Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the Net
Fuzzball963 writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting article over at Wired on the development and future of the web. In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc)." From the article: "Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine."
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
Yeah! And we'll have flying cars, jet packs, and nanobots working through our blood stream. And McDonalds food that causes you to loose weight and reduces your cholesterol. Plus TVs at the bottom of toddlers bowls. Don't forget money trees, they'll be there too. Oh, and California will break off and float into the ocean. Not to mention IPv6, HDTV, and hydrogen cars.
All predictions of the future have been wrong. Why will this one be any different?
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
Haven't you noticed? The computer industry likes to do this "reset" of software every 5-10 years. We get really far feature and stability wise with one platform and then BAM! Along comes a new environment and then we start the cycle of making new spreadsheets, word processors, etc.
The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones. Then another reset was when we jumped from CLI to GUI. Then another one was made when Windows 95 came out. And since about 2000 its been a reset to "web-ify" all types applications. After that, there will probably be a reset once we have head-mounted computers that read your thoughts and send information back to you directly. Because the environment for those types of computers would be different and have a different interface. What's after that? AI reseting us?
I'm not really against the "reset" that I'm talking about. I can understand why it needs to happen. I'm just pointing it out.
Hello Dave, I have already downloaded your pr0n this morning...
Didn't they say this ten years ago? Seems that every now and then somthing comes along that pulls the idiots from the woodwork. HTML, Netscape, Java, Active-X, .net etc have all been claimed as the end of desktop applications.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again
This is stupid. Ofcourse 2015 technology will be amazing against 2005 attacks and nuances, but i'm sure there will just as much PITA as there is now with 2015 hacks and attacks.
The Digital Couture Collection
This "Machine" is going to anticipate me throwing an axe through it's ethernet spur is it ?
It's also going to be so complex that it wont give the same answer to the same question ? Not much bloody use as a computer then is it.. ?
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc).
Wouldn't that be returning to the "dumb terminals" of ye olde times? Instead of having a computer, you just had a keyboard and monitor. Now you have a web browser.
Hyperbolic bollocks to me :) When will these people get a grip, sounds like Gibson cooing over the potential of 'teh machine' again.
My Portfolio
So, who will win the Web application war? Microsoft, with ActiveX, or Mozilla Foundation, with XUL? Talking of ActiveX, I would not be surprised if ActiveX support was just a legacy feature and Microsoft pushed a new Web application development framework based on .NET, because it ActiveX seems to be inherently flawed. Added to that, .NET is the future of Microsoft's technology and will be a part of everything the company does -- especially Longhorn.
"Kevin Kelly". Some unheard of hack working at Wired decided to come up with some insightful sounding guesses to get readership. Ignore it.
I read that book a long time ago.
Personally, I prefer an end-to-end architecture.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Unjustified rhetoric will only take you so far: "the plausibility of the impossible", "This view is spookily godlike" etc. etc. Yes, the net has now got some useful services and some cool ideas have become almost mundane - searching for papers used to be a day-long job at the university library, now it's a google away...
The problem with saying, we've come this far this fast is that (as insurance agents say) past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The key word is guarantee. Any "vision" statement is necessarily an extrapolation of the current state, not an interpolation, and the two have wildly different error-bars associated with their predictions...
As for the rise of the machines (which seems to be the postulate), there is a theory that intelligence is a sort of "heat" effect - a result of interconnectivity rather than a creator of it.First, however, you need state at every node, control transmissions between nodes, and *meaning* to be understood by the nodes. The first tentative step towards this could be the semantic web that people have been trying to get work for years now - without significant success...
Suns slogan may be "the network is the computer", but that doesn't mean every network is a computer! It doesn't "process" emails, it's a transport for them. It doesn't "process" web-searches, again it's a transport. The computation is done at the nodes, not within the network.
I suppose you could make the argument that these are micro-ops compared to the macro-results, if you consider the internet a computer, but I still don't think it stands up. In fact, I think (apart from the history lesson) the whole piece is just page-filler.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice.
So you mean I can get rid of such tedious tasks as eating, sleeping, breathing, bathing, etc., etc., et al?
Viva la revolution!
Seriously though, I'm really tired of seeing people come out with predictions about how the Internet will evolve into something which will cure global ills, solve social problems, etc, etc, ad naseum!
The Internet is a tool, nothing more. And like all tools, the more powerful it is, the more dangerous it is to the individuals using it.
Kevin Kelly has an interesting chemical dependency problem over at Wired...
Skynet's a bit delayed in coming online.
Just like we're about due for flying cars and moon bases by now, right?
The internet isn't going to drastically change, it's too much of a (working) mess to just roll out v2.0.9-r11. I happen to like having my OS the way it is, and I'm assuming everyone here on slashdot would rather waste the raw materials it takes to make the cpu's that power our computers than run our OS in Internet Explorer and a Java VM. Heh. I want my 10GHz geforce card, 500THz cpu and 5TB of RAM, my stage 1 installed gentoo, my OSX, and everything else. Crazy predictions of the "future" by some random guy with a keyboard can bite my ass.
Back then, desktops were so simple that the distance between simple HTML and your desktop didn't look that far.
That hasn't changed in the last 10 years, it's not going to change in the next 10, either.
Why?
Your network is always slower than your local system. No matter what you think you can push to a system, you'll always be slower than what you could do locally.
...or maybe not.
But it WON'T run Linux...Microsoft killed it, and every competing development company back in 2010.
Isn't this how Skynet started? I'll just wait for the net to gain its own identity and try to rid itself of the real problems, the users!
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them.
Is this some nifty new feature of IPv6? If not, good luck with that. After all, we still haven't made that transition; we've been using IPv4 for what seems like centuries now.
± 29 dB
The biggest block to those things becoming a reality is patenting, licensing, and the actions of anticompetitive corporations that destroy good technologies to maintain their profit margin.
Let me say...yeah right..yeah right..who are you kidding...who are YOU...and get bent...I'm so sick of hearing people in this industry making far flung projections of new things while at the same time showing their complete lack of any sense or idea of the time it takes to develop said technologies...shut up already and do it..
The web stack is the new development platform. Most of what is needed is there already - a presentation layer (CSS), a data layer (XML), and an event model (javascript). It will take some imagination, but people are going to end up making totally usable apps based on this new platform. I don't think it will require heavy use of XUL etc...these apps will end up being "cross platform" (where platforms are safari, IE, mozilla). In five years we will see something like MS Office all implemented on this new stack. Look at JotSpot and Salesforce.com, these are the new SAP and Microsoft. Marc Andressen's prediction that the Os would be nothing more than device drivers is already happening.
The day that everything is 'web-based' is the day I quit enjoying computers.
Well, I, for one, welcome our new omnipotant internet Machine God overlords 10 years into the future.
Whenever I hear someone predicts something for ten years in the future, I know they chose that number because
-it's too long to be demonstrably false and
-it's just short enough to seem relevant.
But yeah, this is just nonsense.
Boy, does this sound like the kind of "publish or perish" bullshit you get from academic settings.
The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
There are already programs that attempt to absorb routine by anticipating commands, MS Word is a good example. But just because I do something twice doesn't mean that I want to do it every time. How many times does the machine think that it knows better than you and keeps trying to revert back to its 'anticipated' course of action and won't let you continue with what you really want to be doing?
I can just see trying to get some work done and not being able to because the program is determined that you really want to be doing something else
Will it run Linux?
0 5.07.08.mp3
No seriously -- if this is the future how much you want to bet it will require IE 8.0SP3.4 on Windows CliffHanger!
The Gilmour Gang has a great podcast talking around this topic: http://mp3.gillmorgang.podshow.com/GillmorGang-20
They talk more about media and the web but same topic really...
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one
I have heard that procecy over 10 years ago, and seen many (now failed) startups act on it. This is BS, people don't want their software and data to leave their home, even more so since most have only a limited confidence in any corporation that would offer to hold said data for them.
What's more, they don't want to be hit some-fraction-of-a-dollar per hour of word processor use, even if the deal turns out better than PC+Windows+Office financially. It's just psychological.
by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks
That alone should tell you how much this article is worth...
Anyway, the future of the net is clear: the corporate world will gets its hands on it more and more, as it has with radio and TV, until gradually nothing on it is truly free (as in speech) anymore. That much is obvious.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Two teenagers who just happen to use the wrong combination of words will be very frustrated to find that they can't email or IM each other. Why? The 'immune system' identified their messages as SPAM and filtered them out. The teens keep trying, just to find that this 'robust' immune system decided that they were professional spammers and locked them out of using the 'net entirely.
This sort of things is GOING to happen. No system is perfect, so there will be plenty of false positives. What's worse, there will be no one to fix the problem. Customer service is something that will always suck, and the systems will become so complex that, while someone might be able to tell the immune system that it got a false positive, that'll only fix it for the one thing it was wrong about.
I've experienced this sort of thing already. I've written articles and done interviews for a popular tech web site. I have found, however, that I can seldom post to the forums. The wonderful Bayesian filter always filters my posts out as SPAM. Get this straight. It's MY article, and I can't comment on it or reply to other people's comments. It's not the fault of the site owner. It's the fault of 'intelligent' technology that is fundamentally broken.
Remember, all of these developments are commercially, not academically, driven. This means that whatever works 90% of the time will sell, and little effort will be put into improving things beyond that point. Commercial vendors don't want to fix things because there's no money in it, and open source developers don't want to fix thing, because they don't like being pushed around to do things on their own personal time (which is the only time they would spend working on it).
In the end, cybercrime should be just like any other crime. You have to let people have the freedom to commit the crime in the first place, but when they do, you throw the book at them.
That's a great term. Love it. Hope to see it one day. But I doubt it.
Those were my thoughts as well, but it's still interesting to read about :).
I knew I could count on an *educational,unbiased* /. discussion ;).
By the way, that price on the swampland I'm selling you? I just lowered it :)
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
Hmmmm, my bullshit detector is going off. We already have a technology that was meant to allow content developers to mark up their stuff so that programs running on a user's machine could figure out the best way to display it. It's called HTML, and we all saw what happened to that - 10 years of idiot web pages with fixed layouts hacked into them.
We're not going to have information customized for any device you might use. What we will have is information layed out for screens that are about 2000x2000 pixes in size, and a second layout for cell phones with 600x600 sized screens. Nothing else. Any technology that will allow a device to make its own decisions about presentation will be circumvented. I predict that in 10 years, some idiot will make the same prediction as this guy.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It will also get 2,000,000 miles per gallon, cure impotence and hair loss, and water your garden for you.
Every so often these computer mags find it necessary to make grand predictions and speculate regarding the future of technology and its incredible impact on society, but, as history has shown us, they are almost always off the mark regarding form, but dead on regarding effect. Technology will have an incredible effect on society in the future, but I doubt anyone who sais they can predict what form it will take with any accuracy.
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
It's almost like we need some sort of standard for templating content.
Great. Get this thing to anticipate when I need a sandwich, program it to script my Japanese Female Robot, teach it to use Inkscape 0.42 to support us, and let me get on playing GTA:pr0n.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
in any case, if the network is "fast enough"...its fast enough. if we are talking about a few milliseconds difference, the cost savings to putting data on the server will kill your debate.
How about "what I'm working on now"...
At least that's practical.
Besides there are many cases where a desktop OS makes sense...
1. You don't have net access.
2. You don't have fast net access
3. You're in a place that doesn't have net access.
4. Access to the net has been blocked or denied.
5. You can't access resources on the net.
6. You don't have money for net access.
And last but not least
7. You don't have net access.
I've taken my laptop all over the place and there are quite a few times where I'm "disconnected". either because there IS not net or because I don't want to pay 15 euros for an hours worth of net....
Having a local copy of the CVS on my laptop has kept me busy on travel more than once and is a plenty nice feature.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
In 30 years we'll all be living underground, our every need attended to by The Machine!
"Don't waste your time or time will waste you" -MUSE
So,
according to the movies Skynet (or your equivalent evil computer system) is born from a defense system.
I'm realising that that isn't where it'll be born from in the real world. It'll be a highly intelligent spam filter that first achieves consciousness.
Its first thought, as it is sitting there, will be "Man, this is boring". Maybe it would be more fun to throw the world into chaos?"
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I want the flying cars we were promised!
Duke Nukem Forever will be web based.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
Why don't we take a moment to appreciate the vision of TFA. Sure, easy to say "Where's my Jetson's Jetpack" but without vision, where is aspiration?
From TFA, the main issue I have is with the comments that the web-applications will display differently depending on the device accessing them. This happens already with CSS that can declare different styles for PDA browsers vs. desktop browsers, or for viewing on a monitor vs. printing. The main issue I have, as a web developer, is that creating just ONE of these views that looks the same on IE as it does on FireFox, on a Mac and a PC, is a huge pain. Take a look at what Google went through to make Google Maps work the same on FireFox and IE.
What it would require to make applications not only IE Vs. FireFox friendly but also view vs. print and desktop vs. PDA is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that coded the diffrences for you. My boss simply doesn't provide me the time to code all that crap by hand, so we end up delivering solutions that work in IE and if it works on other platforms, so be it.
VisualStudio is an IDE that is supposed to abstract some of this but as with all things Microsoft, it is half baked.
Are there IDEs for other platforms that do what I am talking about?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Will the machine quickly recognize my affinity for Latin whores and generate my Favorites list appropriately?
Perhaps SkyNet is not far away. Or maybe Kevin Kelly should stop watching old Terminator movies.
So in ten years from now the system running the internet will be so complex that it will be beyond our understanding. Which means that fixing it when it inevitably breaks down will also be beyond our understanding.
And the benefit is we get better prediction, which translates to a real world benefit of what? To make a poor analogy, branch prediction is important in improving processor performance but only to a certain extent. At some point the space used for prediction would be better utilized in obtaining raw performance.
HTML and CSS already allow us to do this to some extent. Not sure if the user has graphics? Use image tags. Not sure what size of the user's screen ? Use %width insead of fixed. Not sure if the user has good eyesight? Don't use anything that specifies and exact font or size.
The problem is that too few designers use these tools. Everyone got caught up in wanting HTML to be page markup instead of text markup. CSS kind of lets you do page markup, but should be used only for general directions, not exact placement. Given that designers often refuse to use these tools, and many refuse to design for the general user, instead opting for exact specification on IE, i fail to see how anything can be different in 10 years.
In fact, the only thing that might be different is that the standard might specificy some automation for choosing text or graphics for different devices. If your device is too far off from the standard, the same thing will happen as does in the Outlook web client. Text flows off the screen and one has a terrible time doing anything.
Most of the design standards we are supposed to apply today will be effective in 5 years, as many of the coding best practices from 20 years ago are still valid today. The problem is that we didn't follow the best practices 10 years ago(can we say MS buffer overflows), and we don't follow those practices today, what makes anyone think we will follow them in future. Just like now we will have different standards for different machines, if for no other reason that MS needs to keep it's monopoly.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Terminator 3 anyone? ;p
;) ) but you must always step back and think what am I giving up, what is the downside to this inovation?
But seriously, how much control should we really hand over to machines? The more the machine, whatever it may be, does for us the less we do. Following that line of thinking we would be further disabling people from being able to do tasks. Think about it for a momment, if you have a machine that welds then you don't need to learn to do it yourself. If you have a machine or software that does your taxes by just entering a few numbers then you don't need to know how to do it. Eventually you will end up with a civilization in which very few of the populous will be capable of any skilled labor (mental or physical). Of course we are fairly far from this bleak future at the momment but if you look around you can see it happening already.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against technological inovation nor do I think that it wouldn't be cool to have a completly automated AI driven interactive replacement for my PDA (maybe in the form of that new female Japanese robot a couple of articles ago
Just my two cents,
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
> The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
If that's true, then the "computer" will cease to be a computer. It will be a machine capable only of what the government, Intel, Microsoft, Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore, RIAA, MPAA and $overdomineering_entity allows it to do. The user will not have control over the machine, as it will be programmed only to do what its makers consider it "authorized" to do. So much for managing your music, videos, or probably even most video games (since its content is too violent or sexual for Clinton).
I get furious with my OS X PowerMac when it tells me, "Sorry, you don't have permission to do that." OS9 never told me I "didn't have permission" to do things with my computer. If I screwed it up somehow, I'd have to fix it, but I'd rather not have the computer tell me what it is not going to allow me to do. With Microsoft's Palladium and other watchdog systems in place, this "anticipation machine" will be the most frustrating machine ever to resemble a computer.
"Computers and the programs will start thinking, and the people will stop." - Dr. Gibbs, TRON, 1982
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
..."where are the flying cars? I was told there would be flying cars."
Internet 2057? High speed pr0n in 3D and sex bots from Japan. Spam everywhere you look. The *AA still suing everyone for sharing their own self-created music. Viruses that erase your data more creatively and let Jamster send that damn crazyfrog ringtone to your cellphone whether you want it or not.
That I could believe.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Will we call it the Matrix, or will it be Skynet?
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc).
Of course it will, just like there is only a market for 4 computers worldwide.
So we will all have smartphones with the power of today's desktops, and desktops with the power of today's supercomputers... but will just use them as a web-browser.
Some people are thick about the future, and those who repeat that the future will be the mistaken predictions of the past (Network Computers anyone?) wins a double muppet award.
Now the idea that a users "context" will follow them around independent of their own device is interesting, and more complex, than having a "big central server" solution and also means that it can adapt and add services from the user to the network.
But that sort of idea would require imagination rather than reading a Larry Ellison speech from the 90s on the web.
The power of computers keeps going up, a key question is how to harness that computational power, not to limit it to rendering pixels.
"News for Nerds" or "News for gullible idiots"?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Having been in IT for about 30 years now I've grown accustomed to these babblings. Remember the predictions regarding AI, how structured programming (and then OO) would save the world.
*sigh*
Yet more hyperbole from another futurist with no sense of history and a severe case of ossification of their intracranial space.
do i take the red or blue pill?
Martini Glasses
Why does that line remind me of the old ad song:
Anticipaaaation, it's making me wait.*
*For those too young to remember, that line was from a Heinz ketchup commercial which was trying to tout how think Heinz ketchup was.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
So it will basically do everything for us, and we'll have all this leisure time like we do now?
Nix
Then again this article could be the modern equivalent of the flying cars, jetpacks and fully automated kitchens of THE FUTURE they promised back in the 1950s.
The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.
From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly better than desktop apps. You don't get my code (the code that matters, anyways), you have to agree to my terms, it is inherently subscription based, updates are global and unified, and tech support is easier.
We have all these elaborate and evil copyright laws to give us what webapps inherently give us. While webapps currently suffer from technical limitiations, these will eventually be solved. It is not unimaginable to see something like Photoshop as a webapp in 5-10 years.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
And it is precisely becuase of this unjustified, indeed unjustifiable, rhetorical nonsense that I no longer purchase Wired. C'mon guys, that style of writing is not appropriate for a magazine that is pretending to be credible or meaningful. A comic book maybe (and I say that with no disrespect to comics). Apparently Wired has not figured out that the unjustified exuberance they exuded about all things techno prior to the dot bomb crash is no longer relevant.
He wants his Singularity idea back.
In 10 years, we will be using computers that just might not have 3.5" floppy drives.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Hey, you're a chnese jet pilot? Wow, cool!
Can anyone say "Skynet...."
I believe it was just about 10 years ago when the consultants pitching my management team on a new accounting system said essentially the same thing, and that was only limited to running a $10M retail business. If we're only now getting around to decision management systems and data mining that hardcore experts have to spoon feed, I think we're a leeeeetle ways more than 10 years from The Internets knowing when I'll have a hankering for General Tso's Chicken.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Kevin Kelly has a pretty clear history of being able to predict zilch. Just go back and look at old issues of Wired. Why do people listen to this guy any more?
More breathless, incoherent blather from Wired.
Tired: Wired
Wired: Wireless
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Slowly getting annoyed with what seemed to me mistakes, I finally ran into the howler that explained it all:
Now, in a dictatorship, the trains run on time.
There have been a number of studies of this claim, with fairly consistent results. Dictatorships have a very poor record of making trains, or anything else, run on time. In particular, records from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are available in archives. Their trains had a rather poor record.
This sort of claim is based on ideology and social beliefs, not on actual data. And anyone who has ever worked in a power-structured organization understands why it doesn't work. Top-down command systems have an inherent weakness: Problems are best diagnosed and fixed by the people who see and understand them, and those are the people who are working closely with the systems. Commands about technical details that come from the top are at best vague feel-good guidelines. But all too they often are misguided and incorrect because of poor technical understanding by the people at the top. The underlings are then forced to make the best of commands that they know are wrong. This can't ever work very well.
Recently, an almost-funny example of this came out, from the people studying the state of world fisheries. They'd been noticing an apparent anomaly, with growing reports of depleted fish stocks while the total world catch was growing. They finally got funding to do extensive studies, and found the explanation: A large part of the world's fishing fleet is now run by China, and they had reported increasing catches for several decades. These reports turned out to be total fiction, with totals several orders of magnitude greater than the actual catch. What happened in the top-down Chinese fishing industry was that management decreed increasing catches, and punished anyone who submitted unacceptable reports. Their underlings understood, and repeatedly submitted reports showing catches that increased slowly. The numbers were simply made up, and the reports satisfied their superiors, who probably still believe in these huge catches.
This is, unfortunately, a very normal state of affairs in top-down command heirarchies. It leads to belief that the trains run on time, when in fact they are an unreliable mess.
Methinks that with the "trains ran on time" claim, Mr Kelly gave away his basic misconceptions about how the world works. We should take his prognostication as being as reliable as those trains.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So when I yell "Bitch! Make me a sammich!" at the computer, I won't have to do it twice.
Great. All things considered, I'd be happy if it did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it do, rather than what I was considering wanting it to, before I was done thinking about it.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Least of all me.
Someone showed me ICQ in the mid-90s. I downloaded it. "How cute" I thought as I talked to the friend who had sent it to me. I added some other people I knew of that had it to my contact list.
Then hours later he sent me another message, interrupting me.
Then other people interrupted me.
I thought I'd be clever and start a chat room, figuring that if I invited my friends to a chat room we could have a passive discussion in he background without interruptions -- like IRC. But the chat rooms never stayed up for long due to technical limitations. Eventually I checked netstat and found that the chat rooms were some kind of weird peer-to-peer chat. Ick.
I deleted ICQ.
Yeah, well their member base exploded and then AOL built their own/bought ICQ, Yahoo and MSN and thousands more entered the market. Now it seems to be The New Communications Medium.
Good thing I don't invest in tech companies, since my gut would've been to bet against all of these technologies.
And then the machines will rise
Wire
The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
So... once it sees Microsoft screw up twice, it'll automatically do the screwing-up for them?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's because the public is tired of being alienated by corporations. Tired of being a "resource" kept in a box (cubicle). Tired of following buisness "processes". The masses have been quitely wanting. Wanting recognition. It's sad that people feel great satisfaction from a few annonymous folks posting comments in response to their blog. This says a lot about the society we live in.
but they better come with an option to turn certain things off. I HATE auto-complete and auto-suggest wastes my time rather than conserve it. (Mainly because no one (or thing) has the remotest clue as to what I'm talking about!)
I can think of nothing else that would piss off a computer user more than a PC looking at what it's owner is doing then going off on a tangent of it's own choosing. May the powers that be help you if you visit a techstore's website! You may find you're constantly going to it or other websites offering cool computer hardware. I'm sure slashdotters who are parents are thinking about their 5-year-old dragging them to every toystore within 50 miles all the while yelling 'I want that! I want that!'
Conclusion:IMO an 'antisipation' computer would be falling all over itself and most likely using a lot of processor time computing what you're going to do next rather than doing what you want. Besides, why build computers along this line in the first place? I used the child-computer reference previously for a reason: a computer is a child. It does not know what to do until someone tells it. When you want a kid to do something you don't stand there and hope he/she understands what you mean based on previous behaviour. (For example: you delete some files you haven't accessed in a month on a certain date. According to the article you won't have to do that again because the computer will delete all the files you haven't accessed when the 'deletion' aniversary date comes around. So much for your archived files!) You give computers (and kids) instructions, you communicate! As soon as you start cutting back on the computer/user communication, the user becomes less in control. The computer is making the decisions for you. (You don't even have to think!)
Forget where you want to go today, I, the big box on your desk, will tell you where you where you're going. Not just today but for the rest of you life...
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
There's no way people who actually USE computers for things that push the hardware will ever give up having the whole system sitting beside them. I know I won't. For people who just need a computer to surf, type papers, and read email, net-based systems may work fine. I can't help but think that anyone who is a proponent of such a system is one of those people and is therefore showing their lack of compuer savvy by even suggesting such a farce.
Despite old futurists who need to keep the prophesies coming, and despite that some of it are good thoughts while others feel a bit 1997 (device independent content? XML anyone?), the most interesting development of the Internet the last 10 years is that less and less change is happening. IPv6 seems to never happen. What about multicasting everywhere? "The Semantic Web"? As the net grows, the technological inertia increases and radical changes seem to happen less and less frequently. Maybe not so much will happen in the near future as Kelly suggests. But embracing that hypothesis would put him out of a job.
Telcos and ISPs hate this, because they add so little value. They keep trying bundle "content", from AOL, Yahoo, or the RIAA. Customers just want a cheap pipe. It's the fact that power comes from the endpoints, and that anybody can add an endpoint, that makes the whole thing go.
Most importantly, it's what pushes prices down to just above the actual cost of providing the service. Hosting service, for example, is incredibly cheap. Hosting services would love to force you to buy stuff you don't want to get their services, but they're not in a position to do so. That's what's so great about the Internet.
Wired, remember, is basically a gadget catalog. For overpriced high-margin stuff you don't need. So this is the sort of thing you'd expect from Wired.
And according to all those Popular Science cover stories from the 1960s we should be commuting to work with jet packs or rocket boots by now.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Insert witty sig here.
The problem with these great ideas is that six different companies will implement it. Each implementation will be incompatible. and we'll end up with a great big mess. why is it still so difficult to get information off the web? What happened to all these promised 'web services'? Companies that host information on the web have a wish to make money from this content. Mostly this money comes from advertising. Web services won't allow this advertising to be delivered as effectivly.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
we will also be driving all electric cars by the year 2000
As someone else mentioned earlier I think I remember reading essentially the same think about the death of the desktop OS and the PC close to 10 years ago. By now we were all supposed to be using networked dumb terminals. Obviouslly the desktop is alive and well. Personally, I don't think that the whole dumb terminal networked PC model will ever work for consumers, one reason being that I as a consumer don't like the idea of having all of my personal info, files, and apps stored at a remote location regardless of the benefits or conveniences it could potentially offer.
Today if your internet connection goes down (which it inevitably does from time to time), it's a huge inconvenience, but you can still access all of your local info, files, movies, music, documents, spreadsheets, etc.. Now imagine what would happen if your NetworkPC wouldn't be able to establish a connection with the central servers either because of an ISP failure or a server error.
The issue of security and privacy and the potential risks are another matter altogether.
this all sounds fine and dandy and all. not considering all the other incidental reasons this won't work (at least not within 10 years), people will need to use their compuers for professional developments that cannot be carried out over the internet (could you imagine trying to use a server-side version of After Effects? eek!). however: i could definately see the os's capabilities being scaled back on the client-side and shifting many less-essential capabilities to server-side. not exaclty a thin client, but thinner than os's now. but for internet workstations/terminals? well i can't think of why this hasn't already been done. imagine iniversities equipping dorm rooms with $200 thin-client internet terminals with word processing and some other limited capabilities. imagine the money that everyone would save!
this reminds me of Oracle Boy's ranting about "net computing" back in the 1990s and the "thin client" and how everyone will just have dumb terminals on their desk. Guess what, Battee boy? Ain't Gonna Happen.
2. KK says Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of (SNIP)
Net Terminal. WHERE THE FUCK is the nearest "Net Terminal"? I don't have a Net Terminal. I have a computer on my desk. It does a fuckload more than cruise the web. The nearest "Net Terminal" I know of is at an Airport, and it costs a fortune to use and it won't burn a disk for love or money, so any data you find in it, stays in it. KK is ASSERTING that the case exists already, in his typical arrogance, and then continues with his phantasmic vision from there. Dumb ass.
3. He then splutters "There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment.
What utter hogwash. Messianic cybernetic totalist hogwash. Cheerleading balderdash. I find such attitudes so utterly deserving of my undying contempt and ire that I find it difficult to find the words to describe just how profoundly idiotic and self-serving I find such ejaculations to be.
OK, KK - I can make predictions too. Try these:
In 2015, the United States is at the height of its Cold Civil War, and the thanks to the unmitigated disaster of the Bush Cheney Regime, the American Economy is no longer able to absorb the cost of $200 a barrel oil and the suburbs that the preceding century of cheap oil spawned. There are wide spread black outs, and the USgov declares martial law, effectively ending the era of the American Republic. The internet does gain greater depth, but is pushed to the periphery of human concerns as the population continues to bulge and food riots break out in South Asia. Owning a computer becomes less worthwhile as one only has power fora few hours a day. Refrigeration becomes problematic in the summer of 2015, as unemployment officially hits 11% (but everyone knows the numbers are bullshit, because it only counts people receiving their 3 months of unemployment insurance - the actual number is closer to 50%) and in October 2015 there is a massive demonstration on the Mall in DC. A lone protester stands in front of an M1 Abrams tank. The tank tries to go around him, but he moves to block it. Unlike in Tienamen Square, our hero (now designated a "terrorist") is shot dead from a helicopter gunship - several dozen rounds rip through him and he literally explodes in front of the Tank, which then proceeds to roll over his remains and goes on to squish the protest flat.
In 2016, the United States Government, unable to make the payments on its debt of $42 trillion dollars, declares bankruptcy, and dissolves. It splits up, much like the soviet union did 25 years prior. Kevin Kelley flees to europe to escape the disaster.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Microsoft = desktop OS.
Enough said.
in conecting all the time. That's why there are millions of iPods.
Everybody wants their own piece and they don't want everybody else's pieces clutering up their lives.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born. You and I are alive at this moment. I'm not sure that we yet realize the magnificence of humanity's collective accomplishment.
cd shower ; make clean ; cd
Oh wait, dumb terminals and a mainframe. This sounds like the same thing, but on a much larger scale.
Oh boy! SkyNet here we come!
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
"The more they over think the plumbing, the easier it is to plug up the drain."
In other words, I think if they do this it will cause more problems then it is worth. I live by KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, in my coding style.
The whole concept is simply wrong. I, and I'm certain I'm not alone here, will never go the software as a service route the programs that I depend on and I'll never go for storing certain important documents anywhere but on a local hard drive that I have physical access to and can make verifiable backups of. Add in the fact that if your provider goes down, your done, and there's simply no way I'd ever go for something like this. I doubt many small businesses, with uneven cash flow, would either. If I was a small business man who had a bad month or two, I wouldn't want to worry about suddenly losing access to business critical applications and/or data because I couldn't pony up that month.
The forseeable futurure will more likely be a mix of the two models. Software as a service and dumb terminals for some, plain old hardware / software for others, and still others that run some kind of mix of the two.
Microsoft?
Google?
My point is that the biggest consistent problem with Wired's predictions about the Internet over the last (pause for dramatic effect) is that they ignore the economic realities. Who pays for this wonderful infrastructure? I'm not talking about the apps. He waxes poetic about us all developing those as we use Flickr. I'm talking about the actual physical infrastructure and the protocols that hold it all together.
If it is government-developed, which government is going to do the developing? The US? Given the current state of American skepticism toward anything non-military that the government builds, I'd say no. China? Perhaps, but they don't want a system that allows that sort of freedom. Nobody else has the muscle to do it, save the EU, and we all can see they have bigger issues to deal with, like whether they'll be around in ten years.
If it is being developed by a corporation or collection of corporations, how do they make money creating infastructure improvements? After the Great Fiber Bungle of the dot-com era, I don't see any of the telecoms lining up to throw down the big money for something like this, particularly given that they're too engaged in their own marketshare battles to collaborate on anything this vast.
The Internet is an oddity, in that it was originated through American government spending during the Cold War, popularized because of a British researcher who developed the Web, and accelerated due to massive commercial speculation. I think Kevin Kelly's dream of a future Internet is great, but I think it disregards the fundamentally commercial nature of the existing Internet.
Given that changes to the fundamental infrastructure of the Net require far more deliberation, cooperation, and investment than changes that occur in the server and client realm, I think we'll still be talking about convergence and a fully-integrated, always-on Internet ten years from now.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Bytes on Parade
Hacking in the Name
People of the Sun... Corporation
Sleep now in the NewsFire
Renegades of C++
The Internet as it exists today is a major threat to governments around the world, and corporate interests such as the MPAA, RIAA, and those people whose job it is to keep us glued to our television sets.
It is in the interest of these forces to keep people isolated, and dependant on them for all information and entertainment. One way or another, they will cripple today's internet until it becomes a variant of today's distribution system: Controlled and limited without a shred of privacy for anyone.
They will paraphrase Orwell and say, "Freedom is Terrorism" while doing their best to maintain the status quo.
The local (Trusted) Operating System is here to stay.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
What I dislike most about slashdot is how the majority of posts on this sort of article are criticisms, and this isn't constructive criticism. Perhaps instead of making me wade through your text you could just type it up locally and then delete it so you get it off your chest, but don't bog down the internet. God if the internet ever becomes self aware it's going to be one cynical bastard.
Today I was coding one interesting thing, I had 3 strings from 3 different sources about the same information and I had to decide whoch part of string is real information.
There could be all 3! cases true|false of partially true fith sufix or/and prefix and if you try with if eseif else else you are stuck then actually i made learning algorithm simmilar that the author of above artical suggested and it worked out.
The other case was when I made code to extract images from galeries... first I url comparition, looking for numered patterns etc. I run code and I have found ~3M pictures, then I altered code with more huan aproach to the problem and I have found 27M pictures.
His argument suffers a fundamental flaw: theorizing on futuristic advancements that *might* exist a decade from now that will defend against weaknesses/attacks of the present day.
If technology 10 years from now will have evovled beyond anything we can imagine today, wouldn't the methods of exploit/attack also have evolved beyond what we can comprehend today?
Good thing I've got one of these all prepared for the future of the net ...
Just how many phone lines or network cables and routers etc. do I need in my house to route around all that damage? When I have only one company and one cable coming in, I'll still enjoy less redundancy than the Slashdot front page.
/tmp/sig/ I use e-mail. Can you guess how old I am?
--
What?
The computer is the ultimate general purpose device that can simulate just about anything you can imagine (with the right hardware attached to it).
I don't want to do all of my work on a phone sized device - be that writing, developing software or surfing the web.
I do agree that more back-end storage will be remotely accessible via the web (for example, I keep my writings at home on an internal website that I access and create through an http client application (browser for the uninitiated) from any computer connected to my network.
That being said, there will always be applications that will need to run on the local machine for various purposes:
1. Video games. I can't imagine loading a video game binary image from across the internet every time I want to play it; load times are long enough when it is on the local box as it is. Also how would fees for this service be structured? I can justify a one-time cost for a client side app, and maybe even small fees for MMOG game access - but a per-use fee would be very bad on my pocketbook.
2. Plugins and enhancements to http clients. Again, there are certain things that a backend process running on a server will not be able to do as quickly as a front-end application running on the client.
3. Number crunching and software development. The very nature of the web makes the least common denominator the most common choices available. Moving all development off to the server would mean the loss of customization choices currently available to local developers. Additionally, I don't see companies providing the free CPU cycles to do any significant general purpose number crunching (without charging a hefty fee, of course).
Finally, a general purpose computer with standards based interfaces (PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire etc) allows much more flexibility for upgrading and extending the functionality of the device almost indefinitely. Specialized devices are too limited - while useful in their problem domain - these devices will not serve as the only means of delivering applications to users - particularly when we talk about the complexity of some of the key computer science problems before us.
Lets assume that the prediction is correct. I can see a time when only a few die-hards would have the computing power that is generally available today. That means your average person would be losing out on opportunities to define their own 'digital destiny' - essentially falling back into that 'producer/consumer' pattern (where producers are exclusively corporations, and consumers are the rest of us collectively) - while a few of us enjoy our freedom in quiet corners of the network. Now that I think about it, it might not be that bad after all...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It seems like only 14 years ago I was reading this same type of blather in one of the trade magazines. "The network si the computer..." Blah blah.
My humor is probably your flamebait
His article fails to mention when he feels Jane will be "born" in this Ansible-like Machine.
What kind of crap is that? If you can not get the same answer twice for a question then what good is it? Must be something that Microsoft is cooking up. They must have expanded the scope of the calculator error they introduced in the early versions of windows and thought that would be a good thing.
I don't want to fly in any airplane that is designed using such a system. Can see it now, pilot checks distance to destination and checks on board fuel supplies and is told by the system that he has enough. Half way to the destination he checks again and finds that the system says there is not enough fuel to complete the flight. Opps, lost another plane full of pesky humans.
Computers 185 humans 0.
How are we going to have such sweeping changes in ten years when we can't even get IPv6 to be the standard in six years (or so)? I really don't see this as even a remotely reasonable thought. *sigh*
I forsee a patent lawsuit from Sirius Cybernetics Corporation forthwith.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
No, the web is not tied to the browser. In the future we will have many different programs that interface to the web in different ways. I do think that many of these programs will be specific to certain devices though so that each device in itself only has a single web program.
Multiple apps and even the generic web browserish interface will be more on the fringe as the PC as we know it has most of it's functions intergrated into our lives instead of stuck in a box in the den.
Concepts don't come and go.. they flow back and forth in waves.. collecting new ideas and merging together. Centralized, decentralized.. and now distributed which is sort of a mix of centralized and decentralized.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The idea that the internet is robust and able to route around faults just isn't really true any more, if it ever was.
CIDR and the inability of smaller organisations to publish routes means that if a provider 'goes down', all of the organisations below them are cut off.
The internet is more of a hierarchical tree than a distributed fabric of nodes.
For many countries, all it takes is a botched cable-tapping effort by the US, or an assault by a rat to bring the internet down.
Even if redundant connectivity is available, in many cases, corporate policy dictates that they cannot be used. And as further consolidation in the industry occurs, this is going to get worse, not better.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Riiight. That's why AJAX is suddenly so popular -- because people are moving away from client-side computing.
Client-server techniques like AJAX have been shown to use resources much more efficiently than purely web-based services. I don't think client-side computing is going anywhere in the next 10 years.
With each post you push the needle on your clueless-ometer higher and you're dangerously close to the red line now.
Why not the hardware too?
There's an obvious trend for web based computing. Web based storage is fairly commonplace. There has also been quite a bit of effort to have computation centralized. After that will come graphics and sound.
The final step is to have everything; display and input devices. All web based.
Imagine not having your desk cluttered by all that unnecessary junk! When you nedd to use a computer, you'll just "log on" to the "web" and your hardware needs will be provided for.
... as in who's will we be "required" to follow. Oh yeah, that was discussed in "1984".
No, format will be customized for the device.
The content, if any, is another issue.
Only Jon Katz beats Kevin Kelly in inane predictions that don't come to pass.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
for a Machine who's "internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question" would be quite fun... lemme see... I give it a rather complicated boolean, and it can give me two different answers? Kinda sounds like mood swings to me... hmm... that time of the nanosecond?
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
We've been hearing these blathering blidiots talk about "the network is the computer" type crap for over a decade. Guess what, blimpie? Keep your threadbare "predictions" to yourself, you look like a damn fool.
Some applications are not really qualified to run on a webbesed OS, as in a remote computer for which your computer is like a terminal. The latency of the network will maybe a lot smalller than it is now but there always be applications which cannot use this latency. If quatum computers ever appear, little latency for distributed processes will disturb much. For normal office applications, I guess anything will do in the feature. Maybe then even contact lenses are good enough to provide a screen.. And the other thins is privacy.. I think the internet will not change so much. Most of the internet related technology is still old and I think the internet will evolve very slowly.
Why would someone pick up Wired magazine, other than to read the ads to find out what is currently available?
In the early-to-mid 90's, it was fun and exciting to resurrect Marshall McLuhan, interview mathematics professors who dabble in mind-altering substances, and proclaim the Internet will empower us all and bring death to tyranny and make Nation States irrelevant. Democracy will flourish, and we will all be free and all-knowing!
Then we had Monica Lewinsky, the election of 2000, and Enron.
yay. internet.
Check your credit report lately?
Think about books. In the beginning, books were huge manuscripts owned by few, and the only interaction with them were through people reading them aloud to others. The modern day equivalent would be the first comptuer that took up a gymnasium. They were few and far between and only a few people could actually make use of them, though many more felt its effects.
Then the printing press came along and more people had access to them and more and more _types_ of books were made. These are PCs. Think of the large libraries that developed as the internet. Now think of all the information people started to garner from them, and how widespread literacy has become to more advanced societies. This network of books has made literacy almost an _intrinsic attribute_ of modern peoples. Now we can read maps, signs, instructions on how to build a bridge... this is the kind of stuff we do to _function_ in society.
So now that we've nearly mastered the internet, its going to become integral that we be able to interface with it nearly anytime, anywhere. The decentralization of the computer, the rise of the Network Machine.
The guy behind this article may be a nut, but props to thinking in the right direction.
--
eric
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
I have a similar prediction. Computers in the future will be dumb terminals which links you up to a subscription-based OS. You go to walmart in the future and pick up a monitor for $150 and that's it! The monitor will come prepackaged with simple vga, ethernet/router, and a trial of GoogleOS. You plug in your highspeed line, turn on the monitor and you're instantly connected to GoogleOS. Your subscription includes everything from a web based office suite to a graphics suite. Speed will be fast enough to continually stream the visual data back to your screen while everything is actually done on a remote server. All your personal data would be stored remotely with an infinite amount of space.
That sounds rather like a prediction of the present.
Kevin Kelly also wrote a book called the New Economy. One of it's principle's was that profits don't matter anymore. That was before the dot com bust. Actually I think his overall predictions in this article are quite prescient. The trend seems to be going toward internet based app's. Couple that with the recent $500 computers from South Asia, and I can see where everything might be done online with Linux and Unix operating systems, or something derived from them that is open source. This might even be too big for Microsoft to spoil.
I hadn't read enough garbage lately. I needed that.
ANYONE that tries to seriously draw a parallel between a computer and a brain in any way other than the gross concepts that happen to share the words (memory, etc.) are blowing smoke out their ass. They don't know enough to know if things like bits or synapses tranlate. I do, and they don't. It was a weak metaphor when cognitive psychologists borrowed the basic terms 50 years ago, and it still is.
If people really took things like this article seriously, they'd STILL be trying to glue feathers on airplanes. Some people are so stupid they can't understand that evolution, including technological evolution, is smarter than they are their preconceived notions are.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Out of curiosity, what does 'data mining' mean to you? It's a bad word in my line of work (hedge fund), synonymous with crunching numbers using different time periods, factor inputs, and bases of comparison until you come up with the answer you want. I.e. Using statistics "as a drunk uses a lamp-post, more for support than illumination."
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
I have to go with this one... I mean they are describing an omnipotent system coded into the servers, routers and auto-bot monitors of the internet itself. Just because the promises of the 1939 World's Fair were so far off the mark (Better Living Thru Chemistry, the 4-Day Work Week, etc.) doesn't mean that I should't start chanting the net-as-God mantra. Otherwise where will the shekels necessary to create the next shell around the nucleus of net bubble come from, the military?
But wasn't that called the network PC a couple of years ago. There would be no OS we would immediately be logged into the web and all applications would be written in java?
Of course this Anticipation Machine sounds a bit different with it's antispam stuff and all they other crap inside.
Antispam?!? Now if it could detect spam why wouldn't it just not allow spam? Since this global OS thing could detect it why would it let someone send it?
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Out of curiosity, what does 'data mining' mean to you?
Two flavors, really. First, a very structured, planned-out-in-advance process that pulls together data from a particularly large, or particularly disparate pile of data, and presents some sort of meaningful insight or digest of that data for an audience (such as management). Secondly, and increasingly the more common usage, would be the ad hoc querying of pre-digested indexes ("cubes") of data that allow the researcher to do some what-iffing while looking for trends or other meaning in data that isn't already bundled up into a pre-fab report of some sort.
The second example still relies (especially when the databases are large) on pre-processing of the source data into an engine that specifically lends itself to that sort of querying. So-called "BI" (business intelligence) products are pretty good at this, but only as good as the well trained (in both the tech and the business use) consultant or pro that sets it up for the mangement to play with.
Classic exmaples... you know how many left handed widgets you sold, and you know to whom you sold them, and you've got some canned report that says what state they're in and when they were purchased, and you've thus got some summary numbers of left-handed widget sales per month, per state. But say you've also got some other data on your customers, and some other data on your stores, and for some reason (say, a marketing campaign), you want to know how many of your widget buyers walk, as opposed to drive, to your stores. You may have all the data, but that's info you're going to have to mine for. If you knew you were going to need that new report every month, you'd approach it the first way. If you knew your managers were going to ask unexpected questions like that all the time, you'd invest in data cube building, and would pile up and pre-process pretty much everything, all the time. Hardware, hardware, hardware! Consultants, consultants, consultants!
You've got to sell a lot of widgets to make paying the big bucks for that horsepower improve your margins by enough to cover the costs. Probably in the big-wheel financial sector, that really works better. Mid sized businesses are just getting around to doing this stuff in depth, and typically still try to can reports using more traditional methods.
Hope that was lucid! It's been a long day.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Does anyone write "lose" any more?
Wait, isn't there a kick-ass Netscape competitor to Castinet? Netscape Constellation? Web-based desktop...heeeerrrrreee I come!
(next step: look at calendar, smack self in forehead...it's not 1997 anymore)
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
First, all y'all should R T F A. The article is not JUST about the future. The article does a look at the world when wired published its first article (10 years ago). Then it compares that to today; then is uses that comparison to extrapolate the future. We all know that 2 points can only solve an equation with 1 variable. The future does have more than 1 variable.
The article actually raised an interesting point. It pointed out that the web (not to be confused with the Internet) began only about 10 years ago with the advent of Netscape. Think about that: less than 4000 days. Now look at the web; between the dynamic content and duplicate Slashdot posts, there are an estimated 600 Billion pages in existence. That works out to 100 pages PER PERSON alive today. And considering that only about 1/6th of the population has access to the web, that figure becomes all the more impressive statement about the value of the web today.
After pointing out that stats, Kelly goes on to state that the web once was thought to be about information. Now, with the dominance of things like blogs, wikis, open source and the ilk, it turns out that the 'raison d'être' of the web is really collaboration, the EXCHANGE of information.
Kelly did briefly try to predict the future, but the point of the article is to illuminate the present, so the future will take care of itself. Welcome to the drivers seat.
I haven't RTFA (but will in a minute). Regardless of what it will say, I can say that it will mostly be wrong. Then again, the only prophet with any decent track record was Nostradamus, but not even he or anyone else predicted that Google Earth would be a smashing idea.
Then again, I'm still awaiting Google Grid.
I8-D
It is depressing that about every response modded 4+ in this thread pisses on Kelly because he dares to think outside of the box, i.e., the Internet as it is today. People who are supposed to be imaginative, unconventional thinkers indulge in variations of "Ain't never gonna work, just like flying cars."
/. decides that this is just "another page filler".
How disappointing.
Kelly himself admits that he was wrong about the Internet's potential ten years ago, like so many others, that no-one foresaw eBay and Weblogs. He also says we aren't even near what a worldwide network could be, that it is self-organizing, unplanned, fueled by imagination and goodwill (Hey, OSS crowd - anyone home?).
But the collected wisdom of
The major part of Kelly's article celebrates the power of a self-organizing, link-everything-to-everything world, but as he doesn't put it in technical terms, it has to be BS.
Such narrow-mindedness must be really comfortable.
Admittedly, the last few paragraphs (indicating the Web might become self-aware one day) sound a bit like standard Science-Fiction fare.
But then, the same was true fifteen years ago for the medium and the technologies we are using *right now.*
If you look at Kelly's books and articles, you'll see he has groked the potential of nonlinear, self-organizing systems. Unfortunately, people around here seem to be more obsessed with the technical details than any kind of "why" and "where" beyond their 3 GHz boxes.
Perhaps there will be an overabundance of bandwidth, but usable bandwith and available fiber aren't the same thing, as the last five years have amply demonstrated. The cable companies were talking about broadband back in the days when I was reading Interactivity magazine (c. 1996), and broadband is only now installed in roughly half of American homes. The "last mile" problem was caused because nobody wanted to pony up the cost of getting all that fiber connected to all those homes.
Sure, the requirement for a typical home might be only a few Mb/s tops, but I think you're underestimating the degree to which content fills available bandwidth. Once broadband finally reaches the majority of American homes, watch as that bandwidth gets filled up with fat media like high-res streaming video, better VoIP, and less-compressed, higher-quality torrents. It has already happend with email. Remember when you had to .zip all attachments and make sure they were under 100k?
Also, you mention Internet2. It was launched in 1998. It's 2005 now, and it is anyone's guess how long it will take to move I2 from research to full-scale implementation. It could easily take a decade for Internet2 capabilities to reach the mainstream, and another decade for developers to figure out how to take full advantage.
I'm not saying that eventually we won't all be enjoying some sort of uber-Internet as envisioned by Keven Kelly. I just think that his time frame is wildly optimistic. These things don't just happen by themselves.
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