.

Of course, others have already compared the auto and PC industries. You may remember an old email joke:

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the
gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating (by Mr. Welch himself): If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought “Car95″ or “CarNT.” But then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five per cent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car default” warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would say “Are you sure?” before going off.

10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. You’d press the “start” button to shut off the engine.

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun!

Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.

The drafting table style implementation shown here measures 36″x27″, is rear-projected, and has a sensing resolution of better than 0.1″ at 50Hz. Stroke event information is sent to applications using the lightweight OSC protocol over UDP.

Looks good. Hopefully it will get out of the labs and into commercial products soon.

Here’s another novel system for interacting with your computer.

Lots of applications for gaming, though I’m not sure how it could be used in a mainstream professional setting…

(via Andreas)

• 1984: DNS introduced.
• 1989: more than 100,000 available hosts.
• 1992: more than 1,000,000 available hosts.
• 1994: Pizza Hut offers online pizza ordering.

Anyway, I like to visit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see what various sites looked like before–and then compare to what they look like today. When I do this, I’m usually suprised by how, at first glance, the design of many of the sites I visit seems static. Why is this? Given how fast things are changing elsewhere on the web, where are the breakthroughs in interface design?

For example, take Amazon from October 13, 1999:

And compare to Amazon today:

If Amazon went back to their ‘99 model, I’m not sure I’d be immediately able to tell the difference (ignore the green arrow–that’s an artifact of the software I used to create the images and not actually part of site).

Here’s ESPN from January 25, 1999:

And ESPN today:

NY Times from November 12, 1996:

And NY Times today:

I like the new version.

Finally, Google from December 2, 1998:

And Google today:

Essentially the same, aside from a few minor cosmetic changes.

To be fair, all of the above sites have made countless important changes that aren’t visible when considering simple screenshots (eg Ajax). Still, I think that usability in general, and interface design in particular, has plenty of room for improvement on today’s internet.

–

Postscript: take a look at Yahoo from October 17, 1996:

And Yahoo today:

I think Yahoo has made significant improvements (though their site is a little busy).

Many think some forms of media convergence will never happen; for certain applications, they say, people will always want multiple devices, with each optimized for a specific purpose (“if I’m on the road, I want a small device that’s good for email. But I’ll never use that to watch TV”).

However, it’s fairly obvious is that media is already “converging,” and we’ll see significant advances over the next decade as underlying technology (screens, battery life, processors, etc) improve and as vendors increasingly adopt open standards.

All this came to mind the other day as I walked into a Barnes and Noble and came across a hardcover book called PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

The book was entirely based on submissions to the PostSecret website. In other words, they took the blog and turned it into a book. (For those who don’t know, the site is described as an “ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.” If you haven’t seen the site, you should check it out.) Although PostSecret used a traditional publisher (Regan Books), there are now a variety of commercial services available (Lulu, Blog Binders, etc) that enable anyone to easily convert a blog into a professional-feeling book.

Separately, I learned earlier today of Apple’s new “mini” computer, which comes bundled with software that (apparently) makes it easy to consume digital media stored on the computer using “normal” devices. For example, you can attach the mini to your TV (provided your TV has the right type of input ports, in this case DVI or VGA) and then watch videos, browse photo collections, and even surf the internet. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, you don’t even have to leave your sofa. You could also connect the mini to your stereo (again, provided your receiver has the right type of input ports) and then listen to .mp3s. The mini even comes with a remote.

Even without fancy new hardware, media convergence is happening–all you need is a web browser. “Saturday Night Live” is getting more exposure than they’ve had in years via video clips on YouTube and other video sharing services. Or, if you prefer music, Live365 has thousands of free online radio stations, all playable from your computer. Or, create your own virtual radio station with Last.fm or Pandora.

In any case, it’s still too hard for most non-geeks to take advantage of many interesting emerging forms of media convergence (does your dad/mom/friend know if their TV has a DVI connector?). But, as always, this will change with time.

Scoble, Steve Reubel, and TechCrunch all offer opinions. It’s worth reading the comments for each entry.

I don’t like the new feature. The problem is that Technorati’s algorithm for measuring authority is too simple–they look only at inbound links (the more links, the more “authoritative” a blog is). Just because a blog has many inbound links doesn’t mean it necessarily has significant influence or control over others. That said, it isn’t immediately obvious how to do a better job? What additional factors should be considered? Can these factors be evaluated consistently? Will the process of evaluation scale to cover the entire internet?

I’m reminded of an article in this month’s Atlantic magazine about online dating (sub required, unfortunately). If you think determining a blog’s authority is difficult, imagine how hard it must be for a computer program to accurately assess compatibility between two people. Difficulty notwithstanding, eHarmony (among others), seems to be having success: according to a Harris Interactive poll, between September 2004 and September 2005 eHarmony “facilitated the marriages of more than 33,000 members–an average of more than 46 per day.” Another study suggested that people who met via eHarmony “report more marital satisfaction than those met by other means.”

How does eHarmony assess compatibility? It isn’t easy: the company has developed a 436-question personality survey (it takes a while to complete). They plan to hire 20 to 25 “top relationship researchers” away from acadamia to develop additional tools.

Clearly, this isn’t a completely fair comparision. eHarmony can successfully ask clients to complete a long survey, and then eHarmony can take its time to analyze data before making a recommendation. Technorati has no such luxury: like other search engines, users demand immediate, accurate results. That said, I think Technorati’s challenge–enabling a machine to correctly assess a qualitative concept like authority–is essential. The quantity of available content continues to increase at a seemingly exponential rate. It just isn’t possible for any single person to digest all–or even most–reports on any topic (after performing a Google search, how many times do you click past even the second page of results?). Better machine intelligence–especially related to filtering and processing qualitative, unstructured information–will likely be a very valuable tool for just about everyone. Perhaps Technorati can take a lesson from eHarmony and invest in developing a more sophisticated solution.

In particular, it looks like the last six months have been best for Google, despite the stock’s recent significant drop.

The above chart tracks stock price; actual market caps for Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo as of market close on 2/15/06 were $101B, $278B, and $47B.

Google’s performance is supported by the dramatic increases the company has made in “reach.”

For the curious, Alexa defines reach as follows:

Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site’s current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.

However, Yahoo continues to dominate in terms of actual page views–and by a signficant margin.

So why isn’t Yahoo’s valuation higher? My take is it comes down to growth trends–Google is moving in the right direction, and Yahoo isn’t.

Nice jobs, if you can get them.

Baris recently wrote an intriguing post about machinima, or the production of computer generated imagery using low end software (typically video games) and hardware rather than complex 3D engines and render farms. The idea is that machinima enables almost anyone to easily create reasonably good quality video.

Here’s an example, created using “Halo” and “Halo 2″:

The show, called “Red vs Blue,” is a parody of “FPS games, military life, and other science fiction movies.” Red vs Blue started in 2003 and is now in its 4th season (check out their web site). There are many other creative machinima examples (including some based on the Broadway show Avenue Q).

What happens in 5 or 10 years, after graphical rendering and audio technology advance to a point far beyond where they are today?

Take a look at these images–all computer generated. Next, give this text-to-speech demonstration a try (sorry, works only with IE). It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that the production of media entertainment is bound to change fundamentally–and soon.

All this notwithstanding, A-list stars still have real value, and it’s unlikely that machinima will be able to perfectly duplicate a recognized actor’s particular gestures and intonations soon, if ever. Plus, quality movies have a lot more than star power (eg good writing, direction, etc); in fact, there are many examples of movies that would likely have been far better had they relied less on technology.

Still, looks like the movie business is ready to be exploded.

Samsung’s latest 16-gigabit flash memory chips have wires and transistors that measure about 50 nano-meters (equivalent to one two-thousandth the thickness of a human hair). That in mind, Samsung is apparently developing a new notebook computer that uses flash as an alternative to traditional hard disks. The new PC will be about 10-15% lighter and 30% faster than equivalent models–and it will have 40 gigabytes of storage.

Sounds promising…

(via The Indian Express)

• From The Future of Privacy: AMERICAblog just bought General Wesley Clark’s cell phone record–they paid $89.95. Apparently, CBS reported on this story on their broadcast tonight (which I didn’t see).
• From The Pixel Wars: The Million Dollar Home Page finally sold its last pixel–that’s right, they’ve now sold all 1,000,000. In fact, the last 1,000 pixels were auctioned on eBay and sold for $38,100.
• From Digg, Delicious, and the New Balance of Power: Kottke has an excellent analysis of Digg vs Slashdot. The verdict: Slashdot isn’t dead. Far from it.
• From An Internet Epidemic: Looks like Sony wasn’t the only company planting potentially harmful software in consumers’ PCs. According to eWeek, Symantec has a “rootkit-type feature” in one of their products, also.