Re:"Probably won an award" (Score 1)

I'll agree with that. (Nice plug for the book, BTW, for a minute I thought I was reading the back cover or something.) I'll go a step further, however, and take a moment to demonstrate reasons for scorn.

Let's look at the vertical, slot-loading optical drive. Yes, folks, every time you want to insert a disc, you will peer closely at the drive to see which way the letters are and then insert the disk properly. After doing this a few times, you will notice a small, white arrow pointing to the top of the disk. Wait, does it point to the top of the disk or the top of the drive? Does it mean that the disc goes with the label side towards the arrow or that the top goes the way the arrow points? A well designed product (such as most horizontal drives or even vertical trayloaders) make it reasonably obvious which way things go - good natural mapping.

Now let's say I want to add or remove a piece of hardware. Can I hotplug it? Don't even bother building something like this if you can't. It's designed to look like a bookshelf and people will expect it to behave similarly and allow any piece (ok, maybe not the CPU) to be added or removed at whim. It's design, by intent, invites change. Now assume I *can* hotplug it. Great - now can I just pull the drive out or do I have to unlatch it somehow first? Where's the latch button? (Pure speculation, but it's probably very artfully designed - small and black on the black part somewhere. Maybe it's marked.)

I will congratulate the designers for making sure the connectors on the devices are fairly obviously dissimilar from side to side, providing physical constraint as to "right-side up". I will not dwell too much on that fact, however, because from what I can see of their mockup image (warning: big image) the connectors are mirrored from one side to the other. In other words, either 1) devices designed for one side will not fit on the other side, or 2) if devices may be flipped to fit either side, then the lights and controls also reverse position. Harping on the optical drive for a moment, it would be even more confusing to reconfigure and then be habitually putting a CD in upside down.

And of course we must have my $0.02 on DRM - their model will mess with people's heads. If you call it a computer, people will expect it to operate and be capable of what their assumption of 'computer' is and they will use it based on their assumptions of how a computer is supposed to work. Having different rights to different devices will drive people nuts. It's all the same computer, why doesn't this hard drive let me do this when this other drive will? Why does it matter whether I rented this DVD from MegaMovie or this whole series on harddisk from ZipTV? Actually, that's pure speculation again - hopefully it won't matter, but I'd bet it will.

JtM