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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rupert1 who wrote (61911)	5/22/1999 6:24:00 AM
From: hlpinout	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Hello Victor, Looks like Itsy is getting a bit more publicity. (maybe you should change your name to Gnome since they want to use Gnu!) News article received, Friday, May 21, 1999 6:15:45 AM EST Linux Developers Should Adopt A Common GUI May 21, 1999 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- RALEIGH, N.C. -- One of the engineers chiefly responsible for what we all see on our computer screens told developers that a uniform view is important if Linux is to go mainstream. Keynoting Linux Expo here Thursday, Jim Gettys, senior consulting engineer at Compaq, told a crowd of several hundred Linux developers to find standard specifications and keep them as they develop a graphic user interface for the burgeoning operating system. Gnome, a new GUI that sits on top of Linux was released by the FreeSoftware Foundation at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in March. It is considered a step forward for the operating sytem which some estimate is installed on 17 million computers. Gnome stands for Gnu Network Object Model Environment. Gnu refers to the Gnu project, which developed the General Public License, or GNU License, the set of rules that used to regulate the distribution of Linux free to developers. With Gnome, users can access applications, send e-mail, and browse the Web without writing a single command line. Users can also configure the system to have the look and feel of Macintosh, Windows, or other commercial GUIs. More advanced users can customize the Gnome interface. But that is where Gettys sounded his warning about specifications and interoperability. "If you can't make it look like another guy's stuff, you're broken," said Gettys, one of the authors of the X Windows a tool that is used to develop graphic user interfaces. The X Windows system came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and was an early example of open-standards-based technology development. "Specifications are a pain," Gettys said, "but they are absolutely necessary. They allow bright people to understand how a system works without wading through all the code." To make his point, Gettys pointed out a specification written in the X Windows code. He ran a 7-year-old videotape of a colleague using the one-line specification in the code to control an X Windows workstation remotely through voice recognition software. Then, Gettys showed a research product from Houston-based Compaq, using that same spec to run X Windows on Itsy, a research project at Compaq Computer's Western Research Lab that uses Linux to run on a piece of hardware the size of a deck of cards. The pocket computer had a 200-megahertz processor, 32 megabytes of RAM and a 200x300 pixel screen. He could use his voice to control the device and get it to read his e-mail. "We need agreements that everybody does the same thing," Gettys said. "We don't want to have n different programs, n different interfaces, to make a general purpose program, do we?" Wimpy interfaces -- mouse-based interfaces -- are not the future, Gettys said. "We are seeing a rapidly growing use of non-desktop devices," he said. Palm Pilots, telephones, audio input devices, hands-free devices, eyes-free devices. He said Compaq was investigating whether the Itsy device could be "made available to the Linux community." Regardless, he said developers should think out of the box, off the desktop, think unconventionally, he said.