Better still: you have a smart card with all your details on it. The smart card tells the exe (a Smalltalk Virtual Machine and Image downloaded into your Diskless workstation), everything it needs to know about you. The machine has now become you. It is now able to reconfigure itself by refering the questions it cannot answer back to you via a simple GUI (or better a Natural Language UI). They are called Net Computers. They failed because they depended on Xtreme Thin Client Software. They thought that Java would solve the problem, It can't because its a System and Software Design failure and Java is not up to it. Smalltalk would have removed 60% of the problem at the program level. Why not 100%? Because Smalltalk is not designed to handle level 1) and level 2) System Problems ref "Three Threads of Squeak". A design fix to Smalltalk would give it 100% performance. The Net Computer is not equipped to answer ie your policy (your Purpose). Only you, the human, you can do that. When the machine is switched off nothing remains except what is on your smart card. Total Security. The ISP remains a security risk though. Now the bad news There is no software available to enable one to build such a System. Hmmmmm? I think the keyword is System Integration not Software Integration.
----- Original Message ----- From: G.J.Tielemans@dinkel.utwente.nl To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 6:12 PM Subject: RE: A stupid newbie question
You are missing the point that for a normal user - not the computer-fun-people - the best solution is to put all materials in one box and if they want to use it, they only would have to open that box: windows-shorthand for that: "give me a .exe"
-----Original Message----- From: Richard A. O'Keefe [mailto:ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 1:30 AM To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: RE: A stupid newbie question
"Stephen Pair" spair@advantive.com wrote: Looks like we have two metaphors to compare:
A) Double click and icon and squeak runs B) Drag one icon on top of another and run Squeak
Am I missing something, or have I been using (A) on MacOS for as long as I've had Squeak (since 2.7)? What's to complain about? It's there! It just works.