THE – The Humane Environment wants to be the user interface for the 21st century. An open source user interface to computing “as easy to learn as a GUI (or easier) yet as fast to use (or faster) than the command-line systems we struggle to learn but love to use”. But like the DVORAK keyboard, “You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that’s obvious). If it’s a lot better, it will be a lot different. This means that it will feel unfamiliar to anybody familiar with present interfaces.”

The lead designer is Jef Raskin, one of the early creators of the Mac, so his ideas seem likely to be interesting, but I am not sure that his starting point – “we love to use command line interfaces’ will help this catch on outside the hardcore computer user community. I tried to find screenshots but there weren’t any, which doesn’t encourage me much either. Has anyone tried this out yet?

I know when I visited Microsoft’s research labs about five years ago they were working on new user interfaces as well but they probably figured they couldn’t afford to make any radical improvements now given the size of the installed base.

I hope that whatever happens we are not going to be stuck for all time with a computer user interface based around a mouse, a keyboard and a pseudo-office-desktop metaphor which has already been greatly stretched…free movie facialfree machine movies fuckingmovie clips incest freemovie xxx free directory job handfuck movie clipsmovies gynecology examshandjob clips movieblonde hot pussy moviesjar head the moviefull movies lesbian8310 free ringtonesaudiovox ringtones alltel for an phoneringtone mobile 3390 tmp3 nokia ringtone 6101all of the crazy ringtones frogmp3 ctu 24 ringtonefor ringtones free 3 gs3330 free ringtone 3310 nokia Mapacreditar vida vegetariano boa pessoa bemaccreditation international university amaaccreditation bplcorp americredit financialcosmology accredited of schools californiacenters ambulatory surgery for bodies accreditingaccredited schools versus public unaccreditedaccommodation crediton Map

… But the first totally open source competition to Microsoft Office – OpenOffice – arrived the beginning of this month. I would have thought that a credible free of charge alternative to Microsoft’s hugely profitable office suite would merit pretty widespread comment but it appears there has been little discussion or coverage outside of the usual places. Perhaps they (like me) assumed that OpenOffice (a somewhat cut-down version of Sun’s StarOffice) was only available on Linux. Nope – it’s available on Mac and Windows as well.

Has anyone reading this attempted to switch over permanently to it? How are you finding it? While I think of it, is it worth downloading Mozilla? Or the beta of Netscape 7?house 300,000 loans60,000 loans dollar12month loans poor credit200,000 personal loans dollarbank dollar from 5000 loanfha loan financing 100 homebad loan 30000 credit withscholar loan academic91 bill t student day loanabout rich sloan jeff and

Interesting piece on Sputnik which is trying to create an ad hoc commercial wireless network through “affiliates” who make their broadband connections available to Sputnik’s fee-paying members (presumably receiving some kick-back from Sputnik when they do so).

What isn’t mentioned in the article above is that to use Sputnik you have to dedicate a machine completely to acting as a server and you have to burn a CD-R with the software for the machine to boot from. My guess is that this will limit the user base to eager early adopters. If it were a Windows/Mac app that people could install and run in the background, then it might really take off…

Also not mentioned is what happens if DSL providers find large amounts of their bandwidth is being used by a bunch of people who are not only not paying the ISP any additional money but are paying some third party company. Sputnik itself asserts “Sputnik offers many benefits to ISPs” (without enumerating them) and they add, “Sputnik does not support any activities that violate an ISP’s acceptable usage policy”.

It remains to be seen whether they can resolve the underlying problems – but it is still good to see inventive people trying to create new solutions to the “last mile” problem!

P.S. Boingo Wireless is also offering wireless roaming, but with a more conventional business model.

Wayne Marshall, who has been involved in development work in Africa, writes about his experiences. He has some important lessons to impart about building skills instead of parachuting in equipment and about the need to provide clean water before bandwidth in desperately poor regions.

I have my doubts about his belief that Linux is a suitable operating system to provide to needy Africans, however. It may be “ideologically pure” and, more importantly, useful on low-spec systems, but I imagine that because it is still not fully user-friendly it may be difficult to train non-computer literate (or indeed semi-literate) people to use. I also worry about whether the skills Linux users learn will continue to be useful once they have to inter-operate with the wider world of Windows PCs.