Interesting article, and he sounds like a clever (and, as the article says) humble guy.
> On the way home from one of those trips, Whitfield had an idea. “He was on an airplane, and he whipped out a tablet and basically drew out the whole schematic of how the clean room should work,” said Whitfield’s son Jim, who was 6 years old at the time. “It was just a simple sketch. It just took a few minutes, and it’s the basic principle that is still used today.”
This was in 1960 and he clearly drew it on paper. So is/was "tablet" a common term for a pad of paper? I've never heard it used in any context other than a slab of stone or a derivation of such.
This exact product is referenced quite often in John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans of the early 1960s. The main character, Ignatius J Reilly, is essentially a neckbeard stereotype.
Etymonline states: "The meaning 'pad of writing or blotting paper' is by 1880".[1] Also see the variety of meanings listed it the Webster 1913 edition, including: "1. A small table or flat surface. 2. A flat piece of any material on which to write, paint, draw, or engrave; also, such a piece containing an inscription or a picture. 3. Hence, a small picture; a miniature. [Obs.] 4. pl. A kind of pocket memorandum book. [...]".[2] -- No information on the frequency of use, though.
Also, typically glue bound along the top edge and having a solid backing, as if you took a hardbound book (of blank pages) and ripped off the front cover and spine. Pages could easily be peeled off, if glued at the edge, or torn off if perforated.
I picture it as a legal pad, more or less. If I really think about it, I imagine a "legal pad" as having that very specific paper (lined, with that nice margin), whereas a "tablet" could perhaps be any type of paper bound together in that same way.
I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)
Looks like paper tablets even predate that 1902 use. This source has newspaper ads for "Pencil Tablets" and "Writing Tablets": bound ruled and un-ruled paper with and without covers from 1894-1895: https://www.kristinholt.com/archives/3205
I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?
I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.
Single AOC 27" UHD monitor on my desktop Windows system at home. I use multiple desktops for context switching. No gaming, just a bit of dev and photo stuff.
At work, a couple of Dell 27" UHD monitors attached to my Windows laptop via DP ports on a dock. Single desktop as I have plenty of screen space. I mostly live in Visual Studio and Outlook/Teams.
No complaints about either - all works pretty well.
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
> Teaching ability is an innate feature of human beings.
Distribution seems to follow a bell curve - you’ll usually find the people with exceptional teaching ability harnessing that aptitude in a professional setting.
All features in humans follow a bell curve. Viva la difference!
Pretty much all humans can run. Yes, some have exceptional talent at it, and some can barely walk. But the vast majority can run reasonably well. Exceptional talent at teaching is certainly not required for routine learning.
Besides, you can buy the workbooks for every level of math, and work it through with the critters. There's no special skill needed. I don't recall any teachers of mine at any level who had any apparent special skill at it.
Except for Feynman. I attended one of his lectures. It was amazing! Feynman was at the extreme end of the bell curve, that's for sure.
> At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.
There should be a name for the tendency to of humans to discount the depth and sophistication of the subjective experience of animals. From insects to primates, it is so prevalent.
This video made me change my approach to consuming animals - I realized that just because animals are dumber than humans doesn't mean they don't have real, meaningful life experiences. And I'd be a dick to deprive them of those experiences.
There's also some hypocrisy in us wanting hyper intelligent AI to have compassion for humans and the human experience even though we're dumber than it, but us not doing the same for animals.
I don't think it's an innate tendency, but rather an aspect of some cultures. For instance, I have heard that the people native to orangutan ranges traditionally considered them to be a sort of people, at least in a way, and I've read that when Carthaginian explorers first encountered gorillas they though they were a peculiar tribe of primitive people.
I use Teams every day (for work, the company basically runs on it) for chat and meetings, and I'm one of those strange people who never really have much problem with it. I can think of one occasion in perhaps the last six months when it crashed and I had to kill and restart it. Otherwise it just sits there on my laptop and does its thing. Same with Outlook etc.
So, what am I doing wrong? How do I get the authentic Teams user experience that everyone else here seemingly has?
Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about serious matter.
Also, it HAS to rename my files.
Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages
In the strictest form Teams "works". You can chat with people, you can do video calls, you can share files. Outside of the core "calling a person" experience though it's a mess, starting with the way the word Team is so overloaded, it has several different meanings within the Teams application. There's very few other places where its so apparent that a piece of software is bunch of other products all mashed together and shipped as fast as possible - you've got Sharepoint in there, Office, Skype for Business, and very little consideration seems to have gone into how to make all of those work together seamlessly.
You are not alone. I also personally find Teams more than ok even if I wish it was more snappy.
Meetings work great. Compatible equipment in room makes everything feel seem less. Collaborative editing and file sharing are both awesome.
Every time it’s brought up on HN I get the feeling that people here use collaborative tools in a very different way I do. They mostly want something to chat via text which I and most of the people in my area of work use very little. I think that’s where the disconnect comes from.
Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.
> Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.
That's insightful. I gather your workday is a blend of collaborative document writing or video calls?
At work, I'm at my best when I'm not in meetings nor documents. I'm writing text all day, some for computers, some for humans. But I can see how I'm in the minority across the spectrum of knowledge work.
> Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.
The problem is that it’s a perfectly fine video meeting application (although what sociopath decided entering a meeting unmuted was a proper default), but many orgs try to push it as their chat application too. The UX for that is awful. And for some of us that is the primary way we communicate. I started working from home in 2008, collaborating on code over Freenode long before that. Most eng teams I’ve been on these past 20 years coordinate on chat. It’s hard when the business people think Teams is fine and then the rest of us have to use busted software.
I’m also puzzled by the hate for Teams. I used Teams for years and developed on Power Platform. The integration between all the pieces of the MS stack is unrivaled.
I now use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace etc. and don’t enjoy the experience at all. It feels low quality and messy compared to Teams.
Making App integrations for Slack to basically anything is pretty close to a joyful experience, the rest of it is comparable to other chat systems perhaps, but are you really telling me with a straight face that developing applications atop Teams (that do more than just plug other Microsoft things together) is actually a superior experience?
I get that opinions are subjective and all that, but so you understand: I'm having the same reaction as if someone said to you that contracting gangrene is preferable to a walk in the park.
Yes. I’ve built apps on Power Platform and I’ve built a Slack App; the Teams experience is superior, for me. Could it take some lessons from Slack - yes, a python or typescript code block in Power Automate would be awesome.
As for your reaction: if your experience is so different, a useful attitude might be to ask why you have such an absurdly negative viewpoint.
Thanks for altering your comment to remove the “grow up” remark, it wasn’t helpful.
To tell you the truth I always assumed it was because Microsoft didn’t really care about chatops or any integration that was not within their ecosystem (or a website). The experience is consistent with that viewpoint.
The biggest problems with Teams -- which I had to use daily for over a year and a half at my previous job -- is with its UX, not its implementation. I found bugs in the Linux client here and there, but they weren't showstoppers. But using it was just frustrating because it got in the way of communication and didn't work how I expected.
It's just not good. When you compare it to Slack, etc. it's just constantly awkward and getting in the way. And it tries to do too much, on top of that.
Same for me, it works and allows me to do what I need to do. It does it neither gracefully or efficiently, but I think that's down to it trying to be everything at once, and the UI suffers as a result.
The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.
> The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.
Makes you wonder how many teams does Microsoft have working on calendars.
mIRC and many other clients just sat there and did their thing. 30 years ago. Countless projects have been coordinated via IRC. This isn't a high bar for chat software.
Teams fails every day at its basic purpose. Chats are confusing, the threaded ones being utterly useless. Constantly have to use the mouse to do basic stuff like address people or change channel. Stuff randomly breaks all the time, syntax highlighting seems to break in some new way every other week. It's complete garbage software and a massive regression for those of us who remember proper, simple chat software from decades ago.
Teams regularly fails at video conferencing. It complains of low network bandwidth at random times, and I check my firewall (OpnSense with fq_codel enabled and reasonable bandwidth limits) to note that it under very light load.
I am not sure if this is a server side thing at Microsoft, or a problem with the application itself. True under Windows, Linux, via local app, and via the web app.
For larger meetings (> 50 people), we use zoom. Unlike teams, zoom generally just works. Quite well in fact.
Teams is simply crap software, forced upon us. If we could jettison that and Outlook, I would be grateful. Though our IT looks at us in an unblinking stare, if we ask them to allow us to use any of the better clients on mobile, laptop, desktop, windows or linux. Its almost as if our third eye in the middle of our forehead opened up.
You're not doing it wrong, if anything I'm genuinely happy for you.
This isn't sarcasm or anything, I really mean it. If you're somehow on Teams' happy path and it does what you expect then I'm envious, I wish I was you and I am grateful that it's helpful to you at least.
For me, though, the frustration stems from being forced to use it at work, which amplifies every quirk tenfold. Minor annoyances like duplicated groups of the same people (splitting chat histories across sessions), the "every team is a SharePoint site" bloat, and the massive resource drain (though that's easing as hardware improves) add up fast.
That is to say that they also relay all of their calls through datacenters half a continent away, so if you're close to one of those then it's fine but the further you are the more likely you are to accidentally talk over people and so on, there's no peer-to-peer, even 1:1 calls are relayed with Teams; making Google Meet and Jitsi perform "better" (though people can't explain why).
Then there's the dev-side slop: mangled code snippets in chats, meeting controls jammed at the top (pulling your eyes away from the camera), and—God help you: if you've ever tried building chatops integrations on it, you'd break down and cry. Like, real, actual office-bathroom breakdown tears.
> On the way home from one of those trips, Whitfield had an idea. “He was on an airplane, and he whipped out a tablet and basically drew out the whole schematic of how the clean room should work,” said Whitfield’s son Jim, who was 6 years old at the time. “It was just a simple sketch. It just took a few minutes, and it’s the basic principle that is still used today.”
This was in 1960 and he clearly drew it on paper. So is/was "tablet" a common term for a pad of paper? I've never heard it used in any context other than a slab of stone or a derivation of such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet#Inscription,_printing,_...
Minor point but struck me as odd.
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