bitsifter
friday, october 11

[sift this] As part of preparation for a business trip for the Company, I was provided with a Compaq LTE 5300, a portable computer with the same Pentium-Class 133 MHz processor as my desktop machine at work. The response time for the machine is amazing, the keyboard is cramped, yet usable, and the removable drive is key to keeping on your toes in a business world sporting a variety of media formats. Still, it is the 12 inch 800x600 16 bit color screen which amazes.

The propagation of the high resolution flat screen is essential to the evolution of the computer from a business tool to a household device. What piece of the equipment is most cumbersome when moving the computer from room to room? The monitor. The huge cathode ray tube continues to speak of age when people huddled around their TV because it was furniture.

The problem with early portable computers was the immense trade-offs from the machines at the desk. Working on the road meant tossing high bit color, resolution, disk space for slower machines that handicapped your mad dash through the terminal due to their weight. Once on the plane, the computer rarely fitted on the tray, but that didn't matter since you only had one to two hours of battery time.

This Compaq addresses all of my concerns, with a click of my centrally located ergonomic mouse, I'm able to play Quake at the same color depth and resolution as the machine at work for several hours, but the machine has more evolution in store.

The monitor is the interface. Now that the depth of the monitor has been reduced to half of an inch, the focus must now be durability. Sony realized this in the mid-80s introducing their Sports line of portable stereo equipment -- encased in durable yellow plastic, it was the first boom box that could live on the beach, guilt (and sand) free. Sony knew that people don't want to worry about the care and feeding of their hardware, they want to throw it on the desk on their way to the kitchen and forget about it.

The computer of the next century has the same dimensions as a place-mat, roughly half a newspaper page. The interface is either touch or stylus based and nobody will mind if you forget it on the floor after you're done in the bathroom.

[rant] When The Database Company move into it�s new digs in Scotts Valley, the seating arrangement described one of the greatest conflicts in many Silicon Valley software companies � the rift between quality assurance (QA) and research & development (R&D).

In the new building, there were 3 floors, the 1st floor was facilities, the 2nd floor was QA � all cubes save for managers, and the 3rd floor was all offices � each with a door and a window. The reasoning was: R&D was more productive when left alone while QA required more teamwork which was facilitated by the cube environment. The separation was only a symptom of the larger problem.

The two departments have a love-hate relationship. QA loves to tell R&D what is wrong with the product and R&D hates to hear it. The conflict stems from the fact that QA evolved when management realized that R&D truly believed that they could write bug free code. Rather than have them find their own bugs (blow to the ego), QA was created so R&D wouldn�t have to blame themselves for flaws in the product.

As the role of QA evolves, the QA engineer has become increasingly sophisticated as they�re required to develop complex testing strategies for dealing with equally complex applications. As QA is often understaffed, it is common that the engineer has a more thorough understand of the application as they�re responsible for a larger portion of the product.

The need for synchronicity between all parts of a team was recognized years before the personal computer existed by Hewlett Packard � the H-P way � everyone has a cube. We all need teamwork.

H-P continues to promote this equality between product groups and other Silicon Valley companies such as Netscape and Intel follow the example.