Sunday 30 April 2000

Pic of the day: Incidentally, I was out of doors today again.

Not once, but twice do I dream the dream. And the dream is about a man whose name I know not. He comes to the town, and the town is enclosed in a large glass dome. And the man goes not into town, nor can he go into a house for any length of time. For the man is so warm that he sets fire to everything that he touches. Even his clothes, so he has to go into water from time to time to keep his clothes from catching fire. He has to move all the time, or his feet will cause the tarmac on the road to melt and catch fire. He comes to the town, hoping to see his friend, whose name I know not. And someone else comes there, to the broad empty road that connects the town with another town, also in a bubble of glass. The other comes and keeps the man company, and he wonders if his friend will come to him. And he notices that the other, who he did not know, is acting like a friend, though not being one; while his friend is not. And the dream ends. There is naked stone on the mesa that surrounds the town. Not a tree, not a straw. Like a sad vision of the future.

I spent some time playing Alpha Centauri again. A couple days ago, I played through a game to its logical conclusion, the Ascent to Transcendence. I am tempted to write about that, but perhaps another time. There is so much to say, and I already have a couple other things on my mind.

Today I play as Morgan Industries, another faction in the game. Just as it is fairly obvious which faction has the sympathy of the game designers (namely the Gaian treehuggers, or rather fungus-huggers) - so it is even more obvious which faction is on the bottom of the heap. The energy-grubbing no-stops capitalists under the leadership of CEO Morgan. I still play at the easiest level, Citizen, which is rather lax on the rules in some ways, though not quite sandbox mode. Playing Morgan is like going up one difficulty level from playing Gaians. Cities can not be built larger than 4 without a hab complex (normal is 6) so the alternative is expansion. Expansion is hampered by the fact that there is less free support for military units than the other factions have. And to top it all, the rest of the factions declare war at first sight. Obviously someone doesn't like capitalists ...

Still, Alpha Centauri is an impressive game. It also runs fine on three year old computers, unlike The Sims, which really could use a brand new machine for best possible performance. It certainly makes my 1 year old portable heat up pretty fast. Which brings me to the main course for today, the Future of The Personal Computer.

Why should the PC have a future at all? There are better alternatives. For games, the new generation of game machines (such as the new Playstation) beats the PC in terms of sound and graphics. And they can be connected to the TV, saving the cost of a monitor. They can even be used to surf the Internet - some day.

Except that for Internet access from home, the natural choice would be the small cheap boxes you plug into your TV. Think WebTV and such. And from the office, you will access the Internet (and intranet) from Network Computers, basically intelligent terminals, which are cheaper than PCs. Corporations need to maximize their profit, you know. And they can download all the software from the net, making sure they are always up to date.

Finally for those on the move, there is the new generation of mobile phones that also gives you access not only to your e-mail, but even to the web, anywhere. They're certainly a far cry from the big bulky PCs.

The days of the PC seems to be numbered. But then again ...

Some people may be content to surf the Web the same way they surf channels on their TV. But most will eventually be sucked in and want to contribute, at the very least in the form of E-mail to friends and family. This is where the keyboard of a mobile phone, gamepad or remote control really starts to become a nuisance. And a flimmering TV screen is not the best thing to read from, either.

Similarly, the extremely business-oriented user will probably be satisfied with a network terminal. But the more playful will want to try some of the games or multimedia that abound on the Net. This means they will need a sound card, and perhaps a better graphics card. And a hard disk, so you don't need to download the same stuff over and over. And if you now add a CD-ROM/DVD player you have it all ... namely, you have a PC.

But more important than any of the above is the one thing that will make the PC survive against the game stations. Namely, the PC is not a brand name any more. (Though IBM may think otherwise.) You can essentially mix and match, and as soon as a new technology is out, someone will try to build it into their PC. So in a few years, when high resolution stereoscopic goggles become affordable, the production lines of the PC factories will switch to include the appropriate video cards that support them. You will not need to wait for GameStation Inc to milk the existing market completely before releasing the new GameStation with stereo goggle support. Conversely, if you don't want the StereoVision Goggles, but everything else, there will be El Cheapo PC delivering "value" PCs without it.

The PC as we know it came into being because IBM launched the PC with no idea that it would be a mega hit, so they were unusually lax on letting people read the specs and make clones. They tried to close the door a few years later by launching the PS/2. I remember the full page ads in everyday newspapers extolling the virtues of the PS/2, which could even do more than one task at the same time. At the time, I used DesqView (if I remember the name correctly, from Quarterdeck or some such arcane producer) which did exactly that, on a normal PC, for a modest amount of money. So did the other nerds, and the CEO who doesn't ask a resident nerd is tomorrows "consultant". So PS/2 flopped grandly.

In short, the PC is currently the best embodiment of free exchange of information, and as such it may continue to exist in some form as long as the human spirit retains its longing for freedom. Eventually the PC will probably merge with us, but that's a story for another day, if any.