I just watched the series of vimeo demos of Mozilla’s Aurora interface.

Very clever and very complicated.  It’s shown as an interaction twixt what appears to be a Yuppie farmer and someone who predicts profits in agriculture based on loosely gather data on the Internet.

The strangest part to me was the graphic of usage icons diminishing in size to the horizon according to there place on the “Z” time line.  It has the feel of a galactic cloud of cosmic dust, only not as inspiring.

What was most interesting about the demo was the space station mouse the woman was using.  It looked like a globular wheel combined with an inter-lever joy-stick.

I have a feeling this woman runs a high tech winery.  If you have read the news lately, they are growing a lot more than grapes in some of these northern California boutique wineries.

Perhaps with hands-on experience I would be better able to critique the interface itself.  This is more a comment on the demonstration itself.  I felt no connection with the characters used to represent the end-user.

Mr. Jobs does a better job of clearly showing how we may use a product in our day to day lives.  This demo did not.

Back in the 80's when I took home my first 8080 PC, the program was on one five inch floppy while the OS ran on the other 360K disk.  Then came the 80286>80386 and the hard drive.
Soon after the introduction of the hard drive a 1200bps modem was added. 

Shareware came on floppies collected at monthly PCUG meetings.  Geeks Only!!!

Next was the 486 and the 5600 baud modem.  It was believed for a moment that we had plateaued in information sharing.  What fools!

This bit of nostalgia was brought about by a review of programs evaluated over the past year.  We kept all of the installation files on our backup 250 Gig back-up drive.  That being full, we are now moving the 2005-2007 files to the second 500 Gig back-up drive.

With the 160 Gig drive on the laptop, the total storage connected to this little laptop come to 960 Gig, or .96 Terabyte.

960,000,000K vs. 360K-X2 in twenty or so years.  There was no way I could've imagined making that leap in so short a time.  What more do we get out of this memory?  A great deal if managed rightly.  Too much to handle, if we don't.

Maybe I'll go back into politics...
Nah!
-30-