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From: roy@alanine.phri (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re:  Where are the small thinkers now that we can't use them?
Message-ID: <8710250157.AA01712@alanine.phri>
Date: Sat, 24-Oct-87 21:57:17 EST
Article-I.D.: alanine.8710250157.AA01712
Posted: Sat Oct 24 21:57:17 1987
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	Warning, this is one of my "keep typing until you get tired"
messages.  It's long, and it wanders, but I think it hits a few good
points, so keep reading (or, at least, keep skimming).

	First, a digression on a point of only marginally-relevant trivia.
"They" have been arguing in j-random newsgroup for the past week or so
about the "right" was to represent a paragraph and/or sentence break in
ascii text, so smart display software can reformat the paragraphs to fit
the reader's screen.  At first glance, I wondered why these people were
getting so worked up.  Then, when I attempted to edit out a sentence of the
following quotation of Barry's words I discovered that emacs's idea of a
sentence break (two spaces after the ".") doesn't match Barry's (just one
space) and killed a whole paragraph when I meant to kill a sentence (M-K).
Maybe it's really worth worrying about after all.

	Anyway ...

> As Greg points out things like window and document systems (X, NeWS, TeX,
> InterLeaf et al) are behemoths of complexity and it doesn't look like
> anyone is offering any choice in the matter.

	By "complexity", I assume you mean complex to write and maintain
the software.  Well, I just got my demo tape of FrameMaker.  FM is an
InterLeaf type program for Sun workstations.  Frame Technologies (the
purveyors of FM) claims that the source code is about 5% of the size of
InterLeaf's source and that the entire software development project took
only a single man-year.  On the other hand:

text	data	bss	dec	hex
204800	589824	0	794624	c2000	/usr/local/bin/tex
977068	128056	49568	1154692	119e84	/usr/local/bin/maker

(tex included for comparison purposes; this is the output of the Unix
"size" command on a Sun-3).  Regardless of how small the source is, or how
fast it was written, a Mbyte of text *is* a bit on the large side.

> it just *seems* like placing characters on a page shouldn't take several
> multi-hundred page volumes to explain, for example

	Agreed!  I havn't seen the full FM documentation (they don't ship
it with the demo tape) but all I needed to get going on some moderately
complex stuff (3-column output, multi fonts, headers and footers) was to
read through the not-very-dense 25-page demo document (in the flavor of
teach-emacs) and start playing around.  Of course, the real win was that I
was able to import 90% of my Macintosh skills -- they tried hard to make it
look as much like a Mac as they could on a Sun screen, and they were
largely successful.  It also helped that I know a bit about typesetting
so the contents of the various menus all made sense.

	At the risk of sounding like a commercial, do yourself a favor and
get the FrameMaker free demo tape.  It may not be the cat's pajamas in the
WP department, but it's pretty close, and at a small fraction of what
InterLeaf is charging (just under $1k per workstation to educational
sites).  It's not as fast as I might like, but considering what it does,
it's really quite reasonable, after you get past the 2-minute startup time.
I'm not sure I'm actually going to shell out the bucks for the real thing,
but I'm impressed.

> We will see more use of "information appliances" as the Mac claimed to
> be.

	You sound like you're not convinced that they are.  Why not?  After
all these years of teaching "dumb scientists" how to fight with Unix, it's
really amazing to see people walk up to the Mac and start doing useful work
right away.  If that's not an "information appliance", I don't know what
is.  Also, why the past tense; "claimed to be"?  It's not dead yet.

	Another digression:  It's also really amazing to watch them all
walk away with hot copies of everything on my hard disk.  How do I convince
people in this information age that theft of software is indeed theft.
These otherwise honest, hard-working, ethical people practically laugh in
my face when I patiently explain over and over again about copyrighted, but
not copy-protected, software.  The same guy who wouldn't dream of making a
phone call using a fraudulent credit card number is perfectly happy to walk
off with a $300 program.  Not just that, but they even give me copies of
stuff I don't want -- I can't tell you how many copies of Microsoft Word
I've removed from my hard disk (it's a public-access machine).  Sometimes I
feel like a preacher in a whorehouse.  Am I the only schmuck left in the
world who actually respects copyrights?

	On a somewhat related note, what's the future of per-CPU software
licenses.  It's already confusing enough trying to decide what's a CPU and
what's a terminal.  The general opinion seems to be that my 3/50 is a CPU,
even though it doesn't have a disk.  FM enforces per-CPU licensing by doing
some encryption magic on the host's internet address.  When I explained
this to somebody, they immediately wanted to know why we couldn't just
license FM on a single Sun and have people rlogin to that host to run it.
I explained that suntools doesn't run across rlogin connections, but it
quickly occurred to me that NeWS and X do.

	Assuming that Suntools will slowly slide into oblivion to be
replaced by NeWS and/or X, software developers are going to start to
rethink yet-again the licensing question.  How do you deal with software
licensing when you're running an application on one host, a NeWS client on
another, reading in the application binary from a NFS file system on a
third, swapping it out to a ND partition on a fourth, and working with a
document file stored on yet a fifth CPU?  Maybe some of those machines are
multi-CPU processors; maybe some have things like Sun's IPC card.  Maybe
I'm running SUPDUP in my comm controller to take the editing load off "the
CPU".  Confusing, very confusing.

> People will tend to use tools which match their jobs and be satisfied
> with the lack of micro-creativity in return for some stability and
> simplicity.

	It's interesting -- you should see the pecking order we have around
here.  Person X is perfectly happy to produce mono-spaced text in whatever
font happens to be the default, and write in the equations by hand.  That
drives me nuts, so I diddle with troff/eqn/tbl/bib and do it "right" (I
consistantly get nicer-looking output using troff then he does using a Mac,
and in less time).  On the other hand, the graphics-artist who designed our
Annual Report format is constantly getting on my case about "stupid
details" like making the page numbers 12 pt instead of 11, and getting the
header rules to be a Pica longer or shorter.  Everybody has their own
definition of where you draw the line between making it look nice and
getting it out the door.

	Enought ramblings.  Comments?
s