Slashdot Mirror
Second Coming of Technology
BgJonson79 writes "A Yale computer scientist has published his views on what will be the next 15 years of computing. He says the last breakthrough operating system was for the Mac and that Linux is obsolete. He also says the present file system is obsolete, as are some filenames." Many good points in this one. great discussion fodder: talks about how we just sort accept flaws in the systems we use. Also talks about how in the future the net will be less about computers and more about the net (eg astronomy isn't about telescopes) Definitely worth a read.
6,006,227 Document stream operating system
Just FYI
While the author makes a few interesting points this article is what you what expect from a comp-sci student who's been detached from the reality of computing for years. While his 'life-streams' migth potentially sound good on paper how would you ever model this? He makes the analogy of how the brain accesses information. However, the brain takes one word like 'Fifth-Avenue' and then takes into accoutn a large amount of sub-concious knowledge to find exactly the resutl you're searching for. On a computer, on the other hand, you would need to figure out all this subconcious information (date, time, relationships of information) to get what you're looking for. It's just like any other find command. Of course the obvious solution to this would be neural implants, but by the time we have something of a quality sufficient to do that all of his ideas will be obsolete!
Checkout taccom my worl war II simulator
"The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it."
I love it when people use the wrong homonym to make a point that's obvious to the point of nonsense.
In fact, the net is more about pornography, gambling and copyright violations than there are actual pornography, gambling and copyright violations on the net.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I don't know about you, but astronomy IS often about the telescope. A lot of astronomers really love their field, and for feel just as exited about a cool telescope as computer nerds feel about a cool computer. In any field, there will be a bond between man and tool. A carpenter takes care of his saws and chisels, a race car has a bond with is car, an athelete cherishes certian pieces of equiptment. Computing is just like any other field in that respect. Sure, there are carpenters who could care less about the tools and the profession and simply does it for a job, but in all fields, a great many people actually like what they do, and liking the equiptment that they use is often a part of it. So yes, a lot of computing may become more about the net than the computer itself, but a large number of computer users will still care about the elegance of the environment they're using, and the niftyness of the latest hardware or software. These people aren't necessarily only the nerds. In all computing areas there are people who simply like an OS or a system of its elegance. NeXT users are smitten by its elegance, MacOS users love its creative aspect, and BeOS users tend to be quite obsessive about their OS. Even Windows users can get attached to the raw power of DirectX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Come on now fellas. You can't be serious here. BeOS is cool, but its not in the same class as something like Mac OS X. At least use something before you attempt to belittle it.
ooohhh, a whole -six- pages, huh? honestly...
So don't story the information in one large (mail, whatever) file. Story individual items individually, and come up with a good search mechanism for them.
This has been done. When I used OS/2, my mail program (MR/2) stored each message as its own file. Before I deleted the partition, I backed up all of my existing mail files. This came in EXTREMELY handy because I could simply use grep to find something like a long-lost order number or serial number (purchasing downloadable software is not without its pitfalls).
The main downside: even with the most current file systems, you waste some space by creating often thousands of files. Not to mention that trying to open the directory in any sort of graphical file browser proved a rather tedious exercise in futility.
For more information, click here.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
It's our world, friends .. let's use it the right way
I am not your friend. I am your worst enemy, you fundamentalist freak.
Wow... What a nut... Course, that probably means he's not far off.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
>Might a horizontal stack of "book spines" onscreen be more useful than a clutter of icons?
How about a vertical one -- let's call it "List Mode"! (depending on OS).
just my blog and pix
Don't listen to him! He's an agent! He only wants to keep you in the Matrix. . .
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
I consider something "pointless fluff" when everything in it provokes one of two responses: "of course, that's obvious" and "of course not, that's absurd". This article neither provokes thought nor predicts with any accuracy, just annoys and confuses.
There will be no real revolutions in interface because we've already found the only two possible interfaces:
-language (CLI)
-(usu. simulated) physical device manipulation (GUI)
That's it. Those are your only choices: tell the computer to do it, or work the buttons and levers on the machine that does it.
Yes, these will evolve. We will teach computers to speak with us more naturally (natural language capability), and we will make more intuitive and useable device simulations (virtual reality). These are not revolutionary changes, just natural and predictable evolutionary changes.
To call either obsolete is foolish, absurd. With the limited capacities of current computers, the language interface is more efficient (for most tasks) for those who work with computers enough to make learning the language worthwhile, and the direct manipulation of simulated machines is easier for those who don't use computers as much (and for those tasks which involve manipulations of simulated physical objects: like drawing and 3D modelling).
Okay, there's one more: direct subconscious control. The computer reads your mind, knows what you want, and gets it for you without you having to consciously communicate with it or even consciously understand what you want. This will happen, but not soon, and likely it will be a failure. People like conscious control, and don't trust computers. At any rate, this more properly considered a form of mind-enhancement than communication.
Similarly, the relationship between computers and networks isn't going to undergo any dramatic revolutionary change. We'll continue to tweak what should be served and what should be processed by the client based on costs and capacities of processing, storing, and transmitting data. The baseline of things that can't be trusted to the network will also be preserved.
And, of course, we'll continue to improve methods of data storage and retrieval. Hierarchical data storage won't go away; it's the natural system for us programmers to work in, it's very useful to have things like file paths and URLs. There'll just be more databases on file contents and better search features.
Timestreams, on the other hand, are just a bad guess. Linear organization? It has its place, but I don't see it gaining any special prominence in the future. Computer use is more timeless than focused on time.
Revolutions will take place in task-areas which do not yet exist, to solve problems we don't yet recognize as problems.
And then he goes an asks for tactile feedback in a mouse...
Logitech manufactures one of these. With an appropriately rigged GUI, it will give force feedback for things like buttons, scroll bars, etc., that makes it easier to be sure you're in the right place. I've never tried it, though.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You wouldn't have to control every cell in the body. Once your new (I mean GNU) Linux body was installed it would run unattended almost indefinitely. On the other hand if you did want to make changes you would have the complete source code and could make modifications to your heart's (and other body parts) content. You would have nifty scripting tools like Cellular Perl or NanoPython to help keep things running smoothly. And tripwire could be used to control things like cancerous growth, viral infections, and probably even dangerous mood swings.
Best of all, however, would be that I would finally get that third arm I have always wanted. Not only would it improve my ski-boxing, but it would make it possible to use the mouse without taking my hand off of home row on the keyboard! Woohoo, that would be sweet!
Truly this is not the reaction of someone with an open mind, which you self-proclaimed technological elite seem to think you possess.
>Moreover, is it someone like our esteemed Mr
>Katz who wishes to help shape the lexicon for
>the new age because they realzie they lack the
>ability to actually work with the technology
>itself.
Ok, so I had the same difficulty stomaching this article too, but do your research before you start with the ad hominem attacks. David Gelernter is respect author and programmer (yes, well, how else to you get a CS position at yale?) with more than a little research under his belt. He was also seriously injured by the Unibomber, if you recall.
Just so you know.
spreer
Some good cyberpoints, but I can't help but cyberreact dubiously to a cyberbody so cyberattached to cyber-buzzwords in the cyberyear 2000.
It's called screen resolution. If you don't like how small your desktop is, change your resolution. If you can't make your resolution bigger and you don't like it, buy a new monitor where you can. Keeping with his comparison, if your desk is too small, buy a bigger desk.
33. A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are banned -- for no good reason.
No good reason? I can think of two. It would be much MUCH easier to find a named file than to try to explain to a computer which one you want. And how would programmers make references to other files if those files had no name? You have the same problem if several files share the same name, if you say i want foo.txt and there are 50 foo.txt files, how is anyone (the computer or me) supposed to know which one I want. If there is a link to foo.txt in a local network, how is the program that processes the link supposed to know which one you meant?
32. You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously.
And who exactly is going to figure out this? If i'm downloading an upgrade to a system file that the system wasn't programmed to see, how is the system supposed to know which file to grab? What about personal directories? If i have one named pictures, how is the pictures directory magically going to know which graphics files i consider "pictures" to go in the file, and which are banner ads, or which are porn shots? How would you program a computer to recgonize the differences?
35. Computers make alphabetical order obsolete.
Alphabetical order makes things easier to find. Ever searched through a directory for 1 file out of 500 when the order of the files in the directory was completely random? How about if, following his earlier suggestion, 50 of those 500 files had the name you were looking for? Pretty hard stuff.
Those are just a couple of logical jumps in his paper, there are many many more. He makes a few good points, but for the most part the way he wants things to be would make an impossible task for programmers. If this comes true, better hope you never have to call a routine. It might have no name!
Just because the fork() command was written back in the 1970s does not mean that Linux was written in the 70s. Just because linux is based on Unix doed not mean that Linux was written in the 1970s. You might as well say that Macintosh is really just a version of the old Xerox windowing system, that since transitors were invented in the 50s, that since boolean logic is just based on the rules of logic from ancient greece, that since electricity is used in lightning this whole technological revolution is really just an extension of the primordial soup. OK, so I fell down a slippery slope, but the fact remains that what is cool about Linux, BSD, Solaris and all flavors of Eunichs is that they took a solid base, the unix programing environment, and built on it. Last I checked, Xwindows wasn't in the original Unix spec, and that is how most people view the magical workings of there Linux systems. I now Gnome is a little more recent than 1976, as I think Miguel was in the very low single digits in 1976 (was he even born?) Perl wasn't around back then. By the logic in the article the C64 is hotter than Unix because it came around later.
Ahhh. I feel better now.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
That's no prediction. The net is already all about pornography, gambling, and copyright violations.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
He says a lot of really intelligent stuff. This might not be particularily prophetic, but it certainly looks like something I'd like to see. An age where OS's and browsers are outmoded and we are connected through a computer to the information rather than to a computer which is connected to the information.
The real problem I have with this is that the whole thing smacks of Shadowrun. He's talking about having terminals and smart cards to connect to information. He seems to be talking about becoming a truly single card society. Instead of having your ID on one card, your banking info on another, your credit info on another etc., you have everything on a card that you slot into a terminal.
The next step after that is to connect our brains directly to information. Who needs cards when we can download info directly into our brains?
Another point is that we are always going to need interpreters. Raw computer data is a series of 1's and 0's, we're always going to need something between us and the information, just so we can tell what the heck it's telling us.
In short, I agree with many of his points, but I don't think this is truly prophetic. I think a lot of it is wishful thinking and pipe dreams. Who knows, I could be wrong, I have been before after all.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
ah Bruce, you have read my comment from a few days ago about GUI design. Re:Form follows function
seems as though the same thing applies here. physical devices, OS's, etc., will fade from the view of "normal" users (read: mom), but will likely get handled roughly the same way by the hardware underneath.
However, that does not mean we should give up trying to innovate at the "lower levels." What if car manufacturers quit making better engines and only focused on making more comfortable seats and installing better stereos?
There is always room for innovation and improvement. Linux is proving that against Micro$oft right now. Let's not believe there will be an "end" to change - technology does not encourage entropy.
What's that smell? Ah, that's my karma burning...
I disagree with you even on that. MacOS X is merely an incrimental improvment. True, it combines the ease of use of the previous MacOS and NeXT with the power of the underlying BSD, *but* it doesn't improve any of the other ones signifiginately. Aqua is beautiful, yes, but by no means revolutionary. The concept of providing for old applications via a wrapper is not now either, c.f. Mac's old 68k emulation layer, or Wine. It's a great application of technology, yes, but nothing new inof itself.
23. The computer mouse was a brilliant invention, but we can see today that it is a bad design. Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought to provide tactile feedback; it doesn't.
Hello...ever hear of force-feedback?
This guy postulates and pontificates on a subject that he seems to know little about. Even his lexicon sucks..."cyberbodies"...gimme a break.
He bitches about all the flaws in todays computing environment, but doesn't seem to give us any solutions. I even went back and forced myself to read the article again (yech!) to make sure I wasn't wrong.
This guy is so full of BS it's coming out of his ears...what is this:
32. You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously.
So he's describing a semi-complicated linking system. BFD.
David Gelernter gives us nothing new here with his "Manifesto". BTW, I think anyone who publishes anything called a manifesto needs to have their head examined.
"Have you ever been on the beach, yet still working at your office? You will."
"Have you ever gotten lost in a deep dark forest and been rescued from hungry black bears, courtesy of AT&T? You will."
I'm still waiting (although my memory is clearly fuzzy on what AT&T was promising.)
Of course computing is going to change ten, twenty, and thirty years from now. That said, I don't think it's going to change in the ways mentioned in this article -- not until people completely abandon the paradigms of files, directories (or "folders"), desktops, and every other concept we've been learning for the past ten years.
While I agree that computers could be improved upon, I have a problem with the whole analogy of the "can of soda" and why we shouldn't have to name things.
We do name everything in life. Call it what you want, but the object used for your analogy was named, labeled or referred-to as "can of soda", "can" ,etc.
The point here is that YOU may not need a label, name, or designation to know what to do with the can, but in communicating with some other entity (the Slashdot readers in this case) you do.
Why should naming things to communicate your desires to the computer be any different? When you wish someone else to know what you are talking about, you give the names of objects, you describe actions, locations, properties of the objects to get someone else to understand. The english language have nouns for this purpose. "Please hand me the soda can I just set on the desk" gives me information regarding a designation --"soda can", a location -- "on the desk", and a time reference -- "just."
I don't see anything wrong with giving files or whatever some sort of designation so we can communicate to the computer or any other "entity" (I use the term loosely) what we are referencing. Maybe we could improve the computer by enhancing the way we reference a file to give location (maybe 3D), time references, object type, ? All of these things are stored now, of course, but we usually don't have the computer find the file with all of these attributes at once.
The bottom line -- until thought-reading is done by computers, we will always have to reference objects somehow.
"The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know"
>The point here, is that computer systems force people to think in ways that are completely
>un-natural and non-logical. The words "AND/OR" mean exactly opposite between real
>life and computers.
I'm being serious here. I've been programming since I was 12 (long time ago) and I was
fairly happy with the correlation between AND & OR in computing and real life uses.
What am I missing ?
pjk
pjk
Even better than the manifesto itself, check out these responses to it from such academics as David Farber and John McCarthy (inventor of LISP, etc.):
/.).
http://www.edge.org/discours e/gelernter_manifesto.html
Make sure you go to the bottom and read McCarthy's - it's especially well thought out and is very critical (but are not flames like here on
-----------------
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
This guy is big on there being a whole system out there which keep my data. Uh, no thanks. I'll keep my own data on my own storage medium, and I strongly suspect that in 15 years time this repository will be carried around on my own person. Not left around in a system I have no control over waiting to be cyberhacked.
:v)
Heck, my pants in 15 years time are going to have more processing power that I have on my desktop right now. The question is: Will they run Linux?
I say yes. Linux has this habit of evolving and - more importantly - being ported. As long as Linux develops SMP further and continues to be the most portable system out there, it'll carry on indefinitely.
Vik
We already are machines. Perhaps you need to check Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell again ? ;)
What is described here is Usenet. An article starts in one location, and spreads out over a network of Usenet servers, and anyone can hook up to their LOCAL server to retrieve it.
It could also be used to describe IRC. At this abstraction layer, he is discussing methodologies that are already in place for certain jobs. You know... Where applicable. But he takes these methodologies and apply them to everything, as if there is only one correct way of doing something, no matter what it is you're doing.
Since he brought up cars himself, this would be analogous with Nissan predicting the end of the 'net, because in the future, we will all DRIVE to the web sites, instead of sitting at home and hog your DSL connection. (If your ISP actually gets around to install your DSL connection, but that's besides the point.)
Sure, if I drive to my web site, I would definitely know where I was, and I could give my URLs by longitude and latitude, but it is hardly efficient. I like my file system, thank you very much, it is a really neat way of organizing my files, and then pull them out directly by name.
Every method, every architecture has its specific use, it can not be applied everywhere. It is quite obvious that the author of the article is a visionary who only sees things from the end user point of view and doesn't realize the architecture behind it.
He presents nothing more revolutionary than Microsoft's implementation of "Favourites", that someone so brilliantly pulled out as an example of why I should start using Internet Explorer instead of Netscape.
"See, Microsoft invented this new feature called 'favourites', where I can store my favourite web sites, so that I can go back to them later, without writing down the web site. And Netscape doesn't have favourites." - ever hear of bookmarks, buddy?
Except, if I take this story and put it in the hands of this author, he'd be presenting it as "in the future, there will be no files, only bookmarks. We will have no documents, only links."
Anyway... enough ranting...
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
I've got to compliment comments that make me laugh out loud here at work! The folks on the other side of the cube are looking at me funny...
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
By comparing filenames to memories the author tries to show that the end of giving names in sight. But really he's just reinforcing the idea that we need to use unique identifiers. For example, you might have quite a few memories of going out skiing, but each and everyone will be unique, like "that time I went out skiing and got so drunk on gluhwein that I threw up , then slipped over it and broke my leg". By attaching those labels, we name it. Maybe not vocalise it but essentialy that's what we do. Ah well, enough waffling from me. (and this is not a first post!)
/Trynis
Yes, but that is exactly what he means. You are not giving your vacation a 'filename' like 'skiing_vacation_991112'. You refer to it by its contents, and that is exactly his point.
This is not a sig.
Yes, that's true. His manifesto was a rant against technology.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
by slipping it your calling card
Maybe I'm just some kind of perv, but, uh, I'm going to go "slip it" to my notebook with a pcmcia card...
..don't panic
BeOS is a fantastic OS. BFS = Be File System = Journaled FS = database. For example, onto a MP3 file you of course will have file name, date created, and size as attributes. But you can also have Artist, Album, genre, song title, hell, if you wanted to you could also attach what you were wearing the day you ripped / downloaded the file. very amazing FS in my opinion.
Be is also fast as hell, stable... everything that Windows and Linux and MacOS try to be, but fail at.
P.S. It's BeOS R5 Personal, not lite.
Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
come on... computers do not work wonderfully at all...
And until we put together an additional abstraction layer on top of the current filesystem (hide the ickiness of files from the end user).
Seriously, users dont care about file systems, or file system structure, they just want their work to be where they put it when they last worked on it.
We, as programmers and tech-people, have grown accustomed to the ways that computers act and expect us to act. Currently computers force humans to act less like people and more like machines.
And computers are rude.
I'm sure that you have filled out an application for a video store. When you are done with it, does the piece of paper jump up and scream out "You need to put a credit card number here, or I wont let you give me to the clerk"
Nor does it ask - what would you like to name me?
Thats the lunacy of our current "filesystem" we've got to name EVERYTHING. We dont name everything in real life.
If I am drinking a can of soda, and I set it down, I dont need to save it as "mysoda7-7-00.pop" and then neatly place it in a file cabinet, or risk it disappearing and all traces of me drinking it removed from my body - thats the contradiction that faces users and current file systems. They must save all the time, because the comuter is not like the real world, the computer will forget what you have done.
I set the damn thing down, and it stays there, nicely maintaining its state (ok, it may get warm and flat, but suspend disbelief with me here).
But the important thing here is, it didnt ask for a name. The can will be where I put it (ignore outside forces) and will stay there, in its current state until I drink more of it, throw it out, or spill it on the ground.
Soda Cans dont need names. Neither do term papers (I am writing a paper on gravitational mechanics, I shall call it "Newton").
The point here, is that computer systems force people to think in ways that are completely un-natural and non-logical. The words "AND/OR" mean exactly opposite between real life and computers.
The excuses that we as developers, designers and implementers use to perpetuate these anomalies are poor.
"The user isnt computer literate"
"That a training issue"
"You arent supposed to do it like THAT"
computer literacy is a joke, normal people dont want to be "computer literate", no more than we want to be "Accounting Literate".
Yes, it may interest some people, but most people only care that the accounting department gets their paycheks right. They dont demand that everyone is "Accounting Literate" in order to get a correct paycheck.
Likewise, we should not force users to become "computer Literate" if all they want to do is produce a Term Paper. Writing a term paper should not involve fiddling with operating systems, playing with the file system, launching applications, saving and storing copies of the "document".
These are all things that should be transparent to the user. All they want to do is do their term paper, and not muck about in computer hell for hours.
... hi bingo
Many filenames are already obsolete:
:)
command.com
win.exe
c:\
and the list goes on
What bugs me about statements like this is how some hack thinks that is able to sum up the progression an entire industry with a single statement. If the problems are so damned easy to solve, then why doesn't he get out there and solve them all himself?
Any academic who thinks that developing the technology and methodology to power some seamless cyberfuture is simplistic must obviously know something that the millions of coders, technicians, engineers, and scientists who have steadily worked on this cybertopia for the last 50 years do not.
What does he suppose that all the developers of the world are doing with their time anyway? Surely he didn't think that we intended to just sit around and play Quake.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Yeah, but if I take pictures of my ski vacation and store them in a file cabinet, I probably will create a manila folder labeled '99 ski vacation. It would be strange to suggest this is uncommon.
Yes, but his point wasn't about file cabinets, it was about minds, and that storage on a computer should work more like a mind than a file cabinet.
/Trynis
This is not a sig.
That whole article gave me the feeling of reading a very abstract sci-fi novel. There is an incredible difference between dreaming up cyberbodies that everybody uses to do everything and actually making such a thing work. In the same way, there is a big difference between the sleek metallic hovercrafts people predicted 50 years ago and the loud, smoking, rusting planes we ride around in today. Perhaps if people looked beyond the idea and into the implementation more, things would be a little more realistic...
Posted from the wireless couch.
I honestly can't believe I just read that. (And I really can't believe it got moderated up.)
Can you really not conceive of any way that computers could be working better? Do you really have such a lack of imagination?
Personally, I think it's ridiculous to stick a typewriter keyboard in front of a TV screen and call it a computer.
because the telephone is fine as is.
No, the telephone is not "fine." It's just that we're so used to its terrible user interface that we resist any change to it. The fact that the use of telephones hasn't changed since the rotary dial was stuck on it is not a good thing! It just goes to show how much inertia human behaviour really has.
If in 2015 I'm still staring at a screen and poking at a keypad designed to work best on a clumsy 19th century mechanical device, I'll be muchly disappointed.
JohnnyB
johnbowman.net
JohnnyB - johnbowman.net
This article may purposefully be controversial or not, likely it is. Things that make people think and re-examine current ideas usually are quite controversial.
However, your proposition that a computer is a "device that runs programs" is incorrect, perhaps subtely, but the mistake is very important and the reason the rest of your reasoning is also incorrect. Let's look at this a bit more closely.
First, your statement. At the core, a computer does not run "programs". It executes code, which in turn manipulates data in some fashion (whether moving it to the screen or to a disk, it's data). What's the difference, you ask?
Saying that a computer runs programs presupposes an organizational model, a split between data and functionality. However, a computer doesn't presuppose this at all, as we can see if we examine it at a lower level. "Modern" operating systems, of course, make this supposition, and their underlying model is what "forces" higher levels of activity (developers and users) to also operate under this supposition. In fact, we've been using operating systems that function in this manner for so long that for the most part we all merely assume that the computer itself imposes this model on us. This isn't so! Why is this important?
When someone suggests another model, our assumption that the computer forces us to our current model blinds us to the possibilities, and even the very nature, of the newly-suggested system. As developers we no longer even take the time to consider a better way of doing things. If something needs done, we write as program, because it's programs that get things done! Or so we're lead to believe. So we continue to believe, as we wander further and further down an increasingly difficult path of programs, applications, and files. What's wrong with this path, though?
After all, we've been using programs to do things for us for the most part sice the first computer was built. Old doesn't imply that this is bad, so what's the problem? Computers are a tool. They are meant to be used to aid in whatever we're trying to accomplish, like any other tool, whether this is to write a book, or simply relax to a nice game of Quake 3. Just like any other tool, though, the closer they fit the problem, the better off they are. You want a hammer for a nail, after all. Programs, however, come in two varieties: applications, and utilities. Applications simply don't scale. They grow into larger and larger monstrosities of code, adding whatever new "feature of the week" seems cool to the developer or marketing department, and only interact through kludgery and hacks (such as OLE and related mechanisms). Applications aim "shotgun-style" to hit a broad segment of functionality, and if it doesn't do what you want, you're out of luck. Unix-style utilities on the other hand do a single thing very well, and are typically built to be useful in a chain of interaction (such as a pipe or other redirection). These have problems to, but different ones. Typically they require knowledge of how to get from what you've got to where you're going, that is, which commands will get your data, modify it in the way that you wish, and then output it to where you want. Often they require "data frobbing" along the way to make the next utility understand what the last one said, since the stream of data has no meaning outside what each utility gives it. So what would be better?
An object-oriented (OO) system, as many people have suggested, is really the next step (no pun intended) above a utility-centric system. As I'm sure you know, an OO model reorganizes ("encapsulates") code and data into units ("objects") that, because of the encapsulation, have the implicit meaning which our streams lacked. (They also add a lot of other things I won't go into, because I'm sure you know, and it's not necessary here.) This is not fundamentally different from how a computer works. It is merely a more useful reorganization of what a computer already does, namely, executing code (object methods) and manipulating data (object properties). How is this more useful?
Objects can interact without the problems encountered with utilities, but retain all the advantages. There is no need to worry about how data is formatted so that something else may parse it, but rather each property can be queried directly upon request, when necessary, if necessary. Objects remain independent, focused only on what they do, without growing features out of control to handle every case under the sun. We can use these objects as building blocks to form what we're after: they model every situation we can come across with a great degree of accuracy. How can I make such a broad statement? Look around where you're sitting right now. Your desk, you monitor, keyboard, pens, paper, books, etc. They're all objects. Everything we use and work with is an object already: it's natural. This is another major advantage (and also for some, a disadvantage): we're used to objects. People already know how to work with them. Unfortunately (and here's the disadvantage), we've all been conditioned to working with programs so long, that using objects on the computer seems unnatural. We can't think of any other way of doing things than opening up an application and saving that file. Here's the test though: what happens when you sit someone down who has never used a computer before?
Usually, they want to start typing, or start drawing, or immediately attack their problem at hand. Instead, they have to go through a set of unnatural and unusual steps, like starting up the word processor or drawing program, making a new file (of what type?), and any other number of things, before they can start writing or drawing. And once they've done that, they're not done! They have to save it, which is quite a foreign concept to most (after writing on that piece of paper, do you have to tell it to remember what you just did? I don't think so.) So, how would these common actions work in a totally object-oriented environment?
Instead of starting a program, and making a new document, you might simply grab a piece of paper, and start typing onto it. Or, pick up your tablet (or grab your mouse), and start drawing onto it. The code to decide what tools to present is trivial - if you don't believe me, look at GIMP or any other device-context-aware program. Pick up a tablet stylus and it'll switch properly to the last tool you were using. Same with the mouse, etc. Once you're done? You're done. You wrote that chapter or drew that picture, just put it away. Objects are persistant, and this is natural. But how to restore that change you didn't want to make? Or revert? Undo, and version control. Already been proven to work. But how would "other" things, like Quake, work, in such an environment?
Same way. Each quake level is still composed of objects that do things, have certain methods. Quake levels themselves are "containers" for these objects. Internal representation is up to the implementation of the object. Fast 3D display is for an interface object (a "View") which determines how to display these. (A level editor would be much the same, use the same objects, but present a different view.) Simple, see?
This is important. Hopefully this will cause those of you who chance to read this to stop for a moment and think of the possibilities, and a better way of doing things, and maybe someday we'll even see a system like this.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Speaking as an average Slashdotter of course....
(Offtopic but I can't resist)
Are you sure you weren't sending Mr. Gelernter packages along with Brother Ted? I will agree that there are certain moral issues that technology brings, but you have more of a destructive approach which opresses rather than a constructive approach which advances.
Destroy the Internet? Why? Because there is a section of cancer that runs wild on it and gives it a bad name. Who are you (or I) to say whats moral and what isn't. Islam?!?! Its a religion. What is wrong with learning about the belief system of another culture? (of course unless it contradicts with your religious beliefs, right?) I'm sure you have no problem spreading your "good word". (since your post seems to have a very heavy religious righteousness tone to it) Why not use the Interenet? Hell, I got people going door-to-door, calling me on the phone, sending me snail-mail. It's just the next step. It's all about freedom.
How about pornography on the net? My feelings on pornography are mixed, but lets say for a moment that I was completely against it. Because you and I don't believe in it, does that give us the right to destroy it? If it didn't interest somebody it would have died out. There is a following out there and even though a majority may feel it is morally wrong, unless there is a substantial moral majority who believe the same, who are we to say it is unmoral. This is one of those things that makes decisions on other controversial issues you've mentioned so damn difficult. If we weren't in that majority wouldn't we appear to them as we feel they appear to us now. It's all about morality.
Rather than destroying technologies, I would like to see them improved. Because it doesn't work the first time don't just erradicate it all together. Fix stuff. For your Internet problem, require strict adherance to the top level domains and expand the current .com, .org, .gov domains into multiple subcategories like .porn.com, .islam.org, .homosexuality.org. Voila, you can now censor your friends, family and anybody else you have influential control over easily. Its all about protection.
I think its key to recognize that destorying the technology is like curing a symptom rather than a root cause. I also think that people need to open their minds to alternative prospectives and stop waving the banner of morality over issues that we strongly disagree with. Another thing to remember is destroying technology or hindering it anyway, only slows it down. I beleive advancement is inevitable. If we were to destroy the Internet of today life would probably revert back to the BBS days. Over time they'd find ways of reconnecting groups of them and voila, your Internet creeps back into the picture.
Moral issues are not easy problems to solve in a diverse culture, and unfortunately can lead to wars. <sappy closing> To have true peace we need to open our minds to the feelings, beliefs, cultures of the world and stop looking at each other in categories, religions, races, classes and more as human beings. </sappy closing> It's not about technology....
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
About the only thing that humans do mentally in their environment is name things.
Not only do we name objects, the more sophisticated can name concepts. I call that a chair, that thing over there a desk, and that a cardboard box.
The more important things we give more and more unique names. "Hand me the pliers, no, the red pliers". We've just named it "Red Pliers".
Really important things we name "Bob", or "Carrie". We even make up our own unique names like "Sweetie", or "Crunchy Love Biscuit".
And we all strive to maintain identity through our own names, either by attempting to be unique (note the intentional misspelling of my slashdot account), or by referring to something (imagine the book you could write chronicalling the references in every slashdot account login).
Names can also be the strongest, most powerful connection to a persons mental awareness. If you doubt that, walk up to someone and call them a nigger. Or a kike. Or any of a hundred labels that we have created to do damage to a person.
The act of naming something is very inherent in being a human. Vaguely referring to something is, as a result, very annoying. "Which pliers? I have two pliers here. Damn it! Which one do you want?!?". "Uh, the last I worked with?".
Filenames are the natural method. We name a million things in our mind throughout the day.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, slow down sir. Is this a poem or a futurist paper? I have NO idea what that translates to in real world terms. Admittedly, I skimmed the thing.
Does anyone else get the impression that he is being more controversial than actually extrapolating from the present?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
talks about how in the future the net will be less about computers and more about the net (eg astronomy isn't about telescopes)
This analogy is flawed. The network is to computers what empty space is to astronomy. Light is to a telescope as information is to a computer. Information traverses the network just as light traverses empty space (although not quite so efficiently).
The statement is also flawed. Who really cares about the network, other than those who maintain it? The only time I ever think about the network is when it goes down. What I care about is the stuff that's on the network. I want to get stuff from the network that makes the PC better.
This is not to say that the network is not important, only that it is a means to an end, not the end itself.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There have been some remarkable advances in computing technology over the past 50 years. For Instance:
Admittedly, not all of these are as equally significant, but they do represent some attempts to go beyond the Von Neumann archetechture which computing has followed since the introduction of ENIAC.
One of the things that has been lost in this process is the ability to make decent analog computers. In the first half of the 20th Century, almost all of the routine calculations were done using these instruments, epitomised with perhaps the most useful: The Sliderule. Although for the most part they lack the precision needed for some of today's applications, you can get some calculations performed with a well-designed analog computer much faster than you can with a 1 GHz CPU. It just takes a good mechanical engineer and machinist rather than an electrical engineer.
Although not really a part of this list, the introduction of a personal computer allowed computing technology to be spread to the point that an average person could sit down with the technology and try to use it.
Probabally the number one idea to keep in mind about computers was missed by the author of this article: Electronic computers are a general purpose machine
You can take a CPU (putting this broadly... I'm talking right now about a "black box" that holds a processor, disks, network interface cards, I/O ports, ect. that you don't care where it sits) and by using the very same box you can have it perform all kinds of various functions. For example:
At this point I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it seems like he totally misses this point. As computing technology changes, through evolutionalary not revolutionary processes, will there be any of the changes that he is discussing. The revolution, if any, will be with some of the alternative computing techniques that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, where you will be able to develop machines that can do something that nobody even expected.
Of course coming up with a new computing model is about as difficult as coming up with a new universal physical theory, like Celestial Mechanics (Newton) or Relativity (Einstein). I seriously down the author is in the caliber of creativity as either of these two, or even Babbage, Turing, or Von Neumann. (add your own short list of computing pioneers if you like)
Whenever I read an article like David Gelernter's piece I also want to shout "Show me the interface!" Having done programming for almost two full decades now, I have plenty of experience trying to come up with a program, just to have an "end user" play with it for a few minutes and get frustrated because it isn't doing exactly what "they" want. Usually I just scribble down a few notes and try to refine the interface, but sometimes I have to throw in the towel and try to start over with a different approach.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach, consult." And those who can't consult, join the military. I'm under the impression that this gentleman will make a fine enlistee if he ventures past the ivy.
That's odd, my computer booted just fine...
While I do not entrench myself in all the nitty-gritty details of my car, I'm glad that somebody (namely the manufracturers and the automechanics) do.
It's because some people emphasize the tool that the tool is functional.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Just curious, what makes up the Holy Trinity of Cyberpunk? I would imagine that Neuromancer and Snow Crash are the first two... or maybe not. Could you elaborate?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The guy has good ideas but it's kinda like those IBM commercials which ask
Where are the flying cars?
My personal opinion is the guy had an assignment due,
Got really stoned and fell asleep watching Johnny Mnenomic... Woke up and typed out his report thesis or whatever that was...
But they're cool enough to head in that direction...
But here is where I thought it went bad... The part where he said that Unix was created 20 or so years ago, and people are fired up about an old technology... There is nothing wrong with improving something that is good... It's like asking the cave man after creating the wheel:
Caveman one: OOGA BOOGA Me Like Wheel!!!
Caveman two: But wheel been around for 20 years... OOGA BOOGA must create hover craft...
Obviously our cars are still using wheels... There must be some genius behind it, to keep improving these tires...
Think of Linux like the aquatread!!!
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
That being said, my opinion of the article hasn't changed much. It still feels like an essay in a English Lit 391: Cyperpunk than any real roadmap for the future.
--sugarman--
For a supposed learned intellectual, his basic assumption is flawed. 1) yes Stars exist with out telescopes 2) the net does NOT exist without computers an appropriate analogy would be that the astronomy would not exist with hydrogen and helium ( Building blocks of stars) the net would not exist without computers PERIOD.... hence the study of the net will always be linked to hardware, just as the study of astronomy is ALWAYS linked to the study of particle physics (the two are not inseperable, but they are dependent). QED
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I am not a computer scientist. But I play one in meetings at work. Of the eight possibilities he mentions I can do all but three, not five.
A file should be allowed to have no name
Can't do (unless you want to count the ones I file in /dev/null).
one name
Default.
or many names.
Linking.
Many files should be allowed to share one name.
Can't do.
A file should be allowed to be in no directory,
Can't do. Even / could be considered a directory. That's like asking to store a file on no device.
one directory,
Default.
or many directories.
Linking again.
Many files should be allowed to share one directory.
Default again.
His use of analogy is sometimes very good and at other times leaves me scratching my head. I can't for the life of me figure out what good a file without a name would be. On the one hand he uses the analogy of a book spine giving far more information than the average filename, but wants the ability to have nameless files (spineless books?).
All in all he had some good things to say, but I'm afraid most of that will get lost in the abducted by aliens feel of some of the other comments.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
From the company's press release
NEW HAVEN, CT - January 24, 2000 - Mirror Worlds Technologies announced today that it has been awarded patent number 6,006,227 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its innovative Lifestreams(TM) technology, which is emerging as both an office workgroup product and as an embedded feature in a new generation of Internet devices.
Lifestreams is an intriguing interface concept, and deserves to be explored, but now that the concept is locked up in a patent we'll have to wait 17 years to see if it has any potential...
My favorite was a computer as a hole in the beach.
I can't thing of anything other than a hole that is like a hole.
The real Penis Bird Guy is an occasionally amusing, but more often banal, spamlord.
You say: A computer is a device that runs programs.
The problem is that this "axiom" isn't. What I mean is that it's not a self-evident, non-challengable rule because the definition of what a "program" is isn't self-evident.
When programmable computers (think Turing et al) debuted, a program was something that had a definite beginning and end, a series of steps in between, and always had a result to report. There was no concept of a computing "environment" except in the sense of having a big room in which to store all the equipment.
Sometime around the late 1950s or early to middle 1960s (it depends upon which stories you know and which you believe) that really began to change. The concept of the "operating system" converted from hardware-only to a software-based "thing". It started with just a sequence of things that happened before any other programs ran and changed into something that actually provided on-going services. In the definition in use before that time, the operating system could not have been called a program. The definition of a program changed to include things that were on-going and that could be said to "live" on the machine indefinitely.
Fast forward to now and we're asking computers to be our "virtual" this or that. We're seeing more and more problems that can't easily be solved by looking at the world through a "functional," step-by-step mindset.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that "everything is [or should be] an object". (Although I think that's not the worst way to look at things.) The point I'm making is that just because you look at a computer and see "something that runs programs" doesn't mean a darn thing about how anything (including or especially file systems) should or will work in the future. Why? Because the definitions may change just as we can now have "object-oriented programming".
Before I forget, one more thing. You say that, "'OLE' and 'Objectification'-style ideas," are "nowhere". Have you heard of COM, D-COM, CORBA, etc.? That oversight leads me to believe that your reply might be flamebait, but oh well...
--- but I don't want a "sig".
I thought Lifestreams sounded familiar
DCMonkey
Check out the demo of his product at http://www.mirrorworlds.com/products/index.html. It actually looks like it does a lot of what he is talking about.
Flashback, 1992:
/do/:
/do/ anything in the /real world/ /isn't/ obsolete?
Yeh, huh, Linux is obsolete. Microkernel is the way to go. Minix is so superior cause it'll do everything and even bake you a pizza.
When it was pointed out that Linux might be superior in what it could actually
"You have to remember that the goal of minix is to fit entirely in the mind of a student"
right, so a system which can't actually
oh, and:
"If you were my student, you would fail."
Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for my quotes being slightly innacurate in wordage. Especially since I'm not directly attributing them to anyone.
Additional disclaimer: If you were my student, you would fail.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
What I really wanted to tackle was his point which said "If you have 3 cats , you name them. If you have 1000 cattle , you don't.". Whether you choose to name them yourself or not, it doesn't matter. Each and everyone is uniquely identifiable, by what's in the broadest sense a name.
Of course, what really irked me is the fact that the guy seems so eager to dismiss current technologies for future advancements. As if nothing what is now can fill a functional role in a few years time.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
People use computers for other things than the internet. Look! I'm profound, just like the writer of this article is!
That's right. The evil network executives force you at gunpoint to flip to the playboy channel. What a crock! Technology does not create the market for porn, it just eases the transaction!
society's sickest members to distribute information about the most taboo of topics: abortion, homosexuality, Islam, liberalism, etc.
I submit the sickest members are the hidebound conservatives who dismiss ideas through uninformed bigotry. What, you're not uninformed about these topics? Then you read the work of those you would silence. Why shouldn't someone else be allowed to, and form their own oppinion?
not honestly evaluating how well our choices fit into a moral and/or Scriptural worldview
Oh? Take a moment then to consider the Scriptural Worldview!!
Did anyone else notice that the numbering of the points goes ..., 50, 45, 51, [next page], 50 (a different 50), 51 (a repeat of the first 51), ...? Other than that, I found the ideas somewhat intriguing. I can see how we could benefit from a few of the points. BTW, in UNIX/Linux a file can have more than one name (hard links and symbolic links acheive this). :-)
And then there was 1984.......
:)
:)
We can get you 1984 by the year 2000, but you won't be able to use it until 2015. Deal?
As for the article, I could pick it apart line by line, but here are some salient points:
Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.
Ok, genius, how do I tell them apart, or find the file I'm looking for? By waiting for 6 different directories to "reach out and grab it automatically?" Then what do I do if I modify one. Will the other 5 'know' what changed, and why I changed it?.
The icon/desktop metaphor wastes screen-space on meaningless images,fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images,
Meaningless? The Trash can? Represents the Trash can. The folder? Represents a folder. The tiny picture of Ido? Represents my 2nd har drive. The little ambulance? Represents Disk First Aid application. You only have to learn this once, and the lesson is good until you move machines. Like learning road signs in your home country. "Do Not Turn Left" is going to stay the same until you leave.
And, incidentally, I know what is inside those tiny little pictures because I NAME THEM!!! Jeez, what an idiot.
forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself,
Err. No. Save a document from Graphic Converter, and you get a Graphic Converter icon. Same in BBEdit or PhotoShop, you get an icon that represents the application it came from. If you want, you can set PhotoShop and Graphic Converter to make the generic icons into miniature representations of the picture, thereby alleviating the above complaint about not knowing what's 'inside' a file.
and keeps users jockeying windows in a losing battle for an unimpeded view of the workspace
Uh, the 'workspace' meaning the Desktop? That's what "Hide Others" in the Application Menu is for. If I wanna see my picture of Allison Hannigan and Laura Prepon I'll go look at it!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
My point is that there should be nothing wrong with saying that computers run programs, whether that program was written in C++ or assembler, in 1950 or 1999. That's what they do! Before you say they don't, you ought to revisit the definition of a computer as well...
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
Just because the roots of an operating system is old, doesn't mean it's obsolete. For example, Windows 98 is a version of CP/M, which was new in 1974. If someone was going to try and say that just because Win98 is based on an OS that is 26 years old is out of date, they should be dragged into the street and shot. The same goes for Mr. Gelernter's quote above.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
His tired old "Linux is like Unix, which is 30 years old, so it must be obsolete" argument sounds like something from M$ marketing. Modern Unix/Linux hardly resembles Unix from the 1970's. (On the other hand, just how many different ways can you do a task switch?)
As for the MacOS, isn't he confusing GUI with OS technology?
My poorly stated point in the previous message was that maybe MacOS X really is a breakthrough.
As far as interfaces go, I like the notion of hand waving. Which do you think we can get down first, PSR or gestural interfaces. Like Sterling said in "Holy Fire," the future of interfaces is gestural, as in its probably easier to program sign-language recognition than pattern speech.
As for the article, can anyone really stomach that much selfserving horsesh*t?
--
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Back when "automatic programming" was invented, it was assumed that programmers would become obsolete. Computing would be forever changed. The Users would be able to program for themselves. There was one problem with that. Automatic programming was a term for compiling code written in a higher level language. It didn't eliminate programming. All it did was redefine the skill set required by inroducing a level of abstraction. The processor is still there and so is the object code.
A couple of decades later, fourth generation languages were once again going to make programmers obsolete. Once again, The User would be able to program for himself. It didn't quite work out that way. It seems that the Users still enjoy the leverage of having specialists make their tools for them.
As for not mattering what operating system you are running, well if all the interfaces are the same, no it doesn't. That's the benefit of RFCs, POSIX, etc. But Gelernter neatly inverted the bits versus paper dichotomy that is well dealt with in The Unix Philosophy. Data shouldn't be printed to be used. It is printed as a fixed record of its state at a point in time. Paper data is dead. The power of the Unix model is the power of treating all of your files as streams of bytes and having a set of powerful tools for manipulating those bytes.
As for his point about files having no name, one name, many names, being in no directory, one or many, and a directory having one or many files. He said that three of these were currently legal and the other five not. That shows a clear lack of knowledge of the Unix separation of inodes and directory entries.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The tide is turning against those who are curious because they're curious. Everything is suspect. Anything not dealing in the superficial lust for information as opposed to a search for knowledge is criticized. I keep hearing: Linux is obsolete, PCs are dead, Command liners are hard line anachronistic fools.
Sorry but this professor is a fool. Second in line to the "Computers are tools not toys" nazi. (Speaking of him, where is Tom Christiansen?).
Why the fuck does this guy care about my public, private, and personal use of my property?
Alright it may not be quite that petty directly, but his stuff is still disturbing. Next he'll show us how to build skyscrapers without scaffolding or how to use a car without driving or knowing where we're going. Is it a crime to want to know?
What's he so afraid of? Having to create something?
People have too many fucking barriers, excuses, and defenses.
RTFM for jesus!
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
It's really too bad that the guy made reference to Mac so early in his paper. It didn't take long and everyone was barking that he was a Mac addict that was pissed off because Mac didn't make it bigger.
I think he was talking about something much bigger. If you really read most of the article you would see that he is talking about a fundamental shift in computing on the whole. He doesn't care whether it comes from Apple or anybody else, computing needs to change to grow, and I agree.
Why do we insist that the common graphical interface of today is the extent that computers will climb to? I see that there should always be a place for such systems, but that computing on the whole has a lot more to offer. He's talking about hooking into the information more directly and not thinking of the "nodes" of computers, but more in terms of the entire "web" of information. I get images of the Hyperion books by Dan Simmons.
For those that don't know, in his (Dan Simmon's) vision there will be a "TechoCore" made up of AI based computers that are in charge of keeping the "WorldWeb" of information intact. People will then be able to use basically any number of devices (even direct brain implants) to access any information in the "WorldWeb" without sitting down at a computer and typing/clicking/pointing. I think that this is an incredibly exciting idea. Of course, we are a long way away from that exact vision, but it isn't that far removed from the possibility of existance. Look at some of the attempts to create AI and ALife type systems right now. If one of these manages to actually create a solid implementation of life on a computing platform (or muliple platforms) this could create the infrastructure necissary to move computing into a real shift. You no longer would use computers by typing and pointing and clicking, but would sit down, say what you want done, and it would be done. Ask for information and you recieve it. Speak, and it would create your document for you.
Of course, in Simmon's vision the TechnoCore seperated itself as a political entity and began doing "very bad things", but I don't think we have to fear that as much as we have to fear the current stagnation in computing. When will something truly exciting and revolutionary occur in computing? My head is full of ideas, but I'm not a good enough coder to complete them. Maybe someone else out there is? I hope so anyway, we need a change.
Bite my yammer.
Yes, but I often forget where I put my memories, I don't want the computer forgetting how to get to slashdot, but then again, its nice to know that computers arn't shy about asking others for directions!!!
From the text
The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface, invented by Xerox and Apple and now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete. It wastes screen-space on meaningless images,
Meaningless? Now, if he was talking about OpenWindows where every damn icon says "/bin/tcsh" on it regardless of what that shell is doing, I'd agree... but the whole point of icons was to distill meaning into a simple, easy to identify image that would take the place of a dozen words. Gee, that icond looks like a hard drive... I suppose it's my hard drive. Meaning transmitted. Mission accomplished. Yale guy wrong.
fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images, forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself,
If it's blurry, you need a better monitor. My millions-of-colours icons (MacOS 8.5+) are very crisp. If Mr. Yale (oops, Dr. Yale) has a problem with getting appropriate info out of pictographs I weep at the thought of him navigating an airport. Pictographs are far more intuitive and easily understood than written linquistics. All of the original writing systems were based on pictographs and only evolved into alphabetic systems when the need to communicate non-concrete objects became a burden (give me a pictorgraph for "obligation"... sheesh). However, in the OS environment, just about everything is a noun. Nouns lend well to pictographs. If an OS needs to transmit info that doesn't lend itself well to pictographs, there's still text. I don't get what he means by "when the system could choose them better itself". When the system choses stuff for me, I usually get upset ("no, no not Internet Explorer you stupid system!")
and keeps users jockeying windows (like parking attendants rearranging cars in a pint-sized Manhattan lot) in a losing battle for an unimpeded view of the workspace -- which is, ultimately, unattainable. No such unimpeded view exists.
Well, if no such unimpeded view exists, then why dis the desktop metaphor? By his own admission his goal is unattainable. Hm. Yes, window clutter is a serious problem, however it is far from paralyzing because: /usr/export/home/foo/ is no easier than playing window-hunt.
1. Screens are big now. My work screen is a whopping 21". The first Mac had a nine inch screen... and that idea managed to catch on.
2. Window management techniques are pretty good. The reduce-to-icon idea (a la CDE or, for a bad example, OpenWidows), the Doc (NeXT and, soon, OS X) and the Window Shade (Mac OS 7.1+ and KDE if you turn it on) all allow for multiple windows to be prioritized and deprioritized nicely.
3. There can only be one focus item at a time. Period. His issue seems to be that finding the item you want to focus, focusing it and keeping it in focus is too tough. Well, as data grows and the number of potential tasks increases, this problem will only increase... typing cd
As a side note, the single-window mode on OS X (a la DP4) seems a fine way to ameliorate this problem. For a guy who speaks so highly of the Mac OS it seems like he doesn't really look at it.
Now go look at Ted Nelson's stuff....
2 1337 4 u!
Damn, I was just sitting here looking at my screen wishing for exactly that.
Well, except for the butterfly thing.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
As is Gelertner. Not only OS's and browsers are obsolete, but so are our thinkers. The internet is a pile of junk inscribed in a primitive documentation language. And yeah, Java is an alias for "stupid fu*k".
:I Get me some solid ground for distributed computing and I might buy it.
It seems to me that Gelertner, Jon Katz, and every moron who'd be willing to try to put the whole computing on the freakin' "web" are equally idiot. Your shi**y "web" browser is never going to make it into some cyberspace dream.
Flames? I see "web sites" like hotmail and i-drive and I curse them every moment I have to use such services. I mean, programs aren't supposed to work on html pages, right?
Ha BTW, if there's a revolution to come it's not going to be some sort of UI + trivial programming + wacky slow and foolish internet technologies like java/php/whatever. Without AI, none of this comes close to realization; I speak to stupid programmers who should've been retired a decade ago.
The internet is anarchy in failure for the most part. The free software community was born out of the net, but I believe remains almost as an exception. But check GNU's http service, I don't think you'll meet a lot of foolish "web" stuff like "sign in", "visit our sponsor", "click here to...".. wtf? the http was meant to be as "open" as possible. Today, I told my friends that I wanted to destroy the internet. Hopefully, the internet will eat itself. I'd personally like to see that internet once again belongs to people.
--exa--
That programmers will use more complex i/o methods is just natural. Normal users will never see them, but programmers, repairmen, etc. will use them when necessary. Sony didn't use directional controllers to program the PSX; phone repairmen don't punch buttons to install your phone.
The problem with all this is that as it becomes easier for normal people to use the less complicated (and less powerful) interface, fewer people will use it.
Show me where Gelernter has executed on any of this handwaving in a way that's anywhere near as wonderful as Michaelangelo's work.
vFolders are not new. The concepts have been around forever, and although Miguel and the folks behind GNOME want you to think that Evolution is "revolutionary" because it creates message folders on the fly based on search criteria, other mail clients (that you can actually USE right NOW...) have had this feature for quite some time.
Check out www.cscmail.net for a clue...
-CZHeh, looks like the author hasn't used BeOS...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think he's got it wrong. I couldn't imagine why you would design a subconscious interface rather than a conscious interface. For example:
Rather than having the computer anticipating your commands (and perhaps getting them wrong), you would will the computer do things, consciously. You do it all the time with your body: you can daydream about hitting your boss all day long, but you have to make the conscious choice to move your arm if you really want to do it. I imagine it would take a little training for most people, but I don't think it'd end up as misdirected daydreams on your desktop. (Anyway, who needs a desktop when you've got a direct neural interface? Just project it into your vision.)
...would either be a refinement of the language or tool-manipulation interface. You'd either think "Computer: move that file to there" or you'd imagine that file moving there.
Besides, who says you've only got conscious control over your body? Haven't you ever started home and just let your mind wander, then realized you were home without remembering how you got there?
JHK
Why ask why? Just go try.
I thought the Unabomber was on a campaign against modern technology - not pseudo-intellectual media waffle.
----------------------------------
What are the weapons of happiness?
Being in no directory: Easily emulated by designating a directory as representing "no directory". Windows and KDE use this technique for the "desktop".
Many names, and many directories: I'm sure these are the other two he thought were impossible, you noticed that they are possible on Unix by using hard or symbolic links.
In fact only one of his ideas is currently impossible. Allowing multiple files with the same name could, and perhaps should, be allowed. If you try to name a file you will get one of the ones with that name, accessing the others requires the first one to be deleted or renamed. This may eliminate some security holes (because creating a new file would be trivial) and would cleanly allow Plan-9 style merge mounts.
Of course the same people who are ignorant of links also clamor for case-insensitive file names, which is getting us even further from the ideal.
When you think about it, what has ever really changed? We still use the same vehicles we've used for a long time. We still use telephones. Far too many people still use faxes.
And stuff that should have changed a long time ago hasn't. I live in America where people are pissing and moaning about gas prices. Where are the electric or hydrogen powered cars?
You'll get so much more attention if you talk about cyber-this and cyber-that.
--
sounds like someone's smokin some cybercrack!
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
In order to change the paradigm, you have to go up against an existing one.
Windows.
To answer the question: "Why hasn't someone come up with a new idea in OS's?" "Well, maybe it's cause Billy Boy would buy it or bankrupt it in days."
"Why hasn't someone come up with a ring-sized personal PDA cybersurf whatever---"? Well, let's look at a hypothetical scenario.
"Hey! We've come up with a 3-D, head-mounted portable/wearable networked holographic system that can store 976 terabytes on a storage system the size of a matchstick with a breakthrough GUI OS so intuitive and incredible that even a Kalahari bushman can figure out!"
"Does it run Microsoft Office? I don't see a floppy drive. We have millions of dollars invested in Windows technology. Can't we leverage it? Won't this run Windows? Can I play my PC copy of DOOM on it?"
*phone rings*
"Looks like Microsoft found out about our innovation. They're sending the first wave of attack lawyers over now."
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
And those who can't teach, consult.
If he's ever brave enough to step outside the confines of his university, this guy looks like he has a very promising future as a consultant.
Maybe I missed it, but he didn't talk hardly at all about the possibility of true AI. I think that there is much more to AI then "filecabinets"...
So basically the fundamental difference between your beliefs and his regarding filesystems is that he is saying "look here! information should be organized according to relevance to other information. The user should be able to cross reference it (i.e. hotel, Indiana, Joe, emailed, etc) and get what he is looking for!". What you are saying is "Why get rid of what we already have? Why not just add this capability on? And stop using 'cyber' so much...:)".
Or did I completely misunderstand your post?
just my blog and pix
This guy teaches? Computer science? At Yale? You have to be kidding. He sounds like like the bastard son of Oprah and Carl Sagan. Your cyberbody will float down to a computer like a bluebird settling on a branch, will it? Give me a damn break. This is poetry. I think we are all very aware of the rapid change of technology. My grandfather and 50 generations before him may have been carpenters, but none could be computer programmers. Technology is not only moving forward, but accelerating. We know this. My grandchildren will do things for a living that I can't imagine. However, they will not speak in terms of cyberbodies and they will not be free of files or directories. My great great grandfather drove a horse and buggy. I drive a '97 Nissan Altima. Very different, but they both have wheels, a seat, a power source, and a steering system. Our computers, software, networks, peripherals, etc will all improve. This is for sure. But computers will not become mystical.
And while I'm ranting, the operating sustem does not fasten the user to the computer, it fastens the user software to the hardware. I wonder if this guy's a real CS prof or an escapee from a creative writing class.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "breakthrough." Generally, though, the word (at least in the present context) refers to an original innovation that represents an significant advance in the field.
MacOS introduced us to the "WIMP" GUI. (Of course, I know that Xerox got there first, but not in terms of impact.) Everyone has copied it since. That's why it was a breakthrough.
X copied the GUI and added some engineering cleverness (modularity, network transparency) that MacOS lacked. But I think it's fairly clear that nothing about X represented as significant a change to the way we think about computing as the MacOS. X (as well as Windows) ows its existence to MacOS.
Or do you think it was always obvious to people working with computers that clicking stuff on a screen, using a strange rodent-looking contraption would be a popular way of interacting with the machine? Sure, it seems like old hat now -- but at the time... I remember when I first saw graphical screen fonts on a friend's black and white Mac. Incredibly cool.
Besides, when did "well-tested" become "obsolete"? Y'know, the human hand has been around for thousands of years but it seems to work just fine. Good design is never out of style.
This "manifesto" had some interesting points, but it tends to break down a bit at the core.
/usr/lib or c:\windows\system ? Of course not. Do these files need names? Of course. Why? because the computer needs to be able to find them and index them and load them and link them and use them. Do these names need to be human readable? not really. A lot of them aren't. But most are. Why? Because it makes it easier for programmers to remember what the files do.
First, files and filenames. He says files shouldn't need filenames. This may be true as far as most USERS are concerned. Do normal users care about the tons of files in
This manifesto blabbers on and on about this nebulous "thingie" called cyber-this and cyber-that (sometimes Cybersphere, sometimes Cyberspace, and then there are these other things called Cyberbodies...) But the meat and potatoes got left behind. Where does this "timestream" live? When I insert an appointment into my "future time flow" where does said appointment go? Is it just random, nameless data written to the inodes of some non-indexed hardrive? No, of course not... Data has to be indexed. Every last little bit of it. Otherwise the computer can't find it. The index may be inode-numbers, or tuples in a database, or (gasp) filenames, but guess what? There HAS TO BE an indexation or the computer (and hence the operator) will not be able to get to that data.
Improved indexation is a definate plus, and this is about the ONLY point in the whole 6 pages of LSD enspired drivel that was this "manifesto" But improved indexation comes at a price. Namely, speed and storage space. Yeah, it would kick ass if I could open up a search window on my computer and type "show me a map to that resteraunt Bill emailed me about" Thing is, we can do this NOW. But guess what? It takes a ton of processing power, and a ton of storage. (and a ton of time, since we don't really have the processing power or storage right now) So, although this is a good idea, it's just not ready for prime time. And you know what? When it IS ready for prime time, it WILL be implimented using files and folders and filenames. It also more than likely will be implimented under GNU/Linux (or its successor.) Why? Because only GNU/Linux provides an open platform that could possibly support the development of the kinds of co-operative applications that this would require.
A while back, I played with a Windows utility by Altavista that allowed you to index all the files on your system and then do search-engine like queries to find files. This was pretty cool (I never knew I had so many files on my system with the word "Fuck" in them) but it suffered greatly due to the lack of a common file format. It could only index a select core set of filetypes. Technologies like XML will allow us to have a single "universal" file format that will allow better indexation of our data. The other drawback to the Altavista program was the considerable time it took to index my hard drive and the fact that it had to do so every night to maintain a reasonable index of my data. Once we can provide low level indexation on the fly (via a kernel-level interface) that dynamically modifies the keyword database as the inode's change, and a universal file format, then we can truely enjoy the benefits of powerful context sensitive information retrieval. Of course, all this will STILL involve files, folders and filenames... Sorry, but its how we humans like to organize stuff. We stick it in compartments and label it. (Be it baggies in the freezer, or boxes in the attic) And when we forget (or are too lazy) to label our compartments, chaos reigns... Do we really want our computers to resemble our attics?
Oh, and on the day that my computer starts sticking random butterflies on my screen while I am trying to work, I fdisk and install a real OS.
-CZ
*sarcasm* Well, of course it'll be obsolete.. in 15 years. Duh. What do you expect? Can we please get an oracle that doesn't state the obvious now?
*end sarcasm*
More seriously, you cannot say something is obsolete before it actually is. Check the dictionary definition.
Unix has its roots with the Multics project of the 1960's.
Bell Labs bailed on the project in 1969 but one of the Bell programmers, Ken Thompson, continued to play with a time sharing environment that he called Unix as a pun on the word Multics.
Dennis Ritchie wrote a C compiler under Thompson's Unix. In 1973 Ritchie and Thompson re-wrote the Unix kernel in C.
So, unix goes back much farther than 10 years. The Mac goes back almost 20.
Linux isn't so new either, I was using it at work in 1994.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
You separate the attributes from the filenames. Right now, you probably sort your documents using elements in the path name. For example, /home/myacct/doc/{eng123|lit234|cs345}, that is, you're storing the attributes of the file that you're using for sorting them in the pathname. This works fine for a given way of sorting the documents, but what if you need a different ordering for some purpose?
Why not store that in the file itself? No AI involved, rather, you would have a set of attributes associated with each piece of data that could form keys for a query. Some of these, such as "file type", "author", "owner" and "date", could be rather standardized. Then you could add other fields such as "subject", "keywords", "project", etc. Use your imagination. To make it further extensible, you could allow each file to have up to N user-specifiable attributes, to let the user dream up their own categories.
Now, directories start to become irrelevant, since the information that used to be part of the pathname to the file is stored in the database record for the file itself.
For instance, if you want all of your files that have to do with CS-305, you could do a query on "class equals 'cs-305'", and voila! you're done. If you want all emails from the Linux Kernel archive about USB, you could do "list equals 'linux-kernel' AND (subject contains 'USB' OR body contains 'USB')". As more and more content is created in this meta-data aware context, even emails stand a chance of being auto-sortable, since the author will have already provided relevant keywords in the "keywords" field.
I think this scales far better than a filesystem, and requires less, rather than more, user intervention. You could still use procmail-style techniques for setting attributes on emails, and you could have your word processor fill in most of the details for you. The rest are details you already have to take care of when you select a folder to save your file in.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
What we really need is Auto-Make in our operating system.
What I mean is, I should never have to generate a postscript file. Or a DVI file. If I want to print out or view the document I just edited, the OS should know that it needs to look for the TeX file and generate the DVI, then generate the postscript. It should cache them and delete them if I need the space.
Also, the operating system should generate binaries automatically from source. It should profile the binaries using spare CPU cycles and when the system is idle re-compile to try to optimize the parts of the binaries that are slowest. Again, these should be heavily cached so that you don't have to compile many times. Maybe it should grab the sources directly from the net, too... For instance, if you want to run ``grip'' it will automatically go to the net, get the grip source tree (and maybe a pre-compiled binary, too) and download it, and then start compiling/optimizing.
That's just my opinion, anyway.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
In the article, the author seems to describe everything with analogies to plants and other natural objects. However, his criticism of technology seems to be directed to a more technically astute audience, not the newbies that such analogies are usually aimed at. To whom is this guy writing?
People don't fear change; they fear the unknown. Usually they are the same thing. But if computers did things so naturally that they qualified as intuitive, you don't think that would sell? You don't even think it's worth trying? Then I leave you to direct manipulation hell.
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
We know this already. All of it. The statements about Linux are misinformed, the guy is at a loss there, But we all know the change is going to abstract the internetwork - fucking duh.
What this really smart fellow is missing out on is the underlying structure will still be maintained and built by hackers. In that respect, nothing will change.
It hasn't since the beginning. SO I would ask one of two things:
I mean Rob Pike's gripe was better than this trash.
I thought all the crackheads went to Berkeley.
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Is this guy a moron or just stupid? Okay somebody explain this to me, how is MacOS a breakthrough? And if it is, how is X not a greater one? It's modular, detachable, what the fuck is this guy smoking? Sorry to be so crude, but it sounds like this dude really has an agenda, either that or he has no experience with the technology on which he comments.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
When he started mentioning things like directories that automatically pull the files into where they need to be, I knew he was nuts. He just bitches and moans and doesn't try to fix anything. We already have legislative bodies to do that, we do not need computer scientists to be doing it.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
you would think that since it is a yale student that it wouldn't be so sensationalistic. I was looking forward to something a little more concrete or maybe just why some of the things were said, like how everything is "obsolete" and that the last great advancement in software was from macintosh 16 years ago.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
1. Lots of interesting, quirky, paragraph-length observations that are frequently on target, especially about current computing discontents.
2. Arguements that never really coalesce into a seemless, persuasive whole.
3. Lots of pie-in-the-sky theorizing about what the ideal shape of the next computer revolution should be, in which most of the specifics turn out to be decisively wrong. (Remember Project Xanadu?)
4. No credible answers to the question: "Who would actually pay to create this immauculate cybertopia?" He fails to mention how third parties would benefit letting their systems be immersed into the "swarm" supporting these "lifestreams" and "cyberbodies."
So, interesting food for thought, but I'd bet money that it will never come to pass as envisioned.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
A little bit scary. Enough to deprive my wife of sleep.
I was thinking along the lines of authors Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson, rather than any set of books.
--sugarman--
"The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts."
Oooooh....moss and locusts! Gee, the future is going to have lots of computers in it...who'd a thunk it?
"If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination."
he should finish: "and this will all be designed by magical fairies other than me..."
And I don't get it...#21 is actually smart, where as #22 is the most absurdly obvious, but not quite clear thing I have ever read...AGH!...I can't take any more...
I just wish I could run down to the local paint store, buy some Colonial Pewter paintbots, with some dark grey trimbots, set them loose, and watch my house change color.
MacOS X was the last breakthrough OS? What does that say about *BSD?
The whole idea that files don't need some unique means of reference is completely retarded. Dude's herd of cattle/popcans/garbage analogy wasn't any less stupid than cyberlifestreammicr... aaugh!
The point is that your files contain unique information. They're not interchangable like cows or coke cans. They're not unique in some kind of physical space (unless you want to "name" your files by hard-drive co-ords!) because there isn't any... when it comes down to it, a particular collection of information you've put together needs to be identified from other similar works and no matter what tricks you use, it will be SOME kind of unique identification. If you don't want to "name your files", let the computer do it, then try remembering which 32-byte UUID of hundreds is your term paper. "Uh... I think it had a lot of eights. And started with A...."
Data East: "Leaders in Dot Matrix Technology" - Star Wars pinball
Dude, didn't you hear? 15 is obsolete now too. :) I think it was mentioned in the good Dr.'s paper...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Sounds just like that last Al Gore speech I heard!
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
He never said that Linux is obsolete; he said that it is old. There is obviously a great deal of benefit to be derived from this (we know where the bugs are, we have perfected it &c.), but the state of the art does need to advance.
He's not afraid of anything. He is creating. He's trying to see beyond the current, trying to forecast the future. He may very well be wrong. But many of his points sound as things used to be on the net before it was commercialised; I like to think that some of these will come true.
Try to read the articel next time.
People like the net because it helps them get information. People hate the net because it gives out information about what they like to do. When you give up info on yourself, you hate it because it's like George Orwell's 1984. Some big brother IS actually watching you. Do you LIKE being watched all the time by a computer? I don't. I don't want someone else to know what I'm working on at home on my computer until I'm ready to share it with others. A truly smart computer card would remember everything that happened around you 24/7 so you could query it and ask it to repeat things you didn't really hear or pay attention to earlier. (So you don't forget to meet your wife at a restaurant or forget her birthday and the like. :-) ) But would you want everyone to know how long you were in the bathroom? Or WHY you were in the bathroom? Do we put smell sensors in the smart cards? Wouldn't they melt under some of these conditions?
Anyway, the guy's stuff is of an idyllic world where no one cares that the thief around the corner has a new supersmart card which can interrogate the machine once you've left and retrieve all of your information. Never mind your government has assured you that they didn't use Uranium 231 to power the card in your pocket and that new rash you've got on your rear has nothing to do with the experimental auto injection system they've installed into the current version of the smartcard so they can test their latest version of the plague on you. Never mind all of that.
But basically remember - there are too many people who do not trust the government, companies, and even their own families to allow us to EVER put ourselves at risk by becoming a mindless bunch of cows and bulls whose only purpose in life is to bring pleasure to those who want to have control over our lives. Maybe you are ready to get down on all fours and have a collar put around your neck - but I'm not.
And as for the rest of the six pages ask yourself this: If a beautiful looking giant spider started walking across your screen while you are logged on - wouldn't it freak you out? Heck, they had a commercial on TV where a roach crawled across the screen and the commercial had to be yanked because people were destroying their TVs trying to find the roach! And what about all of these viruses which come out. Don't you think someone's going to scream "virus!" when the spider crawls? After all - THEY didn't put that spider there. So some virus had to have done it! Right?
Common sense. People won't accept this. No matter what the wrapper. :-)
Hey Slashdot, I've got a really long-ass essay that I think everyone should read, just to make sure that the future can be a utopia shaped by me and my wonderful views on computing. Won't you please post a link to my site?
[Settle down people, there are probably some good points, but the thing is six pages long! Might as well send some mail bombs to people and then threaten to send more if the NYTimes doesn't publish it...]
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Most people who wish to point out the future of computers seem to imply that we need some sort of major revolution- why? Computers work wonderfully as is.
People could say the same thing about the telephone.. this could have changed drastically over the years, but it works very well, and so why change it? Sure, everything is cordless, yadda yadda blah blah, but all in all, you still pick up the phone and punch in those numbers that you've been doing for a really long time. There could be technology to pick up the phone and say "Call bob", and there is, but people don't use it.. because the telephone is fine as is.
In my opinion, the future of computing will at some point move away from the computer.. it's headed towards pdas and cell phone etc. But the computer as is works fine as is, with it's filenames, windows, and basic directory structure similar to the way it was years ago. Sure, computers look different, pcs, server racks, laptops, etc., but all in all it's the same idea.. same with the phone. And while things will move forward (since when do they stand still), I don't think things will evolve much for computers.. I think they will be a persistant piece of technology that stays alongside of tomorrow's technology. People are for the most part comfortable with them and their interfaces (or are at least getting there.. my Grandfather knows how to use a mouse.. that says a lot).. so while they can be changed.. why would you want to?
The real topic in computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use as telescopes and tuners.
I think it's very nice that someone has the time to deliver this sort of speech with a straight face, but, well, fuck off. I am vastly more interested in how and why my computer works than in interacting with the banal masses involved with yon cyber-whatever. All that shit about an online community still involves humans, and the vast bulk of humans will always be less interesting that a nicely done for loop.
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Scientology, anyone?
I can't think of any examples right now, but L. Ron Hubbard leans rather heavily on new definitions and analogies.
Maybe that's why I've Got A Bad Feeling About This manifesto...
--Colbey
He's basically saying that he sees the big picture, and the bones tell him that something else is coming, but he can't say what. Why sweat the details, right?
The self-importance reminded me more than a little of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Did anybody else get that impression?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
But I'll bite. That's an interesting concept of interacting with information - but a horrible concept of interacting with a computer. Why? A computer is not an object-centered idea. Remember the big push a while ago for "OLE" and "Objectification"-style ideas, where everything turned into an object? Note where they are today - nowhere, and here's why:
A computer is a device that runs programs.
That's an important axiom. It doesn't modify documents, etc. It runs programs. And there's currently no way to create such a document-centered beast out of modern computer technology, because the computer is (at its core) still a device that runs programs. And folders, names, alphabetical orderings, etc. are a perfect metaphor for programming. He states that the current idea is great for programmers - well, that's because the programs they write need to interact with a system - and through our carefully-designed structure, they do it.
It's impossible to throw out the current orginizational concept of computers because any new concept of computing will still function in the same way. It may have abstraction layers hiding the functionality, but it will still function in the same way. What you end up with if you try to create a document-centered model is a system that falls apart, programmaticaly. It doesn't work, because it leaves no room to run the programs. Where do I put Quake III in the document-centered model? It's fine for one application, but what about when I've got fifty, all with their own data files?
When Be, Inc. first started to design their system, they had a flat filesystem, almost exactly as described. No folders. Instead, everything lived in the database. They abandoned that approach because it's almost impossible to build a large-scale device that way. (My Palm Pilot, however, works fine). Instead, they came up with a database system for the filesystem that doesn't throw out the approaches that have been carefully designed to deal with running programs. I can build a query and store it on the desktop that lists all of my BeOS-related bookmarks, and another that lists my Linux-related bookmarks. But they still exist on the filesystem as an item.
I didn't get a chance to listen to it all but it cybersounded cybersimilar
No good can come of this.
bah. he pomotes objects instead of file and processes instead of streams...whats the big deal whether an object or collection of objects is a file ? its the same thing.
At least gibson calls it 'fiction'.
This is the biggest load of dung I've read in a while.
Personally, I like organization. I like being able to dictate to my computer what I want it to do. I also like knowing what's going on under the hood.
Everything this guy has said has been said a million times in science fiction, and still, no one is doing it. Why? Because the people who would create it, don't want it.
-Erik-
That fellow should write for Wired. Not for a technical journal. He reminds me of the Nanotechnology conference, where the theme is something like the future will be great, just as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
John Markoff is quoted in Gelernter's bio saying: "...[Gelernter] prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decade before it happened."
And later they say that Mirror Worlds, published in 1991 claimed "in effect that one day, there would be something like the Web.
Except that Tim Berners-Lee wrote his original proposal for the World Wide Web in March of 1989.
Isn't that a little like saying you predicted the stock market crash of 1929 in a book you wrote in 1931?
There's a phone number in my perens.com host record, and you can use that to verify my Slashdot ID if you really want to be sure :-)
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I read the article. That said, I had an uneasy feeling when I read that "A Yale computer scientist has published his views on what will be the next 15 years of computing." I've read similar prognostication by Negroponte and other hyper-intellectuals who have the luxury of sitting around all day theorizing, and schmoozing (yes, I mean that) corporate directors and especially government paper-pushers out of research funds.
What Gelernter outlines is a pipe-dream. It's a 'wouldn't it be nice' scenario full of whinning about what's wrong with the current approach - while there's nothing of the sort actually wrong. Yes, he's patented it - but only to sell the patent, I'm sure.
A book is a natural metaphor only because we've been using them for centuries. [sarc]I'd rather see an OS modelled after drawings made in dirt using a pointy stick.[/sarc] Actually, there's nothing wrong with having files. Naming may be a bit awkward, but only if you let Windows do your file management without your awareness - now the argument seems biased, doesn't it? I know EXACTLY where my files are, and what their names mean. I was raised on DOS, and use UNIX as much as Windows, and I explicitly put my files where they belong. Same as I do with real paper files. Step 1, unset MS-Office defaults. Step 2, decide on directory tree hierarchy. Step 3, do my work. None of this "My Documents" crap.
What Gelernter is suggesting with his streaming OS , is an office with a secretary who has assistant secretaries for assistant secretaries. It's all files ultimately, but you're so far removed from that level, you don't realize it anymore. Bah! You want something done, do it yourself. "letter1.txt"
This sort of forecasting from a Yale Comp Sci is like listening to a Harvard Physics Professor talk about the feasibility of super-luminar velocity travel, if only we can accelerate our frame of reference in some sort of 'warp bubble'.. Of course! You make it sound so simple!! A 'warp bubble'! Why didn't *I* think of that?
Beware the mathematical proof that starts with "assume a spherical cow"! I got yer life-stream right here, buddy.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Of course it's obsolete and based on a 30-year-old system. The point is that the innovations in that 30-year-old system were largely being bypassed by the industry and we needed to fix that problem first.
The GUI itself is not an end-point of our work, and I believe that the verbal user interface will become the dominant way that people deal with computers in the future, at least until and unless there are really science-fictional things like direct neural interface.
Verbal user interface computing will use kernels and filesystems, but the user won't care about that. The paradigm is the computer as your invisible friend. The user will ask the computer for things like "Find me the hotel in Indiana that Joe emailed me about", and will be told about matches or asked questions that refine the query. The GUI will become almost output-only, with pointing done with the finger or eyes and the word "that" replacing the mouse-click. For example, the user points at something on the screen and says "magnify that".
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What fucking kind of university or company would employ this moron?
"You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them."
The only horde Amazon.com is going to devolve into is a horde of bankrupted investors, when they finally go belly up.
It is nothing but breathless, computer-babble. The direct analog to psycho-babble. Just a lot of stupid, never to be implemented crap that is so generalized that eventually something vaugely similar might come to be. But this guy didn't think of any of this ideas himself, and I seriously doubt he will ever implement any of them.
Fuck the essay, write some code.
We'll know the system is working when a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (a few wingbeats later) flutters out - and in that brief interval the system has transcribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the real butterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there, briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly-folded rusty-chocolate wings like Victorian paisley, with orange eyespots) - and moments later will have crossed the screen and be gone.
What kind of dope is this guy smokeing and where can I get some?
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I want some of what that guy is on. He's utterly bonkers! :)
But seriously, how does he think all this weird stuff (probably straight out of a sci-fi novel) will take place? "You won't be connected to a computer, you will be connected to information," he says - or words to that effect. Errr... where might this information be? Does it float around in space? Methinks it would need to be stored on a computer. Gimme a break!
And why does he sit around bitching that nobody is doing all this - why doesn't he get off his lazy arse and try for himself? Perhaps then he will wake up and relise it just isn't going to happen this millennium
*Shakes head* completely nuts.
Perhaps this is a remenant of being a Tech-Support Geek and hearing, constantly, "Your Program should do this, and this feature is worthless."
I am, of course, referring to the critisism of the Windows/Mac GUI and the use of Icons on Pages 3 and 4 of the Web Article.
It seemed to me that the entire article was critiquing the fact that computers cannot read the minds of the users. (Which it cannot, and SHOULD not, in my opinion, since the USER should be giving the orders, and not letting the computer make the decidions.)
Or perhaps that is more residual rant from my critical thinking of Windows 95.
Regardless, It was an interesting article, but the feel of it left me with an annoying headache, which I usually get from people who feel the need to whine, or debate for the sake of debate.
That is all.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
POersonally, about halfway through, and witnessing about the 20th noun with the word 'cyber' prefixed to it, the paper became more interested and self-involved with the words it was creating ("Cybersphere", etc) and finding metaphors for the situations.
Like a Bruckheimer movie, I started to be able to pick the plot points and figure what coined term was going to appear next ("Cyberbody?" Cyberbody: Check.)
So while he does raise some interesting points, is it all that new, or is it merely someone wanting to bullshit their profs by writing a paper that appears "deep" and "Visionary"?
Moreover, is it someone like our esteemed Mr Katz who wishes to help shape the lexicon for the new age because they realzie they lack the ability to actually work with the technology itself.
Just some 1st impressions...
--sugarman--
I think we need to contract our focus here: in reading Gelerenter's manifesto, think about the UI rather than the underlying machines. What Gelerenter is proposing is a new way of interacting with the machines we have; a way of making human-machine interation more intuitive for the average user. To a user, accessing a document by asking for "that picture I took of my kids last sunday at the lake" rather than "kidpic.jpg" is as big a leap as asking for "kidpic.jpg" instead of "0:3:0x45FF3F2". What Gelerenter wants is a computer that's not a computer. He wants a computer that thinks for him, that sorts the files he inputs in a way that's closer to the way his mind sorts them than to the way his mind tells his filing cabinet to sort them. He wants to throw out a hierarchical structure in favor of a distributed structure based on content. When I try to see the type of organization that Gelerenter describes, I visualize something like a Visual Thesaurus, with directories being replaced by abstract nodes, eg "lake", "kids", "photos", and files being appropriately connected t o those nodes through their content. Yes, this can be achived through links and directories, but what Gelerenter wants is something to do it for him, something that will organize a filesystem for the average user. So despite all his anti-Linux hndwaving, what Gelerenter really wants isn't a whole new paradigm, but just a whole new UI. A UI that thinks for the user so that (s)he doesn't have to.
Recursion (n): See recursion
wow. Ya'all beat me to the punch. oh well.
What? - Einstein
I am vastly more interested in how and why my computer works...
to his:
I have to agree with you. Sometimes I actually write software for fun! I didn't put together my first machine because it would save me money, I did it because I wanted to know how it was done.
I also think that he his future is a fatalistic one. It is like Scott Adams says (in one of the Dilbert books): Human technology will progress to the point of the first holodeck, then all scientific progress will stop. Research, in its purest form, is done for the sake of research, progress is a byproduct. Some people need to keep the focus of technology on technology. The system grinds to a halt without that.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
The act of building from previous elements proves it is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Revolutionary acts in vomputing were handwriting and voice recognition, and the oroginal idea of a database. Focusing ont eh article, the author seems to feel that the net is organic, living and without caretakers. Sure nobody WANTS to be near a computer 24/7 but then agian Iron workers probably do not want to spend all day welding. We do things becase the end result is greater than the minute tasks involved.
Keep Dogs Evil
I think this guy heard the words "Publish or perish", and this was the result.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
He fails to include the fact that both hardware and software are constantly progressing with Linux, as evidenced by the (almost sickening) barrage of Mozilla releases, my constant pursuit of the latest versions of GIMP, and Gnome, and the fact that Intel and AMD are racing into the 1GHz range for processors.
Harddrives are soon going to be as small as a matchbook, and able to hold as much data as a mainframe in 1976 could.
I'll tell you what David, I'm willing to live in the past as long as you aren't.
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
It's a small piece of irony that this scientist who published his manifesto of technology was seriously injured by another man who also published a manifesto.
The Unabomber.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I don't think computers should "evolve" past any kind of input. It's restrictive and counterproductive. If anything, lemme use my eye-mouse and keyboard and give voice commands at the same time while doing the watusi in VR shoes... designers need to take into account the poor bandwidth between humans and computers, and find a way to crank that up. Keyboarding's a great skill, but a little paralellism would make a world of difference.
Data East: "Leaders in Dot Matrix Technology" - Star Wars pinball
Some people say, "Abstract art, what a load of crap. A four year old could do better than that". These people would completely fail to appreciate the essential gritsness of this work, instead saying, "That doesn't look like hot grits at all. It looks funny". I would probably agree with them.
But this guy is simply brain dead. Who is he anyway? More importantly, who does he think he is? And are we really sure we know that's all he is? An ivy wall doth not a prophet make - especially from someone as dumb as this.
Jcc
radsoft.net
Linux users would have piles along with folders, and when you clicked on a pile, a bar like the Mac OS X dock would appear on the bottom of the screen where you could scroll through files like Mac OS X does. Power users would have a keystroke/contextual menu to open the pile in a detail-view window.
Another one of the interface elements in the article was the use of time-based visual cues. Older files would look aged, larger files would have visual size/depth.
Apple pioneered the use of icons as nouns (Xerox-PARC only used icons for verbs i.e. cut, copy, paste), I think Linux window managers should take it to the next level.
It's sad but true that there isn't a lot of cutting-edge work being done on the OS level in Linux, there's a lot of "we can do what Bedowsintosh can do", when what there needs to be is "Bedowsintosh can't do this".
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
I don't know about this dude. He probably drop a little too much ACID in the day and doesn't realize the trip is over. If he thinks that people will still be using a file system struct like today ~20 years from now he's nuts. The way I see it is when I get my whiz-bang 3d interface I won't be putting files in directories, I'll be placing them in a location. Financial info over there, cool sites down here, etc. Can't remember where I put a file no problemo, just type in its name and boom, I get zoomed over to it like mary poppins :-) If we ever get to that point I won't give a rats ass whether its a flat directory or not cause I won't care
"Have you seen my marbles"
I am at first shocked at how little enthusiasm I see here for a dramatic vision of technology's future. One would think a bunch of proclaimed geeks would celebrate anyone's attempt at creating a new vision, even if it is still mostly BS. Then again, the captains of sailing vessels were the greatest critics of the early steamships.
-cwk.
I personally don't think that clothing was a good invention. I would much prefer it if we all went naked. Naked feels good. I am naked right now. (and I'm not in the slightest kidding about any of this)
"My religion is to live --and die-- without regret." -- Milarepa
I think he has a different definition of obsolete than the rest of us. He says:
Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers -- near ones OR remote ones.
Merriam-Webster defines obsolete as:
1.a.: no longer in use or no longer useful
1.b.: of a kind or style no longer current
Well, 1.a. doesn't fit, because linux (and other operating systems) is still very useful for servers, games, something to play with, whatever. 1.b. doesn't fix because it's current in the sense that it's still in development and people are still working on it.
While his comment that people might not want to be connected to computers may be valid, his usage of the word obsolete seems pretty liberal to me (aka, flame-bait).
Anyway, read the article, some interesting things mentioned, but not really prophetic or highly insightful. Kinda just pointing out some characteristics of society.
The article seems about as feeble as you might expect from someone who apparently thinks the Mac was the last significant breakthrough in the OS field. Man, I'd be ashamed to hand this vacuous clunker in as a school homework assignment.
[ Blairism is the continuation of Thatcherism by other means. ]
This guy is like a cheap movie no "cyberspace". He talks like it is something more than information and organization. Check this out:
Cyberspace - Information and interface to make it useful for a user. Though today the web is rather unorganized.
Cybershere - Cyberspace
Cyberbody - Your own little Cyberspace
Swarm - Nonsensical blather
Life stream - a cyberspace arranged chronologically
Just out of curiousity, I wonder were executables are stored in a life stream.
He acts almost like he invented the idea of history. Asking what is left when the physical parts of it are destroyed.
3D scanners are not new, I have personally been at a demostration of one about 5 years ago. So, why doesn't everybody have one? They are expensive and complex to build.
I could continue, but I found little in the form of concrete solutions to any real problem. Mostly just a bunch of hand waving and using the word cyber a lot. Whoopy.
Troy
At times like these, I feel like reminding that person of what computers have been, currently are, and for the foreseeable future will be used for by the average user: games and word processing. When slashdotters state why the average Joe can't move from Windows to Linux, it isn't because Linux doesn't represent enough of a philosophical change for them. It's because Linux can't run Microsoft Word and doesn't have enough games available.
People fear change. If Linux, BeOS, or some other as-of-yet unnamed operating system provided all of the things that our wonderful prognosticator deemed important, it would still not sell (until, of course, the model was embraced and extended by Windows).
50 years ago, people predicted flying cars, the elimination of disease, and world peace for the year 2000. It's great to predict, but in reality, the human race just doesn't change that quickly.
---
Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination.
Yeah brilliant. We replicate the database and the business logic on one million clients making it totally insecure and then do one million updates to one million machines one million times a day when anything changes. This guy is a computer scientist?
cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos -- also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere.
This guys is a computer sientist? At Yale? What the fuck?
A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories
Hell, we'll just give all the files the same name and put em in the same directory. You're the Yale genius here, not me.
In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time -- time made visible and concrete.
THE BROWN ACID IS BAD! I REPEAT: STAY AWAY FROM THE BROWN ACID!
Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents.
Now my programs have to read people's minds? What are you, a business analyst?
Software can solve hard problems in two ways: by algorithm or by making connections -- by delivering the problem to exactly the right human problem-solver. The second technique is just as powerful as the first, but so far we have ignored it.
Where's the part where he starts talking about using pneumatic tubes to send email?
Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; they relate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream is a "moment in space," the microcosm a moment in time.
I bet this guy never wrote a line of code in his life.
True, I haven't tried MacOS X, but not for lack of wanting to. I'm eagerly awaiting the release.
However...
This author obviously doesn't have a clue about what the Be File System is because the BFS attempts to solve some of the problems he talks about.
"A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to
be in no directory, one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are banned -- for no good reason."
With symlinks a file can be allowed to have one name or many names. With symlinks a file can be allowed to be in one directory or many directories. With the BFS a file can be allowed to have "no name" if the attributes of the file are what's important.
There is a huge untapped potential for the BFS for proprietary systems and file management.
Correct. The Mac was the cost-reduced version of the Lisa, which had protected-mode multitasking and a hard drive. Most of the innovation was in the Lisa, but it cost about $10,000 in 1983.
What computers really need right now is a DWIM (Do What I Mean) interface.
AI isn't up to the job yet. DWIM was originally a feature in Interlisp, and Gosling claimed that although DWIM sometimes did the wrong thing, it never did anything bad (i.e. non-undoable.) One day I typed "EDIT" when in a mode where EDIT wasn't meaningful, and DWIM spell-corrected it to "EXIT", throwing me out of Interlisp and losing the workspace. That's the trouble with letting a DWIM system actually do anything. Probably today's closest equivalent of DWIM is Ask Jeeves, which is notorious for doing the wrong thing, but which operates in a context where doing the wrong thing doesn't cause harm.
In other words, you should be able to communicate with your computer in some way that makes sense to you, and it should translate your request into something that makes sense for it.
Not good enough. The computer has to have a sense of the consequences of its actions before it can be allowed to act on its own. This is one of the major problems in computing today. Go think about that problem for a while in the context, say, of system administration.
3d interface
Have you ever tried to get anything done inside a gloves-and-goggles VR system? I've tried six of them, starting with Jaron Lanier's original one, and they all suck. It's like trying to build something while wearing mittens. Autodesk played around with VR early on, thinking that it would be the next generation in CAD. It wasn't. An early goal was to get to something comparable to an Erector set in VR, and that's still out of reach. Even high-end 3D animation is almost invariably done with three planar views and one 3D view on-screen. Even though the better animation systems let you draw in the 3D window, few animators do.
If you think online navigation by moving around in a big 3D world would be a great idea, check out Worlds.com, which has such a world. Works OK, but the experience sucks. Moving your avatar around a big 3D space turns out to be a lousy way to shop, let alone look up information.
- Complexity -- UNIX is baroque, true. However, the alternative would be to create a single, consistent way of addressing problems as varied as job collaberation and control, complex searching, security management, user customizability, and many other features. UNIX addresses each one of these separately, and each solution is tried and tested over the long haul.
- Flexibility -- Let's take the example of mail. Many people feel that mail should be pretty. Fine, I can agree in as far as that goes. However, every attempt that I've seen to make mail reading pretty has resulted in a fraction of the number of features as "ugly" mail readers such as pine, mutt, vm and mh. Why? Because those other tools take advantage of the rich, but ugly traditions of UNIX (pine and mutt through the shell and external editors, vm through EMACS and mh through being just a command-line set of tools). In order to write a pretty mail reader that does not take advantage of those traditions you must replace gargantuan amounts of UNIX's features within your mail reader, which is not what you wanted. Things like OLE and Bonobo are attempts to bring the world of the modular to the world of the pretty. On the Microsoft side, they're being used wrong though. For example, do Word and Outlook share the same spell-checker through OLE? Nope. Why? mutt, EMACS, and many other UNIX programs share ispell (or aspell for that matter) without breaking a sweat....
- Text -- Text is the fundamental unit of exchange under UNIX, and try as the rest of the world might, complex, tagged, bagged data-streams will never be able to match the signal/waste ratio of pipes and text.
Well, I guess I've firmly pegged myself as old-school. You whipper-snappers go ahead and take your best shot.Funny thing is that the system that had a shot of replacing UNIX was Windows NT. NT is a solid, well-designed operating system which inherits the best ideas of VMS and Mach. It could have been a real UNIX-killer, but in the end Microsoft's marketing engine saw to it that Win32 was slapped on top of it like a fresh coat of sea-sludge. Given a much more careful and thoughtful layering of UNIX-like, VMS-like, Mach-like and Windows-like subsystems on top of NT's "microkernel", UNIX might actually have had a run for it's money. As it stands, the only thing keeping NT afloat is a marketing engine that dwarfs several sections of the United States Federal Government.
I disagree with the statement and view that computing is not about computers, but about getting the data you are looking for from the "cybersphere". A lot of "computing" involves completing a task, crunching some numbers, even writing a document. If we limit the definition of computing to searching for data and pr0n on the net, we are missing the point. Computing is the science of DOING a task and making our lives easier. Yes, pulling info from the net is part of this, but it is not the be all end all of computing, computer science, and computer engineering. We need to remember that with the almalgamation (sp?) of computers there is more than just surfing the net or whatever it's called in 15 years. With all of this the COMPUTER IS THE IMPORTANT PART of the solution. You aren't going to want to go out on the net and hunt for data when your task involves solving a large calculation. You want your computer to do the calculation.
Organized people use heirarchies. Disorganized people put stuff wherever there's a handy surface.(self included, unfortunately)
People who complain about computers are not usually complaining about actual shortcomings, they're complaining that their computer isn't a magic box, one that will do all their work for them. In fact, this has been the great hope of humanity for years: Smart Computers, Robot Butlers, etc.
The only problem I see w/ this is the following: the only thing capable of performing all tasks a human can perform is, from a functional perspective, a human. This 'human' may take the form of sentient silicon, but isn't that the whole idea of the Turing Test? 'If you can't tell that it isn't human, treat it w/ the same courtesy you would give your fellow man.' or some such?
Given the evil inherent in human beings, I don't look forward to an Age of Spiritual Machines half as much as I fear an Age of Digital Enslavement, where lazy humans take the potential to create smarter, more empathic, kinder, and all-around more decent sentient Beings, and instead of using that ability, we pervert it into a tool of control, abusing and embittering our digital children until we get our just deserts...
Well, that post went offtopic, but I'm feeling excessively cynical about humanity at the moment... just relieving pressure, that's all...
While I was reading all of his ideas, I was particularly interested at the idea of dynamically generated folders, and reminded me a lot about the VFolder technology being used in the new GNOME PIM (what is it called? Magellan?). Anyway, I was excited about the idea of applying this technology to the common directory structure.
Then, I visited the "Mirror Worlds" webpage he linked to (I don't see what's so "transparent" about it, does anybody else?). It says they have a patent on this whole thing!! How will this effect GNOME and VFolders?
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
What he talks about is not computing for the next 15 years but for centuries to come (that is, if we can unravel the way the mind works). Artificial intelligences, neural networks, associative memory retrieval all of them need major work and several revolutions before they can be applied like this.
One thing really irks me. Filenames are obsolete. I haven't heard many statements like this but this is definitely not very well thought out.(especially not if you consider the timeframe this article refers to). Documents need a way to be retrieved, now you can do this based on content or on name.
But whichever way you chose, by giving it a unique name or by attaching labels to it, fact is that to determine which document to retrieve you need a unique identifier, whether it's by attached n labels to a document until it's uniquely identified or by giving it a unique name, it does NOT matter. Both are ways of naming and identifying a unique document. Of course we can be pedantic and only look at names in the purely strict sense but that would be limiting ourselves.
By comparing filenames to memories the author tries to show that the end of giving names in sight. But really he's just reinforcing the idea that we need to use unique identifiers.
For example, you might have quite a few memories of going out skiing, but each and everyone will be unique, like "that time I went out skiing and got so drunk on gluhwein that I threw up , then slipped over it and broke my leg". By attaching those labels, we name it. Maybe not vocalise it but essentialy that's what we do. Ah well, enough waffling from me. (and this is not a first post!)
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
On the latter, he mentions that it would be great that if instead of amazon.com being run off of big servers, it would all run on the client machines. Now this is all well and good for easily distributed processes that are not time sensitive such as Seti@Home where you have a lot of users who are volunteering processing cycles, but that is a totally bizarre idea for a realtime application such as amazon.com. Websites already make use of client processor cycles with client side javascript, Java applets, and flash movies, to name a couple. He seems to be talking about actually distributing amazon.com though, which would imply that clients would communicate with each other. This is totally bizarre for a lot of reasons - the product database would have to be kept in one place, which would mean that amazon would still have to maintain big servers, they would just be one tier back. This is not to mention the issue of security - can one really distribute the checkout and credit card checking process without just attaching back to a single server?
His filesystem ideas seem more or less to just use a relational database model rather than a heirarchical model. That's interesting, but I wonder if he should just look at relational user interfaces rather than a relational filesystem. It is damned easy to delete the wrong thing with an rm -r with a symbolic link in the wrong place, I would hate to find out what the implications of using a relational filesystems would be for operations like that. In my mind, only having one way to get to each file is a good thing.
Some of the ideas involving "lifestreams" are very intriguing to me - I like the notion of users having a presence that can be interacted with directly rather than their computers having a presence. That would certainly help solve some of my email problems.
I think I will stop now as this is getting long. :-)
But it was the first time a major commercial OS company for desktops had used unix as their base, barring BE. But you are right, it was an incremental development, IMHO this guy is a pissed off mac user, who has his proctologist examine his head.
-- Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam
Seems like someone at Micros$ft took this guy seriously. Reads like the whitepaper for .NET
I can't tell if the guy is an idiot-savant or just an idiot. His ideas are somewhat interesting, but it would be nice if he could offer some sort of way of making them work. And can anyone explain to me files without names, would that hurt anyone else as badly as it would hurt me? I don't really have a .sig.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
I think it was a Fifth Edition. Book have errors just like programs and a lot of book are nothing new. I think the author should try to compare computer to something perfect. Go luck, nothing is perfect.
How many thing in your life can be improved? How many times have you read an article about what is wrong?
How many time have you heard "That is the WRONG way...", "It would be better if...", or "... is obsolete"? I would like to heard "I'm going to fix the problem."
As David said the problem is simple and right under our noses. So why don't WE FIX IT?
If you can answer this you will know why we still use outdated crappy computers to do meanless tasks. My answer: becauze we can and I likez it.
...is because of people like this. 90% of all the university "computer scientists" that I have met (and that's quite a few) are doofuses who couldn't implement Towers of Hanoi to save their pathetic lives. It's interesting that one of them recommended that I indeed stop with a master's degree so as not to damage my reputation and marketability. Learn from books, people.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
nooooooooooooo! not nautral language! geesh. COBAL tried that, and we all know where that went... how about a scripting language frontend beside the GUI? or even an actual language, like, for instance, python? (i dig python very much. heh) a good scripting language can be way more powerful then nautral language because it can be targeted to a specific problem domain...
what i really wanna see is a commandline widget integrated into the wallpaper of my gui... or, rather, a commandline widget as a semi-transperent layer above my wallpaper. while not revolutionary, that would be a decent start in the right direction.
otherwise, though, i dig everything you said. you know about the berlin project, right? if not, check out http://www.berlin-consortium.org ... it could be really, really neat. i'm going to start actively contributing code to it in the fall, i promise...
-- sayke, v2.3.05
I want my flying car, they said there would be flying cars by year 2000, I want my flying car.
And then there was 1984.......
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
The comments by Slashdot users seem more intelligent than the original article!
I just wanted to make fun about it before someone posted the same subject, but is serious about it.
"CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin."
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
I didn't mean a natural language for programming, but it might make a "cute" user frontend. As you said, and as I suggested, and "integrated" CLI/GUI. Maybe you don't like that either, I thought it might be kinda neat though, even a "constrained" natural language syntax, especially for new users. Either way, some form of input to do selection and various other things we all know are faster from the command line. ;)
I won't get into a big language discussion here (re: Python). I don't really care for Python, mostly because I find it simply doesn't do anything well enough that something else doesn't do better, or at least as well (not to mention the current implementation has some performance issues). I could go on all day about various features of various languages though. However I'd like to show a little something "cool" about a pure object-oriented system.
First, by a pure system I mean it includes (but is not limited to ;) the following:
This is the "little something": by virtue of unification (point 2), the objects from points 3 and 4 are available to users directly. Now say we have a particular subclass of CodeBlock that is a mere list of method calls, with parameters, to other objects in our system. What we have is a complete "language that isn't a language"! Let me be more specific; we have all the elements of an object-oriented programming language here, but no actual syntax itself. For instance, given "code" such as the following (in whatever horrible crossbreed language this is *grin*):
if(Date::getToday() > "12/13/00") {
new StickyNote n;
n.text = "Your flight leaves tomorrow morning at 6, get packed!";
relate n "on" Desktop;
rename n "Plane trip tomorrow!";
}
or something equally inane (OK so it's after midnight and I can't think of a good example, sue me ;), we can break all this down into nothing but method calls and objects (and a few calls to the object system, which amounts to something similar). For instance, the block between the braces will be a CodeBlock, which has the if(Boolean) method being called on it, which is being passed a parameter that results from the operator> being called on the result of Date::getToday() with the string parameter... well, you get the picture. It's fairly easy to break this all down.
There are some rather neat implications here, and if I just know they're going to scare everyone away because "that's been tried and doesn't work." However unless you've been asleep (as well you might, you might find this dry reading), you probably see them already. One is that all you need is a parser for a given syntax to "translate" into this set of method calls, and you've got (in theory, always in theory ;) "portable," "compiled" code. Since even if you write this in C, you're merely going to be making many of these calls to your object system anyway, for many things performance won't be any different. (Of course, with anything that does tight loops or number crunching, making object system calls for each Integer and Real will likely be a drag. That's why we still can write CodeBlock objects in C, C++, or anything else. ;) Perfectly acceptable for your scripting language, though. And everyone gets their favorite syntax.
The other thing you might find equally horrible is this can be done totally "visually." Just drag a whole bunch of methods and objects together, use arrows to show which goes where, and presto. Same output, no "code". Nice for newbies and such, maybe even to debug visually ("decompiling" these "scripts" is trivial of course), maybe even nice for building the equivalent of those long command-line pipes. Who knows. It'd be pretty cool, for instance, to have a couple separate "boxes" that gather data independently, and then put the results together... easy parallelization here... ;)
Anyway, for those who haven't fled in terror or marked me as mentally disturbed... oh, so no one's left. ;) Well, I hope you at least get a glimmer of the real flexibility that's brought about by such a system. The possibility of a "language that's not a language" isn't meant to turn users into programmers---something not likely to happen---but rather demonstrate another aspect of the inherent beauty and elegance that such a system brings about naturally, by the very nature of its design.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
People evolve. Civilization evolves. And frankly, I think that's the way it should be. A static world, while preventing new flaws and dangers, does not correct the old mistakes. We live, and learn. We try new things. What's left for us to do, else? Yes, people don't like change. They never do. But they like it even less if nothing ever changes. It's too bad if someone don't like change, but not wanting it won't stop it. If you don't like the lack of privacy involved with computers, don't get on the internet! Problem solved. As for genetic engineering or economic growth, try explaining a position against those things to someone dying of cancer, or people dependant on the vibrant economy for survival. It's never as simple as wishing things wouldn't change. Though I think we all have sometimes wished.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Compare:
44. The point of lifestreams isn't to shift from one software structure to another but to shift the whole premis to computerized information: to stop building glorified file cabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds; and to store our electronic lives inside.
4.014 A gramaphone record, the musical scale, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one antoher in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.
they are all constructed according to a common logical pattern.
(like the two youths in the fairy-tale, their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in a certain sense one)
(apologies in advance for the poor latin).
WHy to users blame themselves for the short comings in software? Why is the 'net about porn? Why do we build a space station and whine about the cost of losing martian probles due to software glitches?
What happened to the bright and shiney future predicted in the 1960's, the one that Apollo was supposed to user in--the new edge of exploration, both innerspace, outerspace and cyberspace?
Well folks, it's here, and it's not what we expected. Like a Christmas gift you waited all year to get, which just isn't what you expected when you unwrapped it (and which subsequently broke within twenty minutes of playing with it), our new Millennium (coming to a household near you this January) isn't quite what we'd been told it would be.
It's not bright and shiny, but cynical. Not the dystopic cyberscape the gloom and doom cyberpunks thought it would be, bbut neither is it utopic either. We're stuch with the future our father's made, and the one we're making.
The problem is, we've gotten lost in the details. Innovation today is about making old things better, not making new things--not exploring new boundries. And even those projects that open new frontiers are fraught with legal, ethical and moral concerns. The Human Genome Project? Hello Dr. Frankenstein!
Maybe if we stopped looking at our shoes, and took a glance towards the horizon once in awhile, we might actually make a better future, rather than just a different one.
Or, maybe I'm just a cynic.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
btw have you checked out the Oberon operating system ? - has implemented some of what you say i think
I'm a bit confused by section 33 of his 'prediction'.
:0) ).
He says that, of the eight possibilities, only 3 are currently legal. I'm guessing that he's refering to that a file can have one name, be in one directory and many files can share one directory.
I use Linux, and as far as I can tell, 5 of the possibilities are legal.
In linux, one file can have many filenames (hard links), and can be in more than one directory (er, hard-links again), as well as the above.
In fact, you can also have a file with no filename (just an inode) - this is what you get when you delete a file - you're just deleting the filename really, but i'm not including that, as currently you can't really do anything with an inode with no filename attached (except for overwrite it
Also, I'm not sure about his comment on the first page, saying:
'...today's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976.'
That seems a bit like saying that the latest fighter jet is obsolete because it's based on a plane, which was first sucessfully flown in 1903.
Having said all of that, I do agree with point 24 in the document, that creating a metaphor for a computer system does cause people to not consider creating features above the functions of the metaphor.
--
--
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... Oh, no. It's just an eyelash.
A file in no directory sits outside of the hierarchy of a file system. This, however, does not mean it has to be unavailable. For example, if searching files is built into an OS, it could be retrieved. I find myself using google.com like this more and more. I find a web page with a particular search string. I remember how I found it. The next day I find it again in the same manner. Imagine that on my local machine, and you have a file without a parent directory.
It sounds like this is what that "cyberbodies" concept is about. The ability to log into any machine and see your own personal files/data. There have been many times when I've realised wanted a file from my home pc on my work pc or vice versa, ending up transferring it by email, floppy or CD. If the communications links were faster it would make more sense to store everything I currently store on my local HD on a remote server, and use the local HD as a cache. I wouldn't have to worry about buying and installing a new 30Gb drive - I'd just up my quota with the remote storage company. I wouldn't have to worry about backing up valuable data to CDs in case of the HD failing, because the storage company would do that for me. I'd be able to log on from any machine on the internet and it would be "my computer", as I left it earlier, from another terminal.
There are obvious drawbacks to this, though. Could I see a windows desktop from a Mac? Could I see a Mac desktop from an Acorn? Would all the platform specific files and settings coexist as required? Or maybe - eek! - a single common OS/hardware configuration needs to be adopted. Which is a whole other argument and I'm staying clear of it this morning!
you dont suppose that the entire x86 design, operating system design and chip design are all.. past their time? noo.....
oh, and do you really need a yale prof to tell you that an os developed 10 years ago is old?
come on!
I was thinking of Gnutella when I read that part. But Usenet definitely makes sense too. I would just hope futuristic computing environments don't yell "MAKE MONEY FAST" every ten minutes.
Cheers,
vic
. . . no one will listen to people who predict the future.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
The topic says it all
Good points
Insightful
Interesting
and darn good all round
Nice.
-Sarkdas (dude!)
- everything is an object (limited by the fact that berlin is a GUI, so no Integer type classes, but thats to be expected in this problem domain), check.
- the system is unified in the manner you speak of, check.
- base classes don't really have to do with this, so no check on that.
- i don't know about berlin having a CodeBlock object, and the http://www.berlin-consortium.org/ site appears to be currently down... (they were up yesterday, dammit!) but it seems like a CodeBlock object (or something close enough for jazz) would be damn good to have; necessary, even. hmmmm... i do remember something about how because of the way berlin uses CORBA, programmers are not restricted to one language in their dealings with berlin objects. that sounds close to what you describe. too bad the site is down. heh. i don't know enough about berlin to give this a checkmark or not.
hmmmm... upon contemplation, it seems to me that there could be a very natural correlation between your pure object-oriented system and plan 9's everything-a-file design spec, if one were to take it beyond the GUI problem domain and into the OS/kernel problem domain...and i have nothing whatsoever against object manipulation being done visually. shrug. if people dig it, let em. it could be kinda cool looking, although it would most likely end up as a cheesy attempted-gibsonish pile o' shit... aw well. we all know that people will find themselves irresistably drawn back to the command line from whence they came ;)
oh yea: you said "The possibility of a "language that's not a language" isn't meant to turn users into programmers---something not likely to happen"... i gotta disagree with ya there... i think that, as more and more people use open operating systems, the urge to try to change things will take its toll, and the user/programmer distenction will began to grow fuzzier... at least, thats a naive hope of mine :p
-- sayke, v2.3.05
So he must be right..
:)
Please has anyone ever heard about how good yales computer science program is? anybody?
I thought so.. Stupid yallee.. Probably doesent even know how even install linux, let alone slack
Even files with no names must have a some sort of "date stamp" or something to fix them in the "stream" I'm sure. Otherwise they'd be forgotten, which seems like a bad idea to me.
Or is this supposed to be written in a purely linear fashion? I suppose you could have nameless globs of information then. But what would be the point of keeping it in the first place? How are you going to store this physically? Is there a delete option? Would the delete option do any good? I can't think of any practical way to store information without at least having a date stamp or inode or something that would denote whether the information is useful or not. Somebody clue me in. I'm probably wasting too much time considering this anyway.
You see it all the time, demanding that you admit
that the way we do things is wrong. That we drive
cars with wheels, that telephones shouldn't need
numbers, and so forth.
But the fact of the matter is this: market forces
determine how technology is used, and it has been
seen the past 20 years that nobody will pay for
user interface.
What the growing use of computers has produced is
people who are sick of forced obsolecence, that is
why linux is so compelling. Move your documents
to linux, and you NEVER EVER have to 'import' them
again. All the file formats are open.
Nobody is going to design a replacement for the
way we store information in files. The investment
we have is so huge, that just Y2K's update caused
a perceptable effect on the ecomony of the most
wealthy nation in the world. What will happen is
that systems will NOT get more complex, more
intelligent, because those things invariably break
down and become impossible to use. People are
more inclined to interact with simple things.
What will happen is that computers will get better
at being dumb. They will process things faster,
and more of them, use more files, and so forth.
And tools will continue to follow the current
trends, to try and organize what is essentially
incapable of being catagorized.
His article reminds me somewhat of those horror films that gain their effect purely through the use of the word evil. They say that something is evil, pure straight evil. Evil with a capital E. But, they never go much further than that. They just repeat the word evil over and over again in the hope if they use it a sufficient number of times and in the right context, they get some manner of effect on the audience. Never mind explaining WHY such-and-such is evil, but it's EVIL. The author of the aforementioned is doing a very similar thing with the word change. He is advocating change for change's sake. People must realize that sometimes things stay essentially same for a long time because they work well and there's really nothing to be gained from changing them.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
BeOS is far better than the latest MacOs X, and what about the file system? BFS used by BeOS is incredible, attributes of files can be of any types and size, you can add an attribute to a file which is an image for example, or text, or configuration. And you can queries attributes at the speed of light :)
This guy does not know BeOS and should d/l the free R5 to test it.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
CyberFlowerPower! This dude is really form Yale? "The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface, invented by Xerox and Apple and now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete" how does he interact with his computer/network/cyberperson/cyberwhaterver Very poor...
Was it as tiring to write as it was to read? Let's see him make it work. I'm almost convinced that good designs are accidents, despite all the science of design. Some day there will be the right kind of accident, and most people will be happy. -Bollux Everyone's a critic, including me!
The BFS doesn't do anything that NTFS can't do. Be's GUI, while better than average, isn't anything earth-shattering. It's still just windows and icons. What Gelernter is talking about is conceptual shift at least as great as the shift from wiring plugboards to the modern GUI. Try to keep up with the discussion, will you? -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The idea of storing bits of info without names and classifying them according to retrieval is already implemented in a crude form in the "find" utility. We can search for a document containing a text string, created on a date, of a size. It's limited, for certain, but the idea of data without names is not as foreign as some of you have suggested. It's just clumsy and slow, as we become with age and poor mental conditioning.
The idea of storing 100 papers with numeric titles in a directory together and retrieving them by a find search is not entirely unfeasible. The retrieval of a picture out of 100 basically untitled images, however, is different. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but not to this particular Compaq.
-j
Fantastic article by TheDullBlade. I agree in every place. BTW, one of the best balances between language and mouse is in Wirth's Oberon system, now best manifested by Plan 9 ACME. I think the real innovations will come in programming techniques which solve complex cross-organizational security, networking, modularization and re-use needs, not in user interfaces. Again, see Plan 9 and its cousin Inferno.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
I feel the author of that article does create good points, when he discusses file systems and information access. He leaves it open and does not so as not to over comit himself to one belief. I wonder when the last time this professor worked in the industry as opposed to Academia. Addtionally the article reads with the feel of philiosophy 101, slightly floating and sureal.
This is why those who can do, do, those who can't, obtain PhDs.
I quack therefore I am.
12. By slipping it your calling card, you customize any electronic device you touch; for as long as it holds your card, the machine knows your habits and preferences better than you know them yourself.
Does this guy work for sun, both of those concepts are very big with them at the moment
20. If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? ...
This already happens in a way, or at least spreading it out to different websites, using web portals and ultramode, I don't actually go to freshmeat to see what is there, I get it from slashdot, and I pull down all the comics that I want
29. The rigid file and directory system you are stuck with on your Mac or PC was designed by programmers for programmers - and is still a good system for programmers. It is no good for non-programmers. It never was, and was never intended to be.
still the biggest problem with Linux, by programmers, for programmers, problems with user interfaces and poor documentation are pevalent
just my 2 cents
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
Gelernter has good, interesting points. Obviously, data as the brain does it and as your PC does it is radically different. But the brain is a classic product of evolution, and evolution doesn't pro-actively create, it simply rolls the dice and goes with the winner. "Going with the winner" has changed radically, however. I just returned to a town in Illinois where I spent a few years of my early childhood. What I had in my memories and what I saw these 35 years later more or less coincided, but I was occassionally shocked at how poor my memory had stored the information. The point is, I really appreciate the exactness of photography, printed paper, digital storage, etc. We may eventually understand the human brain, but what if its "inexactness" is inextricably woven into to mix? Could the human brain be a loser, an evolutionary dead-end? Gelernter's "swarming data" is probably accurate, but Danny Hillis' analogy to everyone having a powerful computer being like everyone having a noisy power generator running in their backyard is my gold standard. Whatever happens, I don't think I need more than a smart dumb terminal.
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
MacOS wasn't the invention - the GUI was, and that mostly came from Xerox Parc - almost wholesale!
"Because we don't believe in technological change (we only say we do), we accept bad computer products with a shrug.... [etc]" ... Frankly, the market is not in the least ready for what it is possible to throw at it - and I am not sure that it ever will be! Computers are still in the "bigger, better, faster, more" world of the automobile. This is quite simply absurd - a clear indication that the users simply cannot absorb the product at the moment - they are too interested in the latest numbers and models.
Consider: windows 2000 - must be better than 'VCR with curses interface 1.0' - bigger number... the latter is of more use to the user - they can say anything they like, so long as it records the "**(£"&%(£%&") tv programme!
Computing only becomes really interesting as it becomes pervasive - and at this point it gets so far from the user that the network can actually take the initiative - blending what some people are doing today with the everyday operations that people consider mundane into a heady coctail of information to further the goals of domestic (or otherwise) life.
Everything that the user is doing - that is everything beyond developing the sytstems to underpin the operation - is simply a baseline interaction which is inconsequential to their real goals. Sure, the urban-fetch idea is fun, and to some extent in this semi-wired world, forward thinking - but it should not be so necessary to request the stuff, it should just happen for you - they have all your information, after all!
In summary:
Computer use is fine, but the user has to understand the interface, or at least what they can do with the interface. If this does not happen, the greatest applications will fall on their face & sink into the mire.
For example: Flight simulators do a great job of simulating flight operations - full force feedback, visual and aural cues - but if you can't fly you will get nothing from the cues, you simply don't understand them.
The question remains:
who will write the new generations of system software for the basic systems and gadgets?
the answer is probably something along the lines of "those who still can"
I'm tempted to just come out and say what I think about this person's opinion, but my Karma is kinda low...
What I really wanted to tackle was his point which said "If you have 3 cats , you name them. If you have 1000 cattle , you don't.". Whether you choose to name them yourself or not, it doesn't matter. Each and everyone is uniquely identifiable, by what's in the broadest sense a name.
The easy way to tackle this is to point out he's flat wrong. With cats you may give them a name with a word (Here Morris... time for a treat) but with cattle a direct tracking system is still required - how else would one keep track of an animals health history with a name? Is it the black cow with 3 spots on the left, 4 on the right, and that really cute spot on it's nose? Or is it cattle number #348? Just as one example, my grandparents who run a farm with cattle, prefer the latter method (even if they did give their dog a name).
Second: The instant you see words like 'lifestreams' be well aware that Gelernter is SELLING this. It was the same for Mirror Worlds- the whole thing was an advertisement for the commercial software project he was selling. I have not seen any evidence that Gelernter understands sharing and the free software approach- I daresay it seems terribly quaint to him.
As such, it can be interesting to scan over Gelernter-handwaving for practicable ideas, such as long-skinny icons like book spines (hey, how about horizontally so you can read them- hey, what about making them a stack so the most recently used ones go to the top and stay there?). However, I would be very cautious about this because of the risk that Gelernter is busily filing patents on all of it and will attack anyone who tries to make his handwaving practical. Actually, I haven't seen evidence one way or the other, but based on his history of producing handwavey 'white papers' that are actually referring to proprietary technology that he is SELLING, I would be moderately surprised if Gelernter wasn't busily patenting up everything he could patent- which of course translates to 'everything'.
Can you tell I'm not utterly thrilled with this fellow? ;P If it turns out he's not seizing huge swathes of IP with patents on handwaving-derived general notions, I will be considerably more friendly- but in the final analysis there needs to be more implementation and less imagination for his ideas to go anywhere. There needs to be a lot more gritty detail in how these things are to be actually DONE. One thing you can say for the Linux approach- it's all gritty detail, rarely much in the way of sweeping imagination- but stuff GETS DONE. At the end of the day, Linux stuff got done and an awful lot of grand breathtaking visions remained just grand breathtaking visions...
No way! A major good thing about pages on the web is that they decrease network traffic. For example, I spotted that this article was a steaming pile of elephant droppings after one page and stopped, thus reducing network traffic by 5/6. Some (less perceptive) people seem to have waded halfway through the pachyderm poop. Again, the page at a time nature of this article has saved us 50% in network traffic.
Of course, there are always the clueless lusers who thought this article was relevant or interesting. The only thing you can do for them is dribble-proof the keyboard.
nal 11
Both David Gelernter and Michael Dertouzos, Director - Laboratory for Computer Science MIT, were on NPR's Science Friday this afternoon.
I listened to most of it and it was a typical 'academics predicting the future' show. No obvious concept of the real world.
One discussion was about how this large block of illiterate people out there can't use computers, but that would all be solved with speech recognition. No plans for fixing the problem of literacy, no concept of the deeper problems of literacy, just wait for the talking computers.
Furrfu!
Jerry
Gelerntner is right, but he's basically stating the obvious. Only geeks like Slashdotters care about computers for the sake of computers. Everyone else is interested only because the computer gets something done -- communication, entertainment, etc.
But underneath all of this "getting it done", there's some kind of operating system, whether it's a simple program loader like MS-DOS or lilo or something more sophisticated. For many computer scientists, this low-level stuff is interesting, and it should continue to be so. Even the most interesting interfaces are reduced to pushing bits around on a bus at some level.
What's really happening is that the protocol is becoming the computer. The how not the what. To this end, Linux (and *BSD and all others that adhere to the protocol standards), promote the world Gelerntner is advocating. Microsoft's attempt to co-opt every protocol standard (through non-standard modifications) works counter to this. Common protocols build the foundation, however basic and "boring" it may be, upon which to construct all this interesting stuff.
I like lists in case you haven't noticed
The authors is obviously intellegent, and has a very good grasp of how technology develops, but I think he needs to get out of the lab every once and a while. The ideas of how the computers will move towards creating a world like that out of Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash although they are possible for the future, the level of technology and bandwidth of the net is not near to what that sort of future requires.
The closest thing we have to what he discribes is VR, and it is still in its infancy stages right now, we don't even have popular games that require it. Something is going to have to make the push to create a truly 3D environment for the computer using VR type devices, until then it is just a pipe dream. Perhaps it is time to take Linux out of 1976 by creating the first VR desktop. Of course the amount of time and money required to do so is probably impractical for a group of hobbiests like us.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
I don't know about you, but I don't just randomly cast my furniture about and expect my house to slide a chair beneath my rear when I wish to sit. I organize it just like I do files on my computer. The Sofa goes in the Parlor and the Tub in the Bathroom just as Documents go in /doc and Executables in /bin. Stuctured organization of physical items is natural, and necessary for humans (and docs & execs are physical - an magnetic arrangement of electronically stored information).
I AM, therefore I THINK!
It's all well and good that the author of this bit wants to see this whole "lifestream" thing going. Sounds like a really nifty way to run, but I have to wonder how he thinks it's going to be implemented. Is he a programmer himself? Does he play one on TV? I am not a programmer, nor do I play one on TV, but I imagine a solution like this would be really, really hairy to put together.
And the 3D scanners of which he speaks already exist. Minolta makes them, as do a few other folks.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
Timeline:
1991 - Dr. G. publishes first manifesto.
1992 - Commercialization of the internet allowed.
1993 - Overnight, 5000 ISP's, webhosting companies and online shopping malls spring up all with the word "Cyber" in their names - cybermall.com, cybernet.net, etc.
1993 - Dr. Gelertner is injured by bomb. Out of the picture for some time. Cannot use a computer, visit the Internet or read Wired. Instead, he watches "I Love Lucy" and "Good Times" reruns.
2000 - Gelertner back. Writes manifesto. Uses the word cyber 400 times in a paragraph thinking he is cutting edge. Next manifesto subjects:
* how bad is Windows 3.1.
* when is the new version of Procomm coming out?
* "I just read a book called 'Snowcrash'. Here is a review".
* "10 things I like aboutOS/2"
* RFC2213666 - Why pay for Internet Access? Get paid to surf cyberspace!
14. The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, not horde it.
...
16. The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush
That's all well and good, but have we advanced to the point where the number 15 isn't necessary any more, except for explaining how many years have elapsed since major strides in technology?
For more information, click here.
The majority of the article is doubtlessly right, but his arrogant greater-than-thou attitude and unnecessary use of techno buzzwords reminds me more of William Gibson than any great mind of our past. Perhaps this more insight into the author's own intellectual insecurity than it does into the topic at hand.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Another example where he's flat wrong. Walk up to the Pentagon and "size up the whole space from outside".
It's called COM/DCOM/COM+ now, and it is very much alive...
And there's currently no way to create such a document-centered beast out of modern computer technology
Just because you can't understand change doesn't make it impossible.
But you miss his point - while the model is good for programming, it is not good for the user. Another layer of abstraction is needed. And please don't go off about how more extraction is unnecessary. If that was the case, we would all be programming in ML (Assembler would be too much 'abstraction'!)
It may have abstraction layers hiding the functionality, but it will still function in the same way.
And here, I think you are finally getting the point. Who, besides the programmer, should have to care about implementation details? Implementation should be transparent to the end-user.
Where do I put Quake III in the document-centered model?
You as a programmer? You'll still place it in some sort of structured filesystem.
You as an end-user? The application would be just another 'document'
It's fine for one application, but what about when I've got fifty, all with their own data files?
Again, as you are obviously a 'power user', and probably a programmer, you are looking at this from a sysadmin point of view. Don't, because then you will miss the point.
In Quake, how often do you access data files outside of the UI? Probably never. So, all you are interested in is the UI. Who cares where the data files are physically located, as long as you can locate any data that you need to interface with?
-jerdenn
about how we just sort accept flaws in the systems we use
Heck, we justify them. The worst thing about Linux advocacy is hearing raving justifications for something that's been total crap for ten or thirty years. (I'm not saying that Linux is total crap, just that parts of the UNIX culture were heavily criticized all through the 1980s, and rightly so.)
- 44. The point of lifestreams isn't to shift from one software structure to another but to shift the whole premise of computerized information: to stop building glorified file cabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds; and to store our electronic lives inside.
Not on your life pal. I have enough aggravation in my cyberlife without having to watch my electronic doppleganger contemplate his existence and run to the nearest virtual bridge to end it all.Thanks but no thanks.
Replace "cyber" with "Bat" and you'd have a pretty authentic-sounding Batman episode
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
"Could Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes. "
This is the quote that got my thinking started. Is this guy just making predictions? or is this what he already sees is going to happen? "The internet's power will move towards the desktop." I guess I'm dissapointed since there is almost no technical detail, so it makes it harder to see how what he's talking about is going to happen. For example, how could an e-commerce site like Amazon move its processing power off onto millions of desktop computers, as he suggests in his article. I'm not interested in different possible methods in general, but the way he makes it sound. He makes it sound like the next (and most logical) step in the future of the internet is to move server power into desktop power. So would that mean that internet servers would just become storage houses? (which I think he didn't really cover is what happens to our "current day" servers) If that's the case, then isn't considerable power still going to be needed to retrieve the information from these storage houses? Or will it become the responsibility of the client's desktop to specifiy exactly what it wants from the storage house? If the latter is the case, then how does the client know what to specify?
His mentions on how files should not have to be named, and the notion that all files have names is ridiclous. His analogy was if you have 3 dogs you name them, but if you have 10,000 cattle you don't. Okay. So now is he saying that filenames are obselete, or is file designation obselete? It seems to me that you have to be able to designate a file in some manner, if not by a name, by some other attribute.
See this is what I mean, with no technical detail, I'm having problems understanding where he is coming from on some of his idea.
So that's why I began to wonder if he's just predicting what could happen. If he's predicting how far into the future are we talking? 1 year? (no) 5 years? (bah...) 5-10 years? maybe...
On another note, however, the beginning of the article got my attention quickly. I'm very much in agreement that people do not want to be connected to computers, they want to be connected to information. I think this is very true, and this was the basis of his article. We have to find a way to get people to forget they USING a computer. The computers of today (software and possibly hardware) simply can't do that. I really liked his book analogies. When was the last time you had to think about how to "use" a book?
---
Maybe in 1950 it sounded impressive to "publish" a
"paper", important because you spent some years at
a place called "Yale", but it just looks like an
opinion to me.
Just like this one.
IMHO, the best point was the last one.
58. If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology -- and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think about technology.
We (especially slashdotters) spend so much time playing with and worrying about technology that we sometimes miss the point of it.
People want to use computers. They want them to be intuitive. They don't want to worry about the hows and whys of a system.
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Wow, someone predicted what computers will be like in 15 years. That person has an education, and thus somehow gains the ability to see the future?
The fact is that predictions of this nature come true mostly by coincidence. 15 years is just too long - particularly in the world of computers - to really get an idea of what is going to happen. Things will change, maybe a little and maybe a lot, maybe fast but maybe slow. But no matter what happens, thousands and thousands of people will try to guess before hand, and one of them is going to be right.
Still, his ideas were interesting (the ones I read ^_^), but not particularly compelling.
My predictions for the future of computers: Eventually everyone will realize that there's no reason to have multiple OS's when you can just put whatever face you want on Unix. There will be only one kernel on which all development will be focused, either a linux/BSD derivative or maybe Mach, and everyone from MS to Apple to the folks in the Red Hat labs will just put different user interfaces on top of it. The idea that software used to be developed in a closed fashion will bring quiet chuckles from developers and pundits alike. End users will demand to have a passing understanding of how their computers work, and the stupid users that tech support people complain about around the water cooler will be the ones who call them asking what optimization flags they should use when compiling their kernel. And the number-one most used piece of software, after being resurrected as a GNU project, will be MS BOB!
You just wait.
The enemies of Democracy are
Gelernter starts his "Manefesto" with several believable points, showing how technology isn't making any quantum leaps. However, how are we supposed to take seriously some one who says that "Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a 'Disable Omniscience' button." I like science fiction as well as the next guy, but this sounds more like the punchline to a obscure BOFH joke than even plausible scifi.
Not all progress has to be in huge jumps to incredible ways of thinking. I don't really think that interface design will be improved by saying things like "Computers make alphabetical order obsolete". It's not going to happen like that.
-- demiurge
You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!!
Score one for the downtrodden hacker!
"a cyberbody is a cloud's drifting shadow overing many tiles simultaneously"
"computers will be as anonymous as molecules of air"
"The cyberbody arrives and settles in like a bluebird perching on a branch."
.. and many more...
33. A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are banned -- for no good reason.
Oh, and that's just plain wrong. Hasn't this guy heard of "ln"? They're "banned" in some (not mentioning any names) operating systems... and some of which have good reasons to be "banned".
Of course computers will change drastically over the course of the next fifteen years. Look at how far computers have come in the past fifteen years - in 1985 we were dazzled by the Nintendo, using a mixture of IBM compatible machines and Atari / Commodore 64s. Eight bits. Wow.
But wet dreams about what the future holds aren't relevant to anything except sleeping. Of course computers will continue to evolve. They'll be faster and smaller and easier to use. They'll be pervasive. Literal shelves of books have been written on the subject - with such a dazzling array of opinions, one or two of them are bound to come through in some way. The truth is, there hasn't been a real 'revolution' in computers since 1947. All we've done with them since then is make them smaller, faster, and paint them in prettier colors.
Why should this guy know what he's talking about? Because he's from Yale? Please. I've got friends in small towns in the midwest who have a more solid grasp on this subject than this guy. The future of computers has less to do with their size, shape, and form than it has to do with humans and human interaction.
I'm not talking about human / computer interaction, although that, too, will contine to become more and more refined as computers become more powerful. I'm talking about the ability of computers to facilitate the interaction between human beings in a real-world environment.
The revolution in computers won't have anything to do with computers in the classical sense; it will have much more to do with the humans. We currently view computers as a 'platform' we can use to communicate or calculate. As the revolution begins, we will come to see computers in a new light: not as a platform for, but as a barrier to communication.
We need to come to terms with the fact that the fundamentals of our computing system is fatally flawed and is in dire need of replacement. Once we've done that, we can begin to truly redefine what we want computers for and restructure them to provide it for us.
Then the revolution will begin.
this is a sig.
And Sun Workstations were? Just curious. I don't see anything revolutionary about Mac OS X. Apple took some free stuff, glued them together, had some graphics artists come up with a new look and presto...a "new" os.
My guess is the person is an Apple whorshiper that follows blindly.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
"A newly-arrived email message (for example) can't stand on its own as a separate document -- can't show up alongside other files in searches, sit by itself on the desktop, be opened or printed independently" With Outlook, you can drag a mail message to the desktop and open it independently. Perhaphs Microsoft is preparing itself for the second comming of computers. What a scary thought ;-)
"I suppose you'd prefer a little animated clown who would juggle over to the little file cabinet, wink at you and point to the right drawer?"
Admitedly, I haven't gotten to reading the article yet, but let me speak what I think needs to be said.
Apple is a great company. They've always focused on the needs of the regular user. Apple would be in Microsoft's postion today if Gates and the rest of his pirates hadn't come along. The diffrence is that Apple would have actualy had a great OS for the regualr user.
Macs are great for UI, but they suck at networking. Also, it wouldn't work on a PDA very well. But Linux can do both. With MacOS X, they can have the end users. Let Linux dominate the servers and PDAs and other embededs (with a good, light X-Window interface) and let Apple take back the desktops.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot don't like the Mac, but lighten up. You may think it sucks, but your grandma would probably say otherwise. You can keep Linux, it just won't be everywhere. And Microsoft will be nowhere!
------
Not a typewriter
OK, my little experiment is over. Only two eagle-eyed people figured out that the comment I wrote (#98) is actually a slightly edited letter written by the Unabomber to David Gelernter.
I was amused to see that someone found it worthy of a positive moderation.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
He has a number of good points, including that, in the long run, the current file system and similar data structures are untenable and irritating. The vast clutter of mish-mashed files from OS's of different eras, types, and files structures attests to that. However, he is also obviously not an engineer/practical computer scientist as he does not seem to realize the sheer improbability of what he is talking about in terms of anything that will happen before the 22nd century. Some of things that he appears to be talking about will require a much more sophisticated understanding of information and data storage and retrieval than we currently understand in practice, not to mention he seems to be stretching the body of modern physics, or is using extrememly poor analogies, I can't tell which. Also, has he got some 1984-esque double speak going or what? His insipid use of Cyber-[fill in the blank] at every turn w/ no deliniation of what these cyberobjects are/mean is amateurish and down right idiotic coming from a Yale computer scientist.
Just my thoughts on that.
I personally don't trust a damn thing Pat Robertson has to offer. However, if his message is so important, where can I view get it for free. Something tells me you can't, at least not without making a donation to his christianity network and/or the 700 Club. Why is that? Oh I know, spreading the word of God costs money and to help the oppressed of the world.
Do you think Pat Robertson totally practices what he preaches? Do you think he lives just above poverty and donates all of his money to his cause? I doubt it. I bet the man lives much like a celebrity. But then again I just don't know. I've sat and watched his program on occassion and he has never struck me as a man working for the goodness of God (if one believes in such a thing). To me the 700 club epitimizes the exact opposite of the supposed message they are preaching. They swindle people out of their money, by promising that the graces of God will rain down upon them if they contribute money to Robertson's crusade. Unfortunately, these people are too weak to resist, so I don't feel bad for them. If you can get somebody to part with their money and give it to you, more power to you.
Anyway, we'll skip my utter disdain for Mr. Robertson and other televangelists. I have no problem hearing his views on the subject, but I will not give him a single cent to do so. Gimme a free site and maybe I will approach it with as open a mind as possible...
Keep in mind, I never said that such a solution was possible. I think it is in man's nature to destroy. I think it is many a man's nature to strive for power. As a result, at this stage of development I don't think the hope of having true peace will ever occur, at least not in my or my child's lifetime. I think the utter irony will be the day man drives man into extinction trying to advance the human race.
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
- One name
- many names
- in one directory
- In many directories
- sharing a directory with other files
The disallowed areI suppose one could also add 'existing but nonexistent' to the list of disallowed ones as well.
An information-centric view of data is very interesting and something I have been thinking about for my own field (bioinformatics). Having a 'browser' that reconfigures depending on the datatype being viewed and its relationships with other data types is a fascinating idea. I can think of some ways to get close to a 'fileless' method of interaction that I would like to pursue but do not have the time.
Oh for a few students..
--- Four bases should be enough for any genetic code
Those who can't, teach.
(Disclaimer: this applies to the university/college level. Anybody teaching K-12 is not who I'm refering to with that little sarcasm...)
Anyway, the guy's lucky he doesn't have to get out and work in the real world.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Still, there are plenty of technological advances that have harmed society, or at least, have hurt our moral standing. Cable and satellite television have aided the flow of pornography from red-light districts into the living rooms of decent families.
"Pornography's gotten a really bad name in our country. And I'd like to state, for the record, right now, I LOVE pornography. Love it. I've got tapes that are pure fuckin hard. People fuckin, suckin, every imaginable position, the finest lookin women, fuckin, suckin, I love it.
For the record."
No one will read this, because it's too late, but I wanted to have a Bill Hicks quote in my recently posted list.
BTW, I love pornography.
I have thought about this for a long time, and the author is probaby right about the future. Hard to overcome habits though...
Ever try to imagine a new undescovered 'color'? Not one made by mixing existing colors together, because we *have* those. A new color, something that appears to be entirely different than colors you have seen before, kind of like imagining what Ultraviolet would look like if we could see it. Right now we can see colors outside of our spectrum by converting them to colors we *can* see.
Okay, now in place of an OS. How would you make an OS that is entirely unlike any OS you have seen before, and not a mix of existing systems and interfaces? A 3D interface somes to mind, or a transparent layered interface. Better display techniques will have to be developed before a natural 3D interface can be implimented or else we are just re-arranging space, not actually re-designing and compacting it to be more useful.
What would be some other "new colors"? What is a different way to interface?
-Effendi
-Effendi
you still pick up the phone and punch in those numbers
major interface change here - I remember having to spin and wait for the rotory dial to pulse the line :-)
There could be technology to pick up the phone and say "Call bob"
Actually, there is and I use it. Houston Cellular offers Voice Touch, a very nice feature - especially while driving. In order to "call bob" you have to pre-configure what Bob's number is. What's really slick is that if you haven't set up Bob's number you can just say "dial 555-555-5555".
People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world. In the epilog of your book, "Mirror Worlds," you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable,and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to preventinvasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (towhich computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I noticed several of the points describing the Be operating system, particularly those speaking to the searching and retrieval of information (in the 40's to 50's I think). Be has a fairly well developed internal searching utility, searching any type of file by any attribute. I don't know if text in files can be searched with it, but Be has made a start already it seems.
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
At least Vannevar was a real visionary, working before networks and desktop computers had existed...
Just because Linux is retro doesn't mean it's bad.
In fact, Linux is quite useful. It may not be
innovative in the way the original MacOS design
was, but that wasn't a design goal.
It's very hard to find truly innovated OSs. BeOS was thought differently.
Yes. I asked jeeves just today "How do I report a gross polluter?" and it came back with "Where can I ask science questions of Wendell Worm (yucky stuff)", "Where is the fun Web site Air Sickness bag Virtual Museum" and "Where can I learn about the yucky worm bearded worms?"
Obviously some work is needed here.
That's the problem, they've all sucked, to date. If I had enough money, I'm firmly convinced I could pull it off. I have friends (and countrymen, but no romans, ha ha) who are seriously into math, and some who are very much the superbadass EE. The problem is that you need tactile and force feedback, at a very fine resolution. Gloves with those characteristics are currently very, very expensive. I think that that can be changed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do you have an email address? If so, please use mine so that we can continue this conversation that way. Since this is an old message I don't know how long it will be around for any more.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
IBM OS/2 had an Object oriented user interface that was going to do exactly all the kind of things you mention in your post.
The problem is that it never really worked very well (buggy code, clumsy user experience). They were planning on expanding it, trying to add CORBA support and BENTO functionality, being BENTO == japanese lunch box == many kind of things (food, documents, objects) laid out inside a container.
Too bad all of this got canceled, and the implementation you can find today in OS/2 is limited, buggy and not worth a try.
On the brighter side of things, GNOME's bonobo is trying to do something that could very well give us something similar to an OOUI. It's still beta and a long way from stable, but it's exactly what IBM, Apple and others tried to do without success in the Taligent project.
Ciao,
Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
As retarded as it is, you should at least be aware of how to correctly spell pure stupidity! It's 31337.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
What you're missing here is that as a race we're fat to fragmented to ever collectivly 'sit back and logically think about' technology. I don't believe there will ever be a truly 'global' society, becuase human social groups larger than the nuclear family tend to splinter under their own weight.
If we're to use technology responsibly, we need to stop preaching about 'the greater good' and start thinking in a more human--and consequently more selfish--manner. Technology needs to be used responsibly not for the 'greater good' but for the 'good of myself and my family/friends/social group'
Be selfish--it's more natural.
Hell, lets look at the Open Source paradigm--how many of us code and release it for free to be altruistic, or because 'code needs to be free?' I don't. I work with Open Source because it betters my own personal reputation, my sekill set, and my industry.
There's nothing wrong with a little selfishness; but too much and you've just become anti-social.
Think about it, my friend.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
...sometimes they blow away, and sometimes they linger and make a big stink. Your welcome.
no I did not spell that wrong
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
He made the point that because Linux is based off Unix, which was made in 1976, it has to be obsolete. One of the main advantages of Linux/Unix is that it can adapt... but it still keeps the roots to it that makes it such an awesome Unix-based operating system. Just because we kept the Unix standards, and don't re-invent the wheel every single time we create a new OS, doesn't mean it is obsolete. It means its been tried, and it is true. He seems to forget that...
-- We should kill all the intolerant people in the world.
But there were some fairly interesting points buried in the cyberhype, so don't entirely discount it. One thing I enjoyed was the following element:
Using your powerful desktop computer as a mere channel to reach web sites, reaching through and beyond it instead of using it, is like renting a Hyundai and keeing your Porsche in the garage. Like executing programs out of disk storage instead of main memory and cache. The Web makes the desktop impotent.... The power of desktop machines is a magnet that will reverse today's "everything onto the Web!" trend. Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remote servers onto desktops.
Of course we've seen some of this already, but it's a nice counterpoint to the perennial "the network is the computer" discussion, 1996-vintage though it may be.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Mouse is obselete, windows (Not Windows, they were obselete in the 90's) are obselete, filenames are obselete etc etc. Sorry, not THIS decade. And I wouldn't be so quick to write off those systems designed by programmers for programmers since we're the ones implementing your grand vision of the future.
There are a lot of obstacles to forward progress, too. Although current bandwidth limits still make it hard to make on-demand video content available, another couple of cycles of it doubling and it will be technically feasible for you to watch Dharma and Greg off the Internet at 2 in the morning if you want to. None of the content providers will use the ability actually provide any content though, for fear of losing their precious IP. The legal hurdles will be much harder to surpass than the technical ones.
Current technology is primative. The seams between the desktop and the net are very pronounced. But the correct answer to the question is The Net and The Desktop, not The Net or the desktop. And none of this stuff will evolve on its own. If a company doesn't see a lot of money in it, chances are the consumer will never see it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that most of us here on /. would agree that we have to program for the user, and users don't change a whole lot. Think about how Windows has dominated the market place. As much as their OS design royally sucks, they created a standard way that a computer interacts with a user. Users don't readly change to something they don't know. Mention Linux to typical average Joe User and the response is always the same "learning something new is too hard". Even our window managers on *ix machines have a look and feel much like that of Windows, or Mac or a combination.
This guy is blaming the programmers for problems with computer systems when he doesn't realize that computer systems are the way they are to meet the needs of users.
Some of his ideas are okay but personally most of this article sounded more like an ad campaign for M$oft .NET, all computers working as one, the net being the focus, not the computer. Bla bla bla.... one point that I found particularly interesting:
17. A cyberbody can be replicated or distributed over many computers; can inhabit many computers at the same time. If the Cybersphere's computers are tiles in a paved courtyard, a cyberbody is a cloud's drifting shadow covering many tiles simultaneously.
Um so he's going to fund us to make the entire net a Beowulf cluster? And in a way don't some large sites/ISPs do this anyway? My school has 9 servers and all of them have different jobs. If we had 1 those jobs wouldn't be done as fast.... Ironically he's advocating the same "obsolete" technology!
It all comes down to the user's wants. I don't feel that the user wants what he is advocating here and the only way to tell is if he goes and builds teh stupid thing and gets people to try it.
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
21. ... [An icon] wastes screen-space on meaningless images, fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images, forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself..
This sounds like some of what Nautilus (the new Gnome file manager) is trying to do. Instead of having icons for documents, make the icon be a tiny picture of the document. For sounds, play some of the sound when the mouse lingers over it. It actually seems like a good idea to me.
32. You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously.
This sounds like the virtual folders in Evolution. It would be interesting to try and extend this concept to the entire hard drive. It may be difficult to intelligently catalog everything, but a virtual folders type interface may be good.
But he's not saying anything that hasn't been said more eloquently before. His metaphors need some work, too. Data doesn't flow through computers like wind through tall grass, it's pumped from tank to tank like a waste treatment system.
Of course, we would never have seen this article come out of the pipe at the other end, because it would have been seperated out with the other sludge.
Anyway, he does make some good points in the process (Though I didn't complete the process, because I got tired of him about halfway through, which seems to be a common thread here. Maybe someone should talk to him about how to hold reader interest.) He does bring up the point that UNIX is nothing new (which is true) and that the last big advance was MacOS, though I would say the last big advance was Lisa Office -- A simple system in which it was possible to proceed directly to getting work done without having to know how computers accomplish anything.
I was talking about some of this stuff with a coworker just last week. What computers really need right now is a DWIM (Do What I Mean) interface. In other words, you should be able to communicate with your computer in some way that makes sense to you, and it should translate your request into something that makes sense for it.
So now, let's discuss what I consider to be the two most important advances upcoming in computerland (No affiliation with the lame mac store) -- 3d interface, and drag-and-drop programming. Neither one is obviously desirable, necessarily, so now I'm going to get all defensive about my position.
First of all, let's examine the 3d interface deal. We're all familiar with the way computers are portrayed in sci-fi movies, with the big transparent cubes with data flowing on them, resulting in a huge drain on the special effects budget as these animations are rendered at awe-inspiring resolutions. However, that's all bullshit. It's hard to see how an interface in which you flew through a bunch of transparent cubes with meaningless blips of light flying around is going to make you more productive.
On the other hand, a "virtual reality" interface which allows you to interact more naturally with your data than would otherwise be possible could quite easily bring you to new levels of productivity. Right now, when you load a file, you have to swim through a deep hierarchy of files and folders to locate the file you want. It gets even more confusing when you add the network into the picture. However, a flat filesystem is not the answer either. How much sense would your personal belongings make if you spread them out in a more or less even layer across your floor?
What would seem to make the most sense is the file cabinet/dresser drawer model. A file cabinet (or Volume) has some number of drawers (directories) which then contain folders (subdirectories). The folders then contain sheets of paper, images, or whatnot. However, this is where the metaphor breaks down, because the things inside your directory structure can be analogous to a normal physical piece of paper (Like a resume, or a picture, or what have you) or an application (Which is most closely analagous to another computer, in the physical world -- Or something like a tape recorder.)
Anyway, let's face it, windows has the 2d market locked down. You can make a better 2d interface than the one windows uses, but it's hard to really add very much more functionality, because you're limited to just two dimensions. Sure, you can add task bars and things like that, but windows has something analogous, if less functionality - The taskbar, with its clock, system tray, and start menu does everything (except for virtual desktops, which is really a function of the window manager) that the gnome taskbar does. It's not as pretty, or as configurable, but it performs all the same functions.
If you really want to accomplish something new, you're going to have to break into a new world and go 3d. Just think, you could have flat windows and 3d windows and just free-floating 3d primitives, all representing programs. BTW, I'm picturing a "3d window" as a sort of OS-standard "box" inside of which there would be 3d content. The things the content did would not be able to pass through the "glass" on the front of the box. I'll get around to writing up a whitepaper on this sometime soon, I swear.
Of course, a model like THAT in particular has to have goggles with head positioning, and a dataglove for moving things around, but you get the idea, which is to stop thinking "flat" and start thinking in three dimensions, which should be fairly natural to most of us.
The other thing I think we need to see (and that we WILL see) is some sort of simple drag and drop procedural programming in which a user never writes a single line of code. This isn't going to lend itself to every kind of program, but the idea is that you can bang out a quick tool to get something done. For instance, if you just need a simple app to view jpegs, you'd create a window, set it resizable, you wouldn't turn off any of the gadgets, you'd drag in a toolbar, create some buttons on it, and tie them to file requesters or whatnot by drawing lines. You'd then drag an image viewing pane into the window, and click "package" or something, and BANG, you'd have an image viewer. I won't even get into such things as datatypes (Now known as the Translation Kit in BeOS, but the idea came from Datatypes on the Amiga.)
The ideas here are A> to make using a computer more natural, which has already been done to pretty reasonable degrees in 2d by MacOS, then by Windows, and finally by AOL. I hate AOL as much as the next guy, but it really is goddamn easy to use. Also, B> to make it possible for users to "write programs". A user should be able to create a tool just by slapping together precreated components. If you were a "real programmer", IE, were able to create your own objects (In whatever wins... COM+, or CORBA, or what have you) then you could sell those objects for five or ten or five hundred dollars/yen/pounds/whatever so that other people could incorporate them. It certainly makes licensing a lot more complicated, but I think the reward is worth it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't be silly. Since the Human Body is composed of DNA, all you really have to do is make modifications to the source code and then do a ./configure, make, make install - SHAZAM! The new DNA would then be transmitted to each cell to upgrade you to the latest version.
Wow! just think of this! if we could make a DNA strand like the Linux Kernel, just think how resistant we would be to Virii!
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
The very idea of basing your life on faith is idiotic to the core. Your statement was not controversial, but laced with Xtian overtones and thus stupid.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
And let's not overlook the obvious: the Internet, while being a wonderful communications tool, has made it possible for our society's sickest members to distribute information about the most taboo of topics: abortion, homosexuality, Islam, liberalism, etc.
liberalism is taboo????
this better be a troll.