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Alan Kay Decries the State of Computing
gnaremooz writes "Computer pioneer Alan Kay (DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs) declares 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.' He believes that PCs should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short."
Another computer visionary with vague promises and criticisms.
Instead of doing [insert clearly-defined practical thing here], you should be doing [insert vague semi-buzzword here, like "education", or "object"] and you should be using [insert visionary's product here] to do it.
I do not agree with the writer. I takes me a lot of creativity to find different ways to frag my friends in Battlefield 1942. Also playing battlefield teach me some nice skills for the real life. (press 9 for parachute whenever I fall out of a airplane and such)
From the Article:
The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for.
I'd have to disagree with Kay here, just because his work was with education and simulation doesn't mean that is really what computers are to be used for. They're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented by man, their purpose is whatever we choose it to be at the moment.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Am I the only one who thought "who cares?" So PCs aren't being used like some old fart wants them to be. He wants them to be used for creativity and learning, well guess what buddy capitolism isn't about creativity and learning.
Without the PC, there are many geeks that wouldn't know the first thing about the female body. I feel that we are learning a lot!!
He's angry, and good on him.
I would think that since it's "Personal" computing, that the individual user can decide what it's all about to them. My mom uses her computer to keep in touch with me over email and instant messaging, and she trades stupid email jokes, programs, and malware with all of her friends. Those are pretty personal, non-business related uses if you ask me.
Maybe Kay should've tried to call it the Educational Computer instead of Personal computer all those years ago.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
This guy clearly does not post on or read slashdot ever. Nothing but learning and creativity here :-P
Come to think of it, basically everything I ever do with my computer involves a certain amount of learning and creativity.
Sounds like someone is lamenting their choice of employment -- just because HP is lacking in the forefront creativity department doesn't mean the last 20 years of computing development is in the toilet.
Course by the time I hit submit, I'm sure there will be 50 other posts with this exact same thread, and I'll suddenly by -1 BORING...
Anyone who has spoken with him personally- in person or via email- or read his words, seen his vision knows this. Alan is *the* man.
There's a great XEROX Video we've here at our uni library- "Doing with images makes symbols [videorecording] : communicating with computers," released in 1987 while Kay was a fellow with Apple. For an enthusiastic and engrossing view of what Kay thinks computers *should* be (and I'm 100% with him!) should check it out.
Also, look into Smalltalk. Alan works on Squeak Smalltalk- rather than C++ or Java- and there's a good reason for it. Smalltalk has the tendency to empower both end user and programmer. It's "open source" in a way that most slashdotters have never imagined. It's kind of like having your whole computer run Emacs, but without being stuck with some funky half-GUI half-terminal app with nothing but key commands to drive it. Squeak gives us the power to control our computing environment in a way similar to emacs, although Squeak is a lot closer to a "conventional" GUI environment than Emacs. That said, there are a lot of things about Squeak's GUI toolkit - Morphic- that are highly unconventional, but quite great to have around.
OK, enough early morning rambling from me...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
(And i'm AM joking here mods)
He didn't include macs, where all the creativity and learning IS happening!
More seriously, this could be the effect of having a monopoly or a large single entity controlling how progress is made. I remember in the 80's there was fun times ahead and there seemed allot of things happening. Today its just sterile on the pc side. Cost doesn't allow much indulgence for some of the things he suggested. However I am reminded of that application that was previewed at WWDC, the one with the positions of all the satellites orbiting earth. That was fun as was the CoreImage and CoreVideo presentations. Nothing fun I've seen on the windows PC side, the innovation is elsewhere, in Linux, Apple or the Java 2 Desktop.
Jonathanjk.com
uh, the liberals typically don't want a capitalistic free market based society--compared to conservatives. I take it to mean you are using "liberal" in the classic definition meaning "free."
... "I've no idea what this Kay dude is talking about, I just finished reading this very interesting article on Australian dingos in my World Book. Now excuse me while I have to finish my latest iCompositions in my iGarageband, and organise my iPhotoalbums, all while wirelessly browsing the iWeb sitting in my iGarden."
You can't teach anyone to be creative. You either are, or are not. That said, I think there are a few useful tools to aid the creative process, writing, drawing, music, etc., but I don't believe there are many, if any, tools to enhance the creative process. Maybe computers can't do that.
I use my computer for talking crap on message boards and shooting virtual aliens thanks.
Please. Save at least your time next time...
Since I am old enough to experience and remember this I refute his assertion that business was the prime user at the PCs inception. PCs were the tools for education mainly (along w/Apple IIs).
In 1987 businesses were finally ramping up with $10-20K PS/2s for CAD and other standalone work. Mainframe and minis were the big boys.
In 1988, I interviewed with a recruiter for EDS. When I asked him where he saw PCs, he said EDS would never develop on them or for them, and that they would never catch on (how wrong he was).
I did not see the business explosion until the 90s.
Software was meant to be free.
I think Eben Moglen puts it better in this interview.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
1,000,000,000 windows computers on the earth, 1,000,000,000 windows computers. Take one down, replace the OS. 999,999,999 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,999 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,999 windows computers.Take one down, replace the OS. 999,999,998 windows computers on the earth. 999,999,998 windows computers on the earth. Take one down replace the OS. 999,999,997 windows computers on the earth. and so on.
Maybe we should use something other than gentoo.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
you mean it's not about patches and updates?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Think this guy missed completely the point. People want pr0n, not creativity or other bullshit. In this sense, computers have been very sucessful.
"The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for."
Is the listener supposed to then ask a simple question like "what would you simulate?" and he would say "everything!" and the listener says "how do you do that?" and he says "by building a model of EVERYTHING!" and the listener, still not understanding what the value of "simulating everything" means, just writes him off as a kook who will research useless ideas for the rest of his life?
Does anyone else understand his vision?
I thought that firing up Photoshop and cranking out whatever I felt like at the moment, designing sites, and making Flash animations WAS creativity.
:(
Oops.
I also thought that teaching myself PHP, SQL, C++ and Java was some form of learning. I mean, now I'm studying computer science at UIUC and all.
Guess I was wrong
The Windows PC is about as far from a home uers system as it's possible to get without also making it totally unsuitable for businesses.
In reality, the correct way to go is to step back and look at how succesful home computers worked. Take for example, the commodire 64. This had a user interface that came up in about a second, and was immediately useable. Nobody ever looked at my C64 in a confused way wondering what it does. They knew. It was obvious.
A windows PC on the other hand is a nasty complicated mess. Even the wiring needs some expertese in electronics, and then you have all the cryptic issues with drivers and operating systems. The average user doesn't want to care.
The solution is to produce a standardised simpler system. An all-in-one unit with standard components, that will plug into a TV, and starts with a BAPSIC interpreter. Apps should be loaded with a "load" command. We don't need a mouse. Those are only useful for pixel addressing. In practive they confuse the user.
Yeah, we could have a world with a few people owning computers and being creative and the rest carrying out boring, simple tasks because we're too stupid to automate them, or we could have a world where we automate all of the boring, stupid tasks and people can spend their time being creative.
Read jack phelps dot net
Nearly everyday I think of many new and interesting ways to kill those who wrote Windows, and the muppets who run our network, not forgetting the in-house support, and....
You don't need a lab to make mud.
The whole computing industry can move only as fast as one company, and it's in that company's interest to move slowly. During the .com boom, the whole on-line industry moved as fast as the fastest company and we saw how much was done in just ten years. 20 years of Microsoft dominance has set the computer/software industry back 10 years. Another 20 years of dominance will allow us to only progress as much as we would otherwise in 10 years.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Alan Kay says...
"The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for."
I disagree. Many business users use spreadsheets to "what-if". Perhaps he has a different idea of "interesting".
or was he working for the company with the three-letter acronym between PARC and HP? he better enjoy his current job while he's got it, because on this trend, he's only got one more employer left (and i have a hard time imagining Alan Kay working for X!).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
When I first started with computers back in the early 80's there was a lot of energy in the community. People ran BBSs, built circuit boards to attach to print heads to scan images, built weather facsimile machines, tinkered and hacked and built stuff. Those days were very enjoyable. But the only downside was that all the little hacks were for the computer. I.e., the gadgets celebrated the technology and the coolness of doing new things, but they were all about the technology itself.
Things have changed somewhat since then. There's still Linux and new experimental OSes (and BSDs too) to tinker with. Hardware is commoditized so there's not a lot of need or desire to build memory expansion boards, but people still do interesting things. However, the biggest change is that computers are now really cool tools for doing non-computer things.
I can only speak to my interests, but without computers I could not have easily played with video or recording, ray tracing, music production, math (some problems *require* computers to understand, at least in my case), etc.. The computer today is akin to what the printing press was several centuries ago. I.e., it gives some very powerful tools to individuals of modest means. So things that were only the demesne of researchers and big companies ten years ago is now available in a relatively low powered desktop system.
How far have we really come in the last 30+ years of personal computing?
The personal computing revolution has stalled with the advent of the WWW. Excluding the MS virus, personal computing was making a lot of progress up until the mid 90's. Since then we've failed to truly exploit the power of both a computing platform and a means of communication. Somewhere along the way we've floundered. It's not necessarily a bad thing but think about where we could be.
Listen to the guy. He's really just asking where should we be?
Computers have made huge contributions to the art world. How can he think that we're falling short in creativity?
I work in the music field and almost all the innovation in the last 10 years has come from computers (embedded at first, PCs more recently). With Reason, you can turn out a decent tune in minutes. Live has introduced a whole new way to write and perform music. Those are my favorite examples but there are plenty more.
The film and art worlds have been equally influenced by computer technology.
Nope, I just read it, and I'm still right. He seems to think that the computer is not being used well in business. I'm an investment banker who works mostly with small software companies, and the process automation software industry (better known as BPM) is something I work in a lot. Companies can automate everything now more easily than ever and spend their time doing business rather than doing paperwork.
Moreover, Microsoft Excel is one of the most proliferated tools out there, and VERY few people use it solely to build financial statements without doing any sort of modeling along with it. Kay's quote "The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for" is bull.
Read jack phelps dot net
I'd rather write in Netscape Composer than Word...
You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part.
Has Alan ever written a large document in Word? The program is designed for memoranda... it has precisely one nestable object, the table, and the program tries so hard to keep you from nesting them that I ended up embedding a table in a Visio document in a Word document to keep Word from reflowing it as part of the surrounding table.
There's no list object... lists are simulated by tying paragraphs together in software and if you try and make a list element two paragraphs long you end up breaking the list in two. There's no chapters, no quotations, they're all handled by paragraphs that are redefined on the fly by the program... and it has to guess as to what it's supposed to redefine them as.
Netscape Composer was a relatively minimalist word processor, but because HTML is a structured document format it's much easier to manage the flow of a work in it.
In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines."
He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.
I agree with Kay. I also think Kay has made enormous contributions in the past. And I think that Squeak, his main project, is an enormously valuable tool. But, sadly,for all the great ideas that have gone into Squeak (and Kay's other work), I have not found the implementations he or others have produced to be very useful. Having great ideas is no good if you don't manage to implement them in ways that people can actually use.
So, we have those who do the work implementing things that real people actually use (Gnome, KDE, Sun, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and then we have those who talk about great ideas and grand schemes, but whose implementations aren't all that useful (Kay, the various "usability gurus", etc.). The first group doesn't do enough background research and/or just likes to pretend for PR reasons that they are "innovative". The second group likes to complain about how awful things are but then just doesn't quite get their act together producing something more useful than they do.
How can we improve things? Things get better the more like Kay take actual implementations a little more seriously and people in "industry" stop reinventing the wheel. And software developers and end users need to become a bit more informed about the products they use and make better choices, instead of just buying what's popular or hip.
I was going to go check Squeak out but it looks like that will have to wait. There was a post a couple of months ago about how children today don't really have access from their home computers to an easy to learn programming language. On my C64 I could just start typing out some basic, and I had access to QBasic on one of my early DOS machines. Has anyone out there given Squeak a try. I'm basically looking for something more like a programming language than say Logo, but no as difficult to pick up as PASCAL or C.
The net result of the consumerization of the PC and the internet is a landscape that only want's to hear about what can be packaged and marketed.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
yeh, replying to my own post.
Moglen was a programmer back in early the 70's. He wrote free software, not because of his ethics, but because all software was free back then. Software was a tool for users, and users were allowed to fix and improve the tools.
Anyone could contribute to the state of the art by making a small contribution to the edge.
The current proprietary regime blocks that. If you want one more feature in a proprietary word processor, you'd have to write a whole word processor first, and people won't do that. Not by themselves anyway. Abiword, Kword - and many other free projects - are proof that people will eventually get so frustrated that they will write a whole word processor.
Wiki's are a good example of what Kay says the internet should be like. I know they're not peer-to-peer, but the have the authoring bit to a t.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
What is the point of something if you can't place a monetary value on it? Without profit, where is the incentive?
-Some "crazy" Libertarian
Business Model: Personal Computers? Internet? Where's our money?
His specific complaints are understandable considering his long (and illustrious) career in computer science, but the underlying thesis is simply that we (including Alan Kay) haven't even begun to appreciate what computers can do. Kay yearns for a paradigm evolution, and considers our anchored situatedness to be detrimental.
Please don't color the word "simulate" too much when reading Kay's words. To simulate is to recreate (approximate) one system in another system. Mathematics is a mode of simulation. The sole purpose of computers is simulation.
This is absolutely true. With personal computers, we have the ability to have every book ever written, every piece of artwork ever produced and every song ever sung at our finger tips. And what do we use it for?
The only difference is eye candy like menus, windows and whatnot.
Otherwise, it's pretty much the same, and, even when you put in particularly creative applications like Photoshop, Illustrator/Freehand, Autocad or any music composing system, you basically have "a better version of an older tool, pen and paper".
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET if it wasn't swamped by the line noise...
...think their box is going to transform society and be above debasement by commerce. They have all been wrong up to now. The box doesn't change society. Society changes the box.
Note to self: Try not to sound so crabby when you get old.
The point of personal computing is personal interest. An that cannot be wrong.... Unless we entered the Orwellian era
RTFA, I had the impression of a man that is trapped in the wrong company.
Since active cynic Carly took over, there is no HP any more.
It's NewAgeP: No more research needed - except for how to supress printer ink refilling. Product creation sold to Intel (when she notices the chipset guys are doing well, she'd sell those poor souls to Intel too).
Corporate Culture vaporized. Business-is-adding-a-sticker attitude.
What is this guy sitting for on his chair at HP?
chess
I'm old enough to remember the early days - my first computer was a 8k PET.. While the technology was primative, computers where sold as creative devices. My PET had a built in interpreter, and it switched on straight to the command prompt. The machine, by its nature, encouraged you to get involved with programming, because it was so simple. Yes, there where word processing packages, games and the like, and you got used to loading and running these, but all the time you knew that the real fun was learning to program.
Nowadays, a Windows PC doesn't even come with any kind of programming language (not counting batch files..) and the GUI metaphor discourages automation of tasks (which was the Great Hope that computing promised..)
The internet has been converted from a facinating library to some sort of dumb TV plastered with adverts... The increasing and unfettered commercialisation of the internet is gradually making it unusable. I can't even get my site listed on Google, never mind high up the list, because Google's more interested these days in promoting commercial sites. And don't get me started on spammers (unless I've a 2x4 in my hand!)
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part.
/.
You see where it says 'Browser'? Right there, in the sentence you yourself wrote? See it? Good. Now, let's ask ourselves -- does it say 'authoring tool'? It doesn't, does it? It says 'browser'. Not a tool for creating pages -- that can be done by other tools. A tool for _browsing_ pages. Do you see the connection now? It's a _browser_... its primary function is to _browse_. Okay, I'm going to leave you to work on that thought for a bit.
(I decided to pick on that one sentence pretty much at random -- there were many candidates.)
This article appears to have been cooked up from an old but popular recipe:
1 -- Take a guy from academia
2 -- Add no real applications, userland experience, or reality checks
3 -- Leave him to stew in his own juice for a few years, becoming more and more focused on his own tiny pet academic theory. During this step, take care not to expose the academic to the actual work being done by scientists, designers, and regular people.
4 -- When he is convinced he has a 'message' about the 'state of the industry/nation/world', put a keyboard in front of him!
It's a popular dish, but I'd rather see it served in Wired or the sunday papers than here at
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I think much of what Kay is lamenting is similar to the great - and strangely unpublicised - disappointment many pioneers of television experience.
Remember this?: television will eliminate ignorance, education will be widespread, the people will have a voice with which to communicate.
It's the 21st century, and it's "Hey, do you remember that 'leggo my Eggo' commercial?".
This is what happens when we allow commercialisation to go unchecked; in any environment - unchecked - it will consume infinitely until the environment is destroyed.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
One of the subtexts of Kay's commentary seems to be that most operating systems train you how to use them, whereas I think he would like to see the actual person make the computer perform the functions that they would like them too.
A subtle distinction, I know, but I remember helping teach a class on LOGO a long time ago (ok I was a geek at age 12), and that was the advantage of it for little kids.....they were in charge of the computer, not the other way around. I don't see that philosophy as much today in the widely distributed programs.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
Bussiness people are unimaginative, boring, and turn every decent idea into shit. Film at 11.
That is all.
Thank you, drive thru.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population.
I like to do 3D computer art, and have started programming for fun again after a long lapse. Most people who know me, many of them professionals wiuth advanced degrees, can't grasp why I want to do it as they turn back to their latest Grisham lawyer epic.
The sad truth is that the state of personal computing is exatly what the market (i.e. the consumers) wanted. They want games and pr0n and free music. No about of hand wringing or high falutin' pondering is going to change that.
The other problem:
For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
When people say stuff like this, they are only really thinking about his friends and family, or maybe some small collection of online pals.
You really want to be connected with atrocities like stompthejews.org or purty-yung-thangs-only-mildy-related-to-yoo.xxx or microsoft.com?
Honestly, what is all this infinite connectivity going to brings us over what we have now?
And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."
No, it's just not interested in what Alan Kay is interested in.
The guy is brilliant, and he's done great work, but I'm afraid he's developed the tunnelvision common to people who have had their eogs stroked (no matter how well deserved) for many years. There's some small businesses out there able to automate things that would have required a lot of tedious drudgework in past decades thanks to those "uncreative" business applications.
Sorry, Alan, but behiond all the educations and fancy learning objects, there's still a world to run, resources to move about and daily chores to be done. And we're going to use boring gray box computin' machines for it.
"pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."
OK, now here I agree with him. :-) But he might want to apply the bullshit test to his own beliefs. I try to do it on a regular basis. It's sometimes painful to let go of a closely held belief, but if the facts do not support it, you have to dispose of it.
--- Ban humanity.
Squeak/Smalltalk is just another programming language and can hardly be seen as something that would revolutionize PC use. I agree with the observation that the current state of computing has not improved much in the past twenty years. And I too think it is due to how it has been commercialized. But I do not know an easy way out.
The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero--but that's what it's for.
Dude, I use it every night to simulate a girlfriend, and that is pretty damn interesting.
Kay should take a break from all of this research BS and check out some of the great porn on the internet. He wouldn't be so down on the state of the industry then.
The idea of a PC that sits on your desk and is sometimes used to write letters and sometimes used to view movies and sometimes to work out how broke you are is just residue from the time that computers occupied large rooms and ran the payroll on Thursdays and did structural analysis on Fridays.
If you want a home device for showing movies, build one, but don't stick a QWERTY keyboard on it: it may contain a computer but it doesn't have to be one. If you want a device to get imaginative with, then build a device that facilitates imaginative interaction: don't simulate one on a Windows desktop...
Weird. Granted, Apple did a lot of weird, relatively unproductive stuff in the mid-80s...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"I invented the press to print bibles, dammit, not newspapers and schoolbooks!"
The purpose of a paintbrush and paint is to produce stunning art. Using a paintbrush to protect a house from the elements is missing the point.
He needs to get over himself. The PC is a tool, a toy, a weapon, a paperweight, and for some a vibrator. Use it for whatever you want.
Most people use them for little more than anchors to keep the desk from flying off into space.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There is nothing preventing me from being creative or learning on my personal computer.
The distractions there are the same as in life, but I manage in life as on the computer.
It's a tool. Not a jailer. Do what you want with it.
I think it is silly, sounds a lot like old folks who over romatisize the past as the old golden days... I use it for work, creativity, video games, shopping, listening to music, th elist just goes on....
photoplankton
Granted, he didn't get much of anywhere at Xerox, either - defining "anywhere" as "broad acceptance and commercialization".
Both Xerox and HP are schizophrenic organizations. In the 80's Xerox was bipolar, oscillating between "we put marks on paper/toner pays our salaries" and "we are the information company", taking about three years to complete a cycle. HP used to be an "it's all about the engineering" company - now after ther merger with Compaq, their strategy seems to be "good enough is good enough to be the last man standing".
Sad, really...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The language Squeak wasn't my introduction to object-oriented programming, but having stumbled on Java I found Squeak to really be a much better object oriented learning environment. No language treats "everything" as an object despite their claims, but Squeak really comes darn close.
The Squeak programming environment along with the Korienek, Wrensch, and Dechow book were what made the idea of Object-Oriented programming really click in my brain. Even if you never program a "real" program with Squeak, the value of Squeak is that you can really learn OO principles without the baggage of a C heritage and designers who've shortcut language consistency in the name of efficiency. All are good things you may want to make the trade off for when programming a "real" program, but not things you want to short yourself on during your education.
Think of what computers have allowed us to do. Not just personal computers, all electronic computers. They are everywhere. Sure, they may be used for a lot of conveniences, but those are fantastic conveniences. Do you remember what it was like to check out at the grocery store 20 years ago? I cannot imagine doing that now. It takes minutes to run an entire cart of groceries through and pay for them. But that is consumerism, so someone may be willing to live without that. Think of the medical industry. The advances because of computers has been immense. The tools and technology that they use today is fantastic. Now you could argue that the medical system in this country is no better off, because of shortages, malpractice, etc. But you have to look at the accomplishments of the tool without passing judgement on the industry itself. I got some paint this past weekend. Computer mixed it. I drove my car to get the paint - it has a computer managing the engine system. We have a rover on Mars. Satellite images of the planet. Weather radar that you can view on the internet. Truly portable music. Everything from scientific applications to pure entertainment. Some things that could never have existed without computers.
I fully understand the need to disconnect every once in a while. But if you *really* investigate what computers have done for us, it is mind-boggling.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I always remind myself that before the Internet stepped in, I did use my computer for creativity, especially music composition (on various "trackers" for Amiga, if you must know).
Come to think of it, it was pretty amazing given the poor technology of the times (a mere 2 MB RAM, endless floppy-swapping -- later, a "huge" 20 MB HD). The creativity of the programmers was itself amazing. They did their sound mixing routines alright, MIDI + sample synchro, and the user interface--the user interface!!--was the best thing ever.
And yet today, maybe 100 times the number of Windows PCs is out there, with 100 times the CPU power each, but I still can't find an honest tracker for my Windows machine-- when I say honest, I mean that won't crash my PC or will ask that I buy a damn compatible soundcard. I also mean "free," I mean come on, who's going to spend C-notes worth of professional sequencer software for just dabbling around!!
Dudes in the 90's, up there in Finland & other places, were swamping Europe with their trackers at a time when "electronic distribution" was a euphemism for a network of enthusiasts swapping floppies through the post and holding "copy parties" in each other's place.
Now we got the Internet for distribtion, we got fairly less fragmentation in the OS space, and you'd have thought it'd all have made it much easier?? Think again!
Sure, back then we weren't able to download Britney Spears MP3 for free... Hell, if we had, we wouldn't even have had the CPU power to decode it!! But what's the new thing there? I mean, you just listen to the same music as in the store, except cheaper...
To conclude: quit consuming pr0n and mp3's, start coding mind-opening stuff for masses to discover their own talents!
(and stop reading / posting on Slashdot too, I might add)
Across every industry, real innovation is rare. You have a small handful of innovative ideas that get developed and evolve until they become common place but indispensable. There is nothing wrong with this process. It is rare to be able to go looking for real innovation and find it.
Well, its definitely a better answer than you've given.
Karma Schmarma
He was probably just talking above the reporter's head (or what the reporter considered to be above his audience's head.) Or, he himself hasn't found the way to express what he'd like to see in terms most people would understand.
Most people do use computers primarily to simulate objects that they understand because they have physical samples of those objects (appliances, documents, etc.) in front of them in their daily life. What I took as his meaning was that the computer's ability to make manifest ideas and concepts that do not have common tangible real-world instances is commonly neglected, and should not be. In this respect he is entirely correct.
But the problem in my view is not that noone has tried to foster such uses by making computers easier to use and understand in this capacity. There have been plenty of attempts to do so, many of them in games, some in teaching languages like TURTLE. It is rather that there are few examples in real life of using manifestation of abstract objects to do something useful, or at least entertaining. Face it, most people don't subject themselves to a sit-down session with a computer unless they think they are going to get something out of it, and "modeling" intangible systems is a hard sell in this respect, especially for those who have not been taught the intellectual building blocks needed to approach such a task with any degree of confidence.
Maybe if there were a collection someplace of testimonials and explanations by those few who have managed to get a signifigant real-world benefit from doing something truly abstract it would inspire users. Some would argue that applications are that very thing, but what I'm suggesting would be more of an explanation of the human process involved -- how a person thought his way through a new or unusual application of a core technology to improve their life, rather than a spoon-fed procedural guide to doing the same thing without comprehending the thoughts behind it, which is what most applications are in the end.
A popular game that had a programming component could also break the ice by making it into entertainment, but making it popular versus all the competition would be the obstacle to that...
Someone had to do it.
Kay seems to think the world is full of creative people. Well it's not. Maybe one out of 10 are creative and want to create things. In fact, I'm probably being optimistic here.
Having that drive to build, innovate and make new things is something that's shared by a small minority. Of course the rest are just going to use "Application X". I wouldn't expect any less.
Actually, almost everyone is creative. You just need access to tools and the clay, and a place to play in safely (where no one laughs at you building a six-legged elephant or painting a green sky). AI "experts" like to peddle LOGO and smalltalk, forgetting that these languages have a difficult to grasp interface to a limited repertoire of actions. But look at what a simple and elegant interface to a deep set of tools can provide: Hypercard back in the Macintosh SE30 days was the creative sandbox for a lot of people.
/. go on.
Hypercard was a simple set of tools that allowed users to create stacks of cards and to share these customized programs/stacks with other users. It is one of the few cases I can think of (beyond the initial VisiCalc, which was astounding a leap as has been made in the last few decades; don't tell me people weren't creative in programming VisiCalc worksheets; I actually remember running it on an Apple ][+ back in the day) where the END-USER actually supplied or added the key functionality to the program which they wanted to add. And building up from the provided "address book" card stacks was a great way to start learning. You could add hyperlinks, you could add commands, you could run scripted calls to other programs, every item on the "Card"/screen was an object which could handle actions and messages and pass on unhandled actions to the next layer up. It was an astounding set of tools to allow access to the Macintosh programmer's toolbox of tools to the most unadvanced mac users.
Apple sadly realized it was a useful program and unbundled it into Hypercard "Reader" and the professional Hypercard creator bull****, destroying the base of users who could customize their own stacks. This is sadly reminiscent of what is happening with the Comcasts of the internet who want us all to be "consumers" while they provide the content and Nielsen-VNU monitors us all and provides our demographics for money. Wikipedia is a great example of the use of the web and the internet for a colloborative data set. Yay Wikipedia. Okay, I'm tired of ranting and I've lost my train of thought.
As I started to read the article, a Fortune popup appeared, blocking my view until I closed it.
Tell me about it.
Medicine and steel aren't tools. Also, computers are substantially more useful than the wheel. The wheel only does a very few things (roll being the principal one), whereas the usefullness of computers is limited only by the halting problem. The same goes for the level and the arch. You have on one hand, a tool with limitless potential, and on the other, a tool with highly limited potential. Which would you say is more useful?
He is running on fumes. He did great stuff in the 1970s inventing SmallTalk, developing graphics GUIs, a formulating the "Dynabook", the early PDA. This stimulated Jobs and Gates to commercialize graphical computing and OOP-based OS's. But since then Kay hasn't really invented that much, missed "industrial-strength" OOP, missed the significance of the Web, PDAs, cellphones and other innovations. The Gore-Gates initative to make the Web available in every school and library by year 2000 did far more for children computing access than SmallTalk and eQuariums.
(Lets see if the moderators can distinguish a contrarian opinion from troll-bait.)
You're supposed to stop and consider what you're dealing with. Not what you're doing with the computer today: writing a document/email/whatever but consider the product/business/whatever that you're talking about in all those documents you create. If it's business, simulate the business. If it's a product, simulate that. Once you have a simulation you can tweak it and see what happens. What is a "simulation" here? Any type of computer model you can create that gives some indication of how the thing you're simulating acts under different conditions. The tool you choose depends on the thing you're trying to simulate.
The problem here is that you end up with a lot of stupid people being creative..
Flash ads, smiley faces in IMs, BLOGS, chatroom trolls, Anonymous Cowards etc.
If you've ever read anything at all about the original Mac team at Apple, they were clearly filled with huge visions of an ultra-creative world where Joe Schmoe would use technology to empower their own creative visions.
The problem with Alan Kay is he is stuck in about 1983, waiting to release the first Mac, not realizing that time has marched on.
In short, he gave the world Smalltalk, found that the hardware of the time couldn't accomodate it, and that the tools were sub-optimal. Since then he has been chasing the same impossible dream -- digital silly putty whereby anybody can produce incredible software just by stringing objects together (a *very* Smalltalk-esque concept!).
The realities are, software is hard and most people really don't want to build their own. The other thing he always glosses over is that somebody has to build all those nice objects before someone else can string them together.
The reality is, most of the ideas he has esposed throughout his career have either 1) been tried and are being used in *some* form or 2) been tried and found to not be all that great or 3) really not compelling.
All that said, I wish he'd use his remarkable gifts and produce something. Smalltalk can't have been the only think he leaves to the technology world.
Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web--it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it
He is right the internet is just a great distribution system for information. FTP/Gopher/P2P/WWW are all means for one computer to exchange information. But with this has come new methods of creativity, such as wide spread adoption of Open Source (new method of collaboration) and distributed computing (new method of data analysis).
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes.
People are using computers to simulate pretty much everything. Car crashes,investments, city traffic, call center wait times, economies, effectiveness of medicine, buildings, weather, new materials, foot traffic & queue times at retail centers, shoes, etc.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
You can't teach anyone to be creative. You either are, or are not.
You can't teach anyone to be tall. You either are, or are not.
Have you ever tried looking at the world without a black-or-white dichotomy? There's some creativity in everyone. Compared to Leonardo Da Vinci, most of us are not very creative. Compared to a poodle, most of us are very creative indeed.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
When the Michigan Senator (D) in the (highly recommended) movie Fahrenheit 9/11 responded bluntly to the question "Why didn't you read the Patriot Act before passing it?" with the response "Sit down my son, we don't read most of the bills we pass." It was quite laughable but very chilling.
Legal ignorance is at an appalling level, even among people paid and elected to represent us. Computers are good at pattern recognition; and most people despise reading the mumbo-jumbo lawyers hide their meaning within.
Perhaps a "pocket lawyer" to help parse legal mumbo jumbo is a worthwhile thing. For most people law is a one-way street, you have to read what the IRS, city, and state send to you but you rarely have to write anything yourself. (Though Nolo and some other "mad lib" style books do a wonderful job of this).
While there are lawyers who are trying to be devious and hide their real purpose in contorted language, government agencies should have no need to do so. Require that court rulings, city councils, and any record of law be stated in English and Backus-Naur form. Rely less on the vagueries of English to preserve or hide your meaning while the OED is changing the language (bling-bling? vavavoom?) and hence changing the law through its evolution.
"television will be a wonderful medium for the masses to enjoy the benefits of culture and education."
The truth is that people make any general purpose media or device do what they want to do, or relegate it to irrelevancy. What most people want is to be passively entertained (couch potatoes). Build a device that can only be used for lofty goals, and nobody will buy it.
Will whoever stole Reverend Brother Magoun's p0m please return it? m=rn
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
But we have to ask ourselves--is this by nature, or by nurture? Is lifelong creative drive a rare, recessive gene--or is it a potential that exists in most of us that's discouraged by both school and the workplace? If we gave people easier to use creative tools, would they retain this creativity longer?
And if creativity is TRULY only enjoyable by a minority, then isn't that minority the only subset of humanity worth wringing one's hands over?
As far as the rest of what Alan Kay I guess I mostly agree with you--he is saying that business is inherently conservative--but that's besides the point, because look at the massive amount of man power invested into open source and other non-profit endeavors by private invididuals--if the problems he describes were solvable by merely discarding business conservatism, they would have been solved already.
I think what Kay is really complaining about is that most people use computers more for communication--sending and receiving email, receiving content from major corporations--then for creation. But this shouldn't be a surprise--think about the total computing power of the billions of computers in the world, then compare that to the computing power of the billions of people in the world. Only a tiny slice of the computing powerof civilization is implemented in silicon--most is still in carbon. So, even to a programmer like me, communicating with other brains is still more valucable than communicating with machines.
What Kay misses is the naivete of computing that existed before the Internet was everyone's obsession--when everyone still felt that Computation and Simulation were still more important than Communication. In that sense, someday Kay will get his wish--computation power of silicon is growing a lot faster than human population, and perhaps even in my lifetime (though probably not Alan Kay's) silicon computation will be greater than human computation. Still, I'm not sure he'll actually like the result--I don't expect humans to have MORE opportunity for creativity once machines become capable of creativity. Unless we are actually integrated with the machines.
I think the biggest piece of bullshit was when he contrasted Microsoft Word with the Web--am I naive to think that 90% of people who would want to create a web page and have the economic means to do so are able to create a web page, or at least write a blog? Some web browsers DO have creative ability built in. The web is infested with creativity! Look at all these blogs, these amateur web comics, these open source programs, these complex CGI tricks and games (try doing that in Word, Alan!). Hell, I knew someone who credited practice from Slashdot flamewars with the 12 he got on the GRE Analytical Writing section. Even my sister, who absolutely REFUSES to ever do anything creative, insists on making a web page.
I think the biggest insight is contrasting Squek with current open source desktops. If Gnome and KDE are really about freedom, why do they have to be written in compiled languages that make it such a pain in the ass for end users to change and add features to them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of advanced statically typed languages, but it IS pretty cool how people can write extensions for emacs so easily. It would be cool if the same were true of all the apps on my GUI--though admittedly that would likely have performance and stability costs.
Agreed, this just seems to be a case of being dissatisfied and making noise to remain relevant.
For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short.(from article)
Oh really. I recently downloaded a great 3D sketch application. It allows me to quickly transform my ideas into 3D sketches without any prior knowledge of CAD based design. Since then I have created four concept houses, one complete with an interior. I am not an architect or a computer artist, but this tool made it possible for me.
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes.(from article)
Businesses are already using various tools to chart future strategies, manage their costs, analyze market conditions, etc... It is very difficult to create a complete simulation of a business environment that can intelligently link all the internal and external factors involved in moving a business. If computers could do that, why bother having CEO's and managers. Just fire upper management and have your sophisticated computer with its infallible simulated world giving orders to everyone.
This guy reminds me of the one lecture I once heard from this techie about the wonders of modern technology. One of the examples she gave was the Sony AIBO. According to her it was the perfect replacement for carbon based pets. It didn't shit were it shouldn't, it always listened to you, and responded the way a real dog would to tactile contact. Whats more, unlike a real dog, It could also email pictures to you and record videos. Needless to say, I came to the conclusion that she was mad.
Similarly, in this situation, computer have come a LONG way in the last 20 years. There are sophisticated tools available for people to explore their ideas, regardless of what their area of interest may be. Computers are being used extensively in educational environments. They are adding value to the educational experience. What they are not it tools that have to be used just for the sake of being used. Computers are used where they are needed, and where they can help.
So far I have seen nothing in this article that indicates that this guy is actually working on something useful. He's put across a couple of buzzwords, the sort of thing which many irrelevant techies throw around. I'm surprised that he has the audacity to criticize the effort that has gone into hardware and software development in the last 20 years, without having made any single tangible contribution (in that time) himself.
When a severely brain-damaged friend of my son gets to free himself for a few hours with Counterstrike, where he can jump and twirl and join the general melee as any other kid, I know Alan Kay is decidedly wrong.
Croquet does indeed look very fascinating. However, I read their draft license, and it appears to have an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL. I really, really hope they address this incompatibility, as croquet is something that could become a defacto lingua franca of an immersive 3d, collaborative internet. It is something that Blender, for example, could embrace ... were its licensing to be GPL compatible.
However, if they inadvertantly freeze out a major portion of the free software world, they will be doing both themselves and the rest of us a disservice, along the lines of the most recent xfree licensing debacle that led to the xorg fork (and xfree's subsequent deprication by nearly every Linux and GNU distribution).
That would be a terrible shame.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What the flying fuck are you talking about? The transistor was developed at Bell Labs, the R&D arm of AT&T. The first successful personal computer was effectively the Apple II developed in a garage by two Steves who wanted to, you guessed it, market it and sell it.
Businesses build what sells. Fuckin-a PERIOD!
Get your nose out of moveon.org once in a while.
Besides, we don't have laissez faire capitalism, so your whole argument is a strawman. You don't need laissez faire to have market forces. There's a huge range in between LFC and complete solcialism.
Indeed children do have a great ability learning new things, however, they often lack the level of abstract thinking needed for doing some real programming. But how many people grasp the difference between a set and a list? And how many people confuse concepts like "object" with "class", or understand the "pointer-to-pointer" concepts?
"Smalltalk has the tendency to empower both end user and programmer."
Oh please! Yet another evangalist for yet another computer language. Sorry friend , but there is NO computer language on a normal Von Neumann computer that exists that gives ANY more power to a user than assembly code. I don't mean this to be a troll but as we all know anything that can be done in a high level language by definition is possible in assembler/machine code. All a high level language does is make it EASIER to do , it does not ENABLE it in the first place. I do think some people when promoting their language-of-them-month do seem to think that it brings something to the table that has never been possible before. The ONLY way that can happen is by using fundamantaly different hardware designs , it CANNOT be done just by changing the software (ie the programming language).
i tried to become a member but got tired of waiting. Microsoft has recently made available Express versions of some of their languages that can be downloaded for free. I would suggest that you try visual basic which is available here:i c/defau lt.aspx
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vbas
You can reach me at therumorroom@hotmail.com if you want.
The computer industry sucks. There is no creativity, there is no R&D anymore. Last I looked there were two HD manufacturers and everyone just bought their innards and slapped their sticker on the unit. People persecute you for the OS you do or don't use. It's a sick industry where rabid theiving dogs with no care but thier own wallet are heralded as kings and made the richest men in America. Good thing I'm graduating in August to join them =)
When HTTP was designed, it was intended to become something like WebDAV, because it does have a PUT method. For some reason most HTTP servers never implemented.
I belive he is wrong, they are the greatest invention ever and i can make two points here:
1. Humans have progressed technologically faster in the period since we invented computers then any other time in history, how is thsis not creation? If you bought a person from the Roman empire to the dark ages he would sigh, but if you ough a person from before computers to today, they would have a heart attack. We have created so much with computers and although maybe not as much as we like they are tools to be used as we wish.
2. the internet, the single greatest pinnical of creation ever. it contains almost infinite amounts of information and every day more and more people add their creation to it http://www.deviantart.com/
how can he say they are not being used for what they were ment to be
1. computers are a progression of code breaking machines in WW2 designed to compute
2. how can millions of million of people use computers the same way every day and be wrong, surly if they were being miss used we would feel uncomfortable using them the way we do. or in retrospect we developed them to do the tasks we see as their purpose.
"The increasing and unfettered commercialisation of the internet is gradually making it unusable."
Bullshit. It's not like the "commercialisation" is removing literature, research, and raw data from the Internet.
Don't blame others because your site isn't interesting enough to go to.
Go to Google and enter "+opsin +bovine".
3,610 hits. Not a commercial site in the first 30 (I didn't go further). All research.
If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes.
Alan Kay is definitely overrating users. I go through great efforts in trying to present concepts and to abstract a technical issue in a way which is logical to business. Both IT and business people I deal with want to talk about databases, files and web GUIs in stead of discussing the problem to be solved at a higher abstraction level.
I think the required levels of knowledge and ability to abstract problems in order to to create computer models of companies is currently found in universities and in businesses that encourage academic thinking. It will take a very long time for this awareness to seep through to the common business.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
He may have (and was) a great pioneer, but these days I think he's too busy playing with *his* old toys to notice the world has changed around him. He says we mainly read the web, and yet every person posting here is *writing* the web. He has overlooked the impact of CMS systems and more importantly wiki. Why no metion of Skype, bittorrent, 3 degrees of seperation or any form of IM? Step aside old man, let the young lions continue your work or let the scales fall from your eyes.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I was going to make some statement about using a Mac, but given his time at Xerox PARC, he knows 'em, if you follow... ;-)
I don't know what fantasyland he lives in regarding personal computing and its uses -- my iBook has been used for learning -- programming languages, research for articles, etc. Creativity? Photoshop for web design and photo editing, MS Word for my writing, PHPWiki for keeping the notes/timeline/etc. organized for my future world setting (sci-fi). Oh, and communication -- email, AIM, IRC, etc. And entertainment -- NES emulator, Galactic Battlegrounds, pr0n^H^H^H^Hweb-surfing, iTunes, DVDs, etc.
So yeah. I think the PC has fulfilled Kay's original intentions.
blog |
That's nice. I'm sure it feels good for the handicapped kid to "belong". But why stop there?! Don't you think playing an FPS falls quite short of creating art or learning new things? That's all Kay is saying. Computers could be the tool the handicapped kid needs to really -contribute- to society, not to just -belong-.
I catch your meaning (and the big picture) here but believe that the term "domain" is more appropriate here, "demesne" being used primarily in the sense of real property. Reason I raise this minor niggle is that usage of relatively uncommon terminology can sometimes distract from a discussion (it obviously did in my case!8=). Good Post.
Nowadays, a Windows PC doesn't even come with any kind of programming language (not counting batch files..) and the GUI metaphor discourages automation of tasks (which was the Great Hope that computing promised..)
Actually, it comes (nowadays; you used to have to download it) with a pretty awesome scripting environment. You can use VBS (Visual Basic Script) files to script damn near anything (which is why it was such a virus vector, I know ...).
Nothing cooler than watching Word and Excel open automagically and start doing repetitive tasks and spewing out PDF reports ...
You're right that the OS interface doesn't encourage it, but the capability is still there for those who want to take charge of their computing experience.
You could just plug cartridges into the old computers, or blindly type in programs from Compute! too, you know ;) But you're right, they did encourage creativity more. Ah, the VIC 20 ...
I simulated combat scenarios, racing cars, passenger jets, mass troop movement, ect the last few weeks with my computer.
Simulation IS to be done for a reason. Your computer simulates your oppossing soccer team in fifa2004. Is simulates driving physics in F1 Grand Prix or Colin McRae. It simulates a whole city in simcity (heck, there is even a whole genere called SIMULATION).
And even if you leave out games, there is stock software, Seti&Folding@home (both simutlating stuff), ect. Put povray and all the other renderers in the pot, because they all simulate a multitiude of physical effects.
He has just a Really Narrow Vision (tm) about what simulation should be about. (and sorry, i have written simulation software myself, for fun, because i LIKE to watch a barnes-hut simulation of a globular cluster, ect, but i still dislike that logo or squeal....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The solution is to produce a standardised simpler system. An all-in-one unit with standard components, that will plug into a TV, and starts with a BAPSIC interpreter. Apps should be loaded with a "load" command. We don't need a mouse. Those are only useful for pixel addressing. In practive they confuse the user.
You know Bill, the global reception was lukewarm at BEST when you introduced the MSX platform over twenty tears ago. What makes you think the idea would fly the second time around?
Just Curious...
After more than 20 years programming my opinion is that Alan Kay is right. Those who are older enough know that there were expectatives (ie: computers will understand human languaje), now there are refinements (oh, look at that, spell-check on any text entry, wow!),
Even the most succesful idea on those years, the web, was already (and probably better) designed in the Xanadu project.
Hardware is still worse, one single schema, a single processing units, lots of memory, and a hard disk, that's all. Were are those prolog machines? I remember a small english company that build a nice small blue box able to outperform some CRAYs on graphic processing. That was creativity.
Computing has fallen by his own success, there was bussines and money to get, now big corporations are unable to do a thing but continue with the same old crap. Of course innovation is lost, the only thing that gives software an edge is that is a personal activity, that's why open source still remains. But the big picture is depressing, sofware is under MS control, and harware is under Intel directions, that's falling short friends, very very short.l
What's in a sig?
I'm doing it, so the probability's at least in in six billion.
I'm interested in brains and the like, so I'm writing a simulator so I can what kinds of circuits you can build with various types of neurons. There already are quite a few such simulators around, eg. snnap, genesis, etc, but the fact there are so many seems to indicate everybody wants something different from their neural network simulator, and I want my very own to play around with. Note the word play - I'm a programmer by trade, not a neuroscientist.
Anyway, I'm sure David Kay's jolly impressive and all, and I'm sure what he's actually doing is dead cool, but the article's a load of bollocks. Most of it's spent panting about how clever Kay is, then there's some wiffly-wafffly stuff about how we should all be dead guilty coz we're not using his stuff right and thank goodness he's decided to put us back on track.
I don't know much about Kay himself, it's the article which bothers me. I'm sure this amazing dude has better things to say than that "nobody simulates things" (of course they do), "simulation is what computers are for" (I guess I'll have to stop word processing then, because it's not what computers are for... please!) and "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person" (really, I thought it was for making candy-floss). If he doesn't he should be left to grumble in private so as not to embarass himself unnecessarily.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
Do you actually feel better about yourself for believing this, you worthless sack of dirty water?
I suppose you don't believe in evolution either?
Unfortunately, GST has nowhere near the depth, power, or enthusiastic user base of Squeak.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Maybe you've all been lucky enough to work with Smalltalk based systems written by highly self-disciplined programmers, but I have to use a stupid proprietary Smalltalk variant (basically it just adds some syntactic sugar), but it has all the awful problems of Smalltalk: no typing (not even dynamic), class browsers and everything's a frigging object.
The application has a Smalltalk variant called Magik. Everyone in my department hates it. Without type checking, you get deeply buried bugs that a type checking system would have caught ages ago.
With the "ease of object creation" that the Smalltalk-family of applications give you, the core GIS application has nearly a thousand objects which makes using the class browser a pain because it becomes a sea of methods you have to wade through trying to find the one object that does what you need, or worse, trying to figure out how the flow of execution runs through 20 objects and a hundred methods, which is harder because you have no idea where a method could be called from.
ARGH! I get so upset just thinking about it!
Smalltalk: Great idea, bad production language.
Don't know why I typed David Kay. I think he's actually a comedian.
Anyway, my rant was about the article, in case I didn't make it clear. I really am sure this guy has a lot of interesting stuff to say, it's just that the article didn't seem to get anything of interest across at all.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
If your mind is not constantly groveling in little details, it has the ability to go up a couple of meta-levels and employ new problem-solving strategies in the large, letting the computer worry about stuff in the small.
Word processors enabled new forms of novel-writing by allowing the writer to move and manipulate text easily and experiment much more than he could with a typewriter. Similarly, powerful dynamic languages like Smalltalk enable new methods of programming by putting new approaches to problem-solving and experimentation within the grasp of the individual programmer.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
He ignores the fact that most people are neither creative nor capable (or desirous) of more learning.
If I were to go back and reference say, the Altiar 8800, or some such, then I could see where one might consider a text program something of a luxary: The entirity of output to begin with were flashing LEDs. Likewise primitive, input was accomplished via switches. However, that is going a long ways back.
To do any sort of "computer thing" right now, one needs, at the very least, some sort of capacity to manipulate a plain old ascii text file. And this is where I think my disconnect comes in. I just don't see how one can call it a "non-computer thing" these days. The state of the Art of computing has come quite far in the 30 some years since the microcomputer was introduced. New things are being done all of the time. The difference I think, is what Burke pointed out in his "The Day the Universe Changed" series: That very little of this stuff is being done where the public can examine and participate.
I believe people are reading WAY too much into a little one page article in a magazine directed at finance types with sprinkles of quotes from Alan Kay in it.
Some simple rules for reading anything written by a "journalist".
1. The more you know about a subject the more the journalist will get wrong.
2. The shorter the article the more will be left out and gotten wrong.
3. The more complex the subject the more will be gotten wrong regardless of article length.
So in this case we have a short article by a journalist of unknown technical credentials writing for a target audience with no technical credentials, and people are complaining that the small quotes from someone with DEEP technical credentials on a VAST subject area are bozo-y? Please. Show me an article _BY_ Alan Kay written for the ACM and then I'll pay attention. This article is just fodder for CEOs to annoy their IT shop with.
PHB: Alan Kay says we should be modeling our business so we can make more money. Get on it.
IT: I'll get right to it after I install the latest critical Windows/IE update and wipe the latest virus from all the machines on our network. (i.e. Never.)
- Jasen.
One thing I've noticed is that children have boatloads of free time. Unless they're doing something dangerous, how they ultimately choose to use it relatively inconsequential. However, by adulthood, you learn that time is as much of a commodity as anything else - once it's used, it's gone. As such, you have to invest wisel to reap the maximum return on time invested. I think adults have some fear that if they embark on a new learning expedition, there will be no payoff, and hence, their time will have been wasted- time that could have been spent doing something else. The irony here is that this "something else" is often more of what is already known to work- maybe not the best, maybe not even good, but enough to get a known result. This fear can lead to stagnation, which might be perceived as an inability.
I love learning, but I have the same fear. There's so MUCH to learn, and every time I decide to look at something, I find myself asking, "how will I use the knowledge I gain from this experience?" It would be great not have to worry about this, but time is limited.
From what I recall Bill was Nishi's "boss" (he was employee of what became ASCII Corporation -- a spinoff of Microsoft Japan). MS Did a bit more than provide the BASIC--they created the design and wrote 100% of the system software (that being the OS and BASIC interpreter) as well as the bulk of application software outside games. Not to minimise Nishi's vision--I think he was very forward thinking in a lot of ways. The idea was to specify the platform and have others build the machines--which is basically what came about with "Wintel" machines after many, many years.
They were cool machines though--the games reminded me of Coleco games (not surprising as the MSX was largely a rip-off of that system--same CPU, same sound chip, same graphics) -- the Konami games for both were basically identical.
I think that besides being behind the technological curve (by the time MSX came to market in meaningful numbers machines like the Apple Macintosh were out and even flashier machines like the Amiga and Atari ST were on the horizon) the concept probably wouldn't have endured. It was wedded to fading concepts--a machine where reasonably fast mass-storage was optional. It was self-contained with limited expandability. When powered up it presented a command prompt for the BASIC interpreter.
By 1984, the future of computing was looking past that--the PC was striving to become an "appliance" where you turn it on and just "use it" to do things. None of this booting up into a programming language nonsense. Everything was included with the PC to make it useable. Power up, click here and write a letter, balance a chequebook, etc. It's functionality is extended by installing programs from time to time, but they remain in place after that. 99 percent of the time, users should actually be able to USE the machine.
MSX and other 8-bit machines of the time and previous to it were really beter suited to hobbyists. The machines were offered with NO persistent mass storage device included (tape and floppy drives were extra-cost options). You had to "program it" to do things. It was useless without putting a disk or tape in and typing "LOAD", or at the very least typing in many lines of BASIC code. In my experience, they were LEARNING machines--I learned a lot, but probably did "real work" with those old 8-bitters little more than half the time (even less if you don't count playing games).
I think that is what irks Alan Kay actually--and I agree. The pendulum has swung too far and the likes of MS keep trying to push the pendulum further. The vision today is of a cable box on steriods--you buy a sealed black box and turn it on to do things. You never explicitly install software--it comes to the box off the 'net "on demand". Sounds great, but MS wants you to pay a subscription, and doesn't want you to OWN the box. The EULA will forbid you from opening the box or altering the software (anything that can reveal the internal workings constitutes a threat to precious IP rights after all). Don't like how it works? Aww, too bad, but if enough people put a request in for your idea it MIGHT show up in the next update.
How boring and unimaginative. Lets try to bring that pendulum back to the centre a bit and give people back control of their machines. They are ALREADY very useful appliances--leave all that alone. It doesn't need to hook to a TV or boot up in BASIC, but PLEASE put programming tools back on the machine! And don't hide it away like it's meant for "experts only". If MS wanted to drive innovation and creativity it could start by GIVING AWAY visual studio by pre-installing it with the OS.
Thank God for Linux and BSD--right now they're the only true choice for PC owners who want to LEARN. The source is there, as are the development tools. There are no legal and technical impediments for getting under the hood in terms of software. In addition, Linux is getting very good at serving the "appliance" needs of the desktop PC user. For people who actually want to learn comp
I think he is being a little unfair in the creativity comments. I see tons of creativity coming from Open Source, Apple, and yes, MS. I see my Mom ordering something on the web and communicating with her peers. The "fumes" and "business use dominates" comments ring true. I hark back to dial, BBS, text-only and little memory and that was exciting. Getting that stuff to work was a challenge, and challenges are fun. Now, I have too many machines and devices and they can't talk together well and pain in the butt. And the challenges to get them to talk are way too hard, or not even possible. My fave; why can't people with limited $ buy a $200 Xbox to surf and email? But I am not sure lack of challenge is it. There is something about that "fumes" argument. IP and stock prices kill everything they touch, but that isn't all it either. I see Paul Allen can't get another hit no matter how hard he tries. Someday I will figure out the answer ...
There have been MANY improvements in the last 20 years. The Apple Newton was one, but Steve Jobs killed it because HE DIDN'T INVENT IT. Some of the (free) programs that help disabled students read also help the rest of us read. The best is text-to-speach softweare that is combined with flashing the words a few at a time on the screen in large letters. I can read with 4x the comprehension using this software. The problem is that if it's not pre-installed in Windows, nobody uses it.
Andy Out!
Which is why I failed Algebra and despite having college-level skills in english and reading, wound up having to take "reduced" math classes in order to graduate from high school.
Problem was that I was finding solutions to problems, getting the correct answers, showing my work... and FAILING because it wasn't the TEACHER'S METHOD, which was convoluted, made my brain scream, and sent me to the nurses office three or four times a week with tension headaches.
Public Education math is very much My Way Or The Highway. It's easily the most creativity-stifling experience I've had in my life.
I found this passage from the middle captures his arguments succinctly:
Depends on the busines. Most businesses want predictable, repeatably, accurate, auditable activity done with their PCs. Accounting is an example of a business that does not WANT creativity. :-) I am assuming he's not talking about this bread-n-butter computing problems but what's done on the desktop, but he also has to remember that the desktop user also has to work in that "boring" business environment, and most jobs discourage creativity in order to "maximise efficiency".
Some jobs will benefit from creativity, and in those cases, most people feel their PCs (especially the Mac crowd) do encourage their creativity. But I can't help wonder if he's so obsessed with being creative that he's ignoring the fact some people don't need creativity in their jobs, also, if they are being creative, they don't want to be creative int he way he wants to be creative.
Here's an example of his disconnect. Maybe they're not doing it in the way Kay wants to see it done, but it's done all the time with various tools, but mostly spreadsheet based ones using plug-ins for Excel. People find the spreadsheet the most comfortable tool for modeling things and simulating their company on paper. Hell, there are some really nifty 3rd party plug-ins for Excel that can do Monte Carlo simulation on your spreadsheet data. You provide some extra information about your values, like variance, etc., and the plug-in will calculate the outcome curve of your model. And there are some really cool tools for MS Project to model how your project works!
From my perspective, modeling happens all the time and people are using their imaginations to model and work with some really nifty things. From small businesses to the home user figuring out their portfolio balance to the engineering company using their PC to model new ways of designing structures! It just might not be the way Kay wants to do it.
I think Key is confusing the way he wants to be creative and how he thinks with how everyone else should think. Berating people for not thinking like you do is, to me, the anti-thesis of creativity.
I think he's trying to say that PCs should transcend just trying to be a poor simulacrum of pen and paper. On the surface, that sounds seductive: your PC should take all that drudgery away from you leaving you free to think. Let the PC do all the thinking and work and you do all the creativity. As someone who likes to think of himself as creative, that sounds... stupid. Painters like the feel of paint on canvas. Harlan Ellison loves the effort it takes to push the keys on his mechanical typewriter. Most artists consider the "drudgery" part of the creative process. It's a challenge to your imagination that spurs you forward. The effort of collecting and working the clay is considered a key part of the pottery making process. Just going to a shop to buy the clay is considered death to the process. Being truely creative is about taking all there is inside you and expressing it. Making it "easier" is missing the point.
Kay also believes that the drudgery inhibits creativity; which it doesn't. You will be creative even if you have to use a stone and cliff face. Making it easier will not increase your creativity, nor will it improve its quality. If you want to make PCs more use
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Why isn't there a program that graphically represents possibilities? Every one of us has to make complex decisions, each of which has a set of factors and pros and cons. Why can't the computer take this set of factors and "map" them, allow us to attach probabilities at each level, and then graphically highlight trouble areas and predict desirable outcomes.
Things like deciding whether to carry X or Y product would be more tactile and visual, and probably more accurate than a flat spreadsheet. Hell, anything could be modelled with a standard set of conditionals, from what to wear to whether to support the death penalty. That's one of the creative things a computer would be great at - unravelling a complex knot of a problem.
Back when SARS initially broke out in the southern part of China, the Chinese government did what it usually did: It sequestered the area and communications to and from it so that people wouldn't start panicking. ("It's good to be the totalitarian regime.")
Of course, word got out anyway. Worldwide panic ensued. How? SMS text messages on cell phones.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Technology has reached a critical mass where "idea guys" no longer control where technology goes; people figure out new ways to use it on their own, without regard for where it "should" be going. This includes both researchers like Alan Kay, big corporations like Microsoft, and totalitarian regimes like China.
Kay is still stuck in a PC-centric paradigm. It's a lovely paradigm, that. But why would I sit and change how I communicate with a personal computer when my phone's with me everywhere I go now?
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I don't think Alan has anything against pretty graphics. I think Alan believes that commercial uses of computing have eclipsed creative uses, and that this is a sad thing.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Nice post! I modded you up, but I also wanted to send extra props. VERY nicely said.
-Da VinMan
Squeak, and this article, just makes me nostalgic for Hypertalk on the old, old MacOS. It was really the string theory of computer science...a 21st century idea that fell into the 1980s. The runtime (Hypercard) was kind of drawing program, and kind of a RAD, and almost a database, and ran pretty comfortably (if slowly) in 1M of memory from floppies. It was really scalable to your level of ambition: you could draw pictures, or build GUIs that just moved from page to page, or write custom handlers for buttons in a smalltalkish language, or write external pascal libraries. I knew lots of non-programmers who wound up writing Hypertalk, 'cos it didn't even feel like programming.
Did I mention it was slow? It crawled. But it was great. It anticipated (or inspired) the web, and Visual Basic, and Tk, and a lot of other stuff. Apple totally drove it into the ground during the Scully era. It would be sweet on a modern box.
Bill Joy abandoned vi, stopped doing anything useful, and now runs around complaining about computers. Stallman, who helped bring us GCC and Emacs, is now mostly famous for his beliefs about the phrase "GNU/Linux".
Kay complains that web browsers are not authoring tools. That might have a shred of validity, but:
Kay never mentions Linux or anything else that would show he's come out of his cave in the last ten years. He has an annoying tendency common to these aging geeks - he takes Microsoft as the sum of all modern computing, and then complains how it didn't incorporate his pet ideas.
"Creativity" is too nebulous. Yes, you are being creative, and you're using your PC as an aid, but it isn't the *focus* of the creativity. You're not inventing new things to do with computers; you're using them to help you with old ones.
The reading or watching of television, theatre, or film would be entirely passive and therefore uncreative if they happened in isolation. Art is a participatory process, however: people talk to one another about what they've experienced when they read or view some work of art and share the experience. The interaction between people when they experience a work is also a creative process, I think.
I realize that I appear to be sticking up for John Grisham and Survivor and those who partake of them and it hurts me more than you can know.
I haven't given it much thought but if this is true it perhaps follows that the quality of the work being experienced isn't the measure of how "creative" someone is, but rather the amount of participation in the creative process. This is intuitive since it makes the artist the most "creative" one in the process.
I agree that being passive is in opposition to being creative, obviously. Looking at it, I define passivity a little differently I suppose, and I also don't think there's necessarily any moral value attached to being more or less creative, and perhaps that's the cause of our disagreement.
It's worthy of more thought I guess.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I will redirect you, my fellow /. readers, to a previous of mine, here:
9 55 8485
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112680&cid=
Where you can read why current operating systems fail.
I've posted the same thing lots of times before, but it was never modded as a 5...not because it was not worth of a 5, but moderators did not get it.
More and more people are saying that we need another type of software to achieve better results...just like Alan Kay.
Finally, I have a link for you:
http://www.adaos.net/overview.html
The guy in the above link is trying to build an O/S using data that realizes this idea exactly: the live object-oriented information system.
If any Linux developer reads this, put it in your mind once and for all: if you want Linux to dominate and make Microsoft a thing of the past, you have the chance. JUST IMPLEMENT THE OBJECT ORIENTED INFORMATION SYSTEM, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!
(And what a coincidence! Alan Key worked in military apps...so does the AdaOS dude above, and so am I!!!)
Turtle geometry is not a book about programming paradigms, but it leverages LOGO to levels where no one would have imagined. Way beyond programming for children and sometimes into topics only teached in college.
Logo is a much more powerful programming language than most people can get. And it's because is very related to lisp. The limits I found 13 years ago when I learned LOGO, where in almost all the books about it, not in the language itself.
There is nothing wrong with OOP, but there is nothing magical about it either. And I'm a C++ fan.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
i seriously fail to understand why everyone else finds alan kay's message so difficult to grok.
.NET and DirectX and a hundred other complex object libraries. anything you ever want to know or figure out should be accessible through your computer, but for now too many roadblocks of controlling interests are balanizing the playing field.
basically, the problem of commercialization of computers has resulted in the commodification of computer technology. people rarely create (write) their own software, and despite FOSS that percentage of software authors compared to the total computer owning population is getting smaller. many programmers actually encourage this because they feel it to be protectionist, that they can secure their paycheck as long as everyone else knows less than they do.
alan kay, and myself, feel quite the opposite. that anytime you want your computer to do ANYTHING, including processing the incredible VOLUME of data people struggle to manage to maintain their lives, people should easily and freely be able to program their computers to do so.
the goal is not to buy iLife from apple, but for every individual to contribute their customizations and extensions to a Free distributed system of lifestyle management. grandmas should easily visualize and understand how to improve a firewall and add beyesian filtering to their email client. kids should write games without first learning
that's what alan kay is on about, and that's the problem he's addressing with a solution by developing Squeak.
Yes, but they're also happier and less likely to go postal or embezzle from you ;)
Read jack phelps dot net
Just two days ago I saw an error message like this on my XP box whilst running a wizard for a Microsoft development system. I can't remember exactly what it said, but this is what it was like.
Error 23753. Many programs require Hoojimongle services. If you disable Hoojimongle services, many programs may fail. Furthermore, you may be unable to reboot if...
The buttons were labeled "Yes" and "No"; there was no way to scroll or resize the dialog box to see what it said, and there was no other way of getting rid of the dialog box short of stopping the process.
Back when I was at Westminster High School, Westminster, California, they had these "hip" math text books that had less mathematics information than the countless "story-problems" and graphical pictures of fake handicapped children taking turns sitting in a wheel-chair and scissoring pointless geometric shapes as though they were learning somthing.
At the time, mind 1990's, the "Teachers' Borg" (bitch board) as I called them were pushing multi-culturalism into their mathematics. It's almost as though experiencing a Disney Film try to make "love" to a Jim Henson film. My point is that I began learning Algebra in a private school in the 6th grade and our books were old and well-maintaned due to the fact they were quick to teach alot and didn't force anything but mathematics onto the reader. You can't even find a Smiley Face in those older math books and that's what I fucking enjoyed; math. I'll solve my own story-problems when I'm picking strawberries or barbecuing 10 corns cobs for 3 women and a baby.
And the class projects they had in that "University" math class, by the canons of heathen gods do they wreak havoc on my own creativity! Those mercenarial teachers would establish a grading scale that somehow unanimously approved that 90% of all the class-material accounted for 4% of the "grade" and the small 1% class projects accounted 50% of the "grade" and quizes and tests accounted for whatever remained which they dynamically re-adjusted or graded selectively everything on curve when they think the class "should've done better" or "gosh I think they did well on what I taught them even though they flunked the other 60% of the content on the paper."
They ought to teach mathematics, not "let's all get along with the wheelchair" and not Jan's Welfare Checks Dilema and not Measuring Goat Hair or whatever the fuck they taco-snotted into those goddam books. I left that school and learned what they try to monopolize: Calculus! I wanted Calculus and they don't want to teach it ASAP! They just want to take a whole semester teaching Calculus just so they can keep their jobs. I learned Calculus in what equated to about 2 months of hard studying. Calculus rocks! Oh Calulon*(@$ ermm.
I'm not the original poster that you responded to, just an AC as below.
:-)
One of the buggers I incurred through "High School" was repetitively expressing on paper how equations were solved when the theory had already been incrorporated and mastered in the student's lobes.
In reality, yes its good to express your methods to solve an equation but this would slowly limit your thoughts to various artifacts such as your measured performance to inscribe on paper your thoughts or the ussurpation to make one dependant upon the paper monopolies for every aspect of your living for mere tedious tasks as expressing overly-exaggederated common-knowledge solutions upon paper for obviously low-intelligence peers to observe with no correlation but satisfaction from the "teacher" that the student follow their tradition of filling a portfolio with cruft that need not be.
My reasoning against repeatedly expressing the method on paper is equally repugnant to programmers that demand code commenting in an API. For those of us that don't want to crunch math in such a style that is slowed by our handwriting, it is beneficial to mankind to think without having to chop trees and sharpen lead poison rods constantly.
Imaging a classroom without wasting paper and every theory is expressed on the Overhead Wall Projector and mastered without paper by the students that they need little paper to be tested.
I suggest you read The Tao Of Computer Programming.
I *know* you aint talkin' 'bout my computah muthafucka!
My PC is unquestionably a tool for learning. Every time I install a program or do something silly like wanting 2 printers on it, I always learn a lot - usually far more than I had originally intended. Some of them have resulted in a Continuing Education program for me.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
n\but suffers from the same blind spot as everyone else concerning data relationships.
:-) Remember, you got it from me.
Smalltalk (and all of OO disciplines) are blinded by the Five Normal Forms which posits that links are to be carried internally (through pointers or foreign keys) when they would gain flexibility and object reusability by carrying relationships in a schema and implementing them and (existential) connections.
You could achieve the same things that relational databases are getting now but you would be able to articulate so much more flexibility from your database designs.
I'm not writing this for his benefit (he's not going to read this) but to get an historical audit trail established.
Maybe one of you could even get the damn idea
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Everyone knows that the true purpose of the PC is to allow us to connect to the internet so we can download porn!
In the 60's OOP was supposed to allow one to model the "real world" easier. In the 70's, when Alan was extalling the virtues of Smalltalk and OO, it was supposed to model human thought better. In the 80's OO was all about "reuse". In the 90's it was about making code easier to change. Now there is no constistent claim about what OO is supposed to be good at. It makes it tough to be an OO skeptic when OO fans cannot give specifics about what OO is supposed to be good at anymore. It is like trying to nail jello to the wall. Different OO fans give wildly different answers. Either way, Alan's views of OO have fallen out of style. But like wide ties, they will probably come back someday.
Table-ized A.I.
For [Kay], "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
And let the spam, viruses, system cracking and general misbehavior commence . . .
Kay's intentions may be good, but I'm firmly of the belief that we're nowhere near a level of civilization that would allow us to use such a network well. Even putting aside the issue of random miscreants, you can't take six billion people of hugely varying backgrounds and beliefs, slam them all together into a common environment, and expect anything good to come out. Even five hundred years after we discovered the Earth was round, intercultural barriers are still quite high. (I don't mean to bait flames, but look at the Middle East for an excellent example.)
Besides which, do you really want to be connected to everybody else in the world? What would you do if you were? How much information do you really think you can keep track of, much less use? How much music, anime or whatnot have you downloaded off P2P and never even watched once? (I admit, I've got about 70 gigs of such.) Are you really happier having access to everyone in the world, even the fraction of the world's population that's currently networked?
Communication is good, but you can have too much of a good thing.
You're certainly right there- LOGO has the ability to be a powerful language. It's got the right stuff already there. But unlike Squeak, it lacks practical value in using it beyond turtle graphics and other intro programming. LOGO could be as practical as any language, but it lacks the environment and the libraries. Squeak contains a lot of room to grow, LOGO doesn't. Not unless the student wants to recreate the wheel a million times over... That said, the problem would be solved some if using a turtle grpahics system on top of DrScheme or something. Like Squeak, it has a lot of the best of both worlds.
And I agree about your OOP statement. And I'm a Smalltalk fan and programmer. OOP is no magic bullet, but all indications show that it will be sticking around for a while. Which means that a good early introduction to the concepts of OOP is a good thing for kids learning some programming now who made up being programmers down the line.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
When Kay was talking about creativity and computers, I don't think this is what he had in mind. ;P
Un-news
You know, I was tired of hearing http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/04/204521 2&tid=99>Kay complain last time, and I'm not any more excited about hearing it this time.
/. ?
It's one thing to complain about something, it's another thing to detail solutions to the "problem", and yet another thing to get those things done. He's merely on step one, and he doesn't seem to be progressing. Does every whinning rant need to be posted on
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Bullshit. It's not like the "commercialisation" is removing literature, research, and raw data from the Internet.
No, it's just burying the content under a pile of adverts, 'portals', keword-spammers and such. The example you give uses a couple of esoteric words, so its not surprising the results are all research. Information on more commonplace subjects is harder (I'll admit, not impossible) to find.
35% of my email is spam, all of which is promoting commercial enterprises.
Web sites get slower and slower as the advertising banners, pop-unders, flash 'pop-overs' and other marketing devices use up more and more bandwidth. I can see that some sites need advertising to run, but does it have to be so intrusive?
Don't blame others because your site isn't interesting enough to go to
If you'd actually bothered to read my post you'd see I'm not 'blaming others' that my site is not 'interesting enough'. I know its of (virtually) no interest to most people. But I just don't understand why it is not listed at all not why its hard to find. I get the odd email from time to time from people who've read stuff there and found it useful, but they've found it through other search engines. I'm not blaming anyone, I just made the comment because it seemed to me that Google had started to become harder and harder to get listed on for non-commercial sites. You have to admit that the link to the page for site submissions is not exactly easy to find, is it?
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Can I use it to tell the wife to pick up some bread on the way home? I can do that with email.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."