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 He also says the present file system is obsolete, as are some filenames."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.
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.
Some good cyberpoints, but I can't help but cyberreact dubiously to a cyberbody so cyberattached to cyber-buzzwords in the cyberyear 2000.
That's no prediction. The net is already all about pornography, gambling, and copyright violations.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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...
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.
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.
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.
His tired old "Linux is like Unix, which is 30 years old, so it must be obsolete"
He fails to understand that what is "new" about Linux isn't the software technology -- it's the development, licensing, and distribution models.
Linux development is driven by the people who use it, not by the people who market it. That's a huge difference that filters out a lot of the unfortunate crap that winds up in market-driven operating system design.
Linux licensing places the source code to the operating system in what could best be described as very close to a "copyright-enforced public domain." by guaranteeing you not only the right, but also the ability to control your software by guaranteeing you access to the source code. Traditional licensing keeps the source code to the operating system as far away from the public domain -- and the public -- as copyright and trade secret laws allow. This is another huge difference.
Linux distribution removes the single point of failure created by the proprietary ownership and distribution model. Traditional software distribution funnels all distribution through a single distributor, who charges monopoly prices, and can remove the product from the market at any time. If RedHat, Caldera, and all the other Linux distributors were to go out of business, or dump the Linux kernel in favor of a new kernel design, Linux would survive. I'd like a new release of the Lisa operating system. When can I expect it? This is a huge difference.
Linux will evolve, just as the Mac OS and Windows will evolve. The difference is that Linux is picking up features like journelled filesystems, while Windows is picking up features like talking paperclips and desktops that blink with advertisements.
That's a huge difference.
The innovation of Linux is that is has created a functional replacement for a Public Domain in software that has never existed due to overly restrictive copyright laws and overly long copyright durations, and like the public domain, has the potential to become ubiquitous.
NOT the fact that it is largely an implementation of a traditional Unix kernel, which, as the article points out, is not a new achievement.
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...