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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."
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.
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.
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 thing that always makes me laugh is when people predict increasing order and stability. The more complex a system becomes the more disordered and unstable it becomes, until it reaces a kind of biological stasis, like a weather system.
Bigger pipes will allow more and more varied types of spam, age, backwards compatibility, and obsolecense, will create odd network backwaters, new systems will be grafted wholesale onto old systems, and everything will grow through accretion into some unplottable meta-network.
Should defintitely be cool, regardless.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
That's always been true in the past, but won't necessarily hold in the future. The speed of a computer only matters insofar as the user can perceive a difference. Right now, there is a huge difference between playing an HD movie off of your hard drive, and streaming it over the net (namely, the first is somewhat possible, whereas the second is not). If network connection speeds get to the point where real-time high-resolution video can be streamed with no lag, then there is no difference in having your monitor hooked to a computer that is sitting beside you, versus hooked to a computer that is on the other side of the planet.
Once network speeds become faster than the human ability to notice the difference, it will matter much less where your computing power is physically located. It may become commonplace to lease a computer from someone and access it remotely (from anywhere on earth) rather than own and maintain your own box with a CPU in it. There are a variety of reasons why people will still buy their own computers, of course (reducing costs in long-term, ability to control it fully, sensitivity of data, etc.). However, I fully expect us to reach a point where networks are fast enough that the user experience can be decoupled from the hardware (whether or not this happens is more difficult to predict... but the potential is there).
(Note: Perhaps I'm naive to assume that in the future we will still be using a monitor-and-keyboard interface. If we all switch to VR interfaces, which require more bandwidth, then it again becomes prohibitive to stream the user experience over the net. However I maintain that the finite bandwidth of human senses means that eventually networks will surpass our ability to assimilate information, and it won't matter whether the data is local or remote. I'm not going to speculate on a date where this will happen, however!)
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.
There is a market for web based apps, just look how many there are out there right now. I would use an online word processer, maybe not for $10/month, but maybe for $1/use. I hardly ever use an actual word processor - most of my personal stuff are straight text files that I use Vi for. For the once a month or so that I need to send a letter, invoice or something I would gladly log into a web based app, especially if they would print an envelope and mail my letter for me. That's just one idea, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of applications that would be great to be able to run from the web if they were platform independent and reasonably priced.
The difference between that and this article is the idea that the net would be one huge computer you would just tap in to. That's just never going to happen. First, how are you ever going to get everyone to buy in to that idea. Second, who is going to keep it running and keep performance where we need it. The very thing that has made the net so successful is the fact that it's so heterogenous. The ability for anyone anywhere to add a page, product, service, or online store to it easily and quickly is what's fueld it's existence. If it evolves into one large entity where everyone is doing the same thing at the same time it's usefulness and appeal will diminish.
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You know they never call these people talking brains because it isn't there job to really think. They just spew off some nonsense to get as big a response as possible without causing any true controversy.
The problem with making predictions about a current market and the technology it produces today and what will be the dominant technology tomorrow is it's impossible. But most people and other talking heads end up joining in on the irrational exuberance of these predictions. Especially if they are already in the camp of the "chosen" technology.
Now I am about to do the forbidden on slashdot, I am going to explain myself and my Opinion.
First off I do not have any facts to back me up and since I nor anyone else has a time machine, this in my opinion is acceptable. Plus it is a long and honored tradition here to say whaterver you want with nothing to back it up.
Secondly this is my opinion, you don't know me and so you cannot make any accurate character judgments about the quality of my opinion. But my opinion is worth as much as any other person on slash dot and most are worth far more than the editors and pundits who get front page exposure. Apply generous amounts of salt and you should be fine unless you are new here or European or an insensitive clod or an American who does not recognize sarcasm, witty banter, witless banter, etc...
Follows is an opinion, flush twice if it doesn't go down the first time:
The computer operating systems are part of a middle aged market. This market is having a mid-life crisis because it has reached such a level of success that there isn't much hope for any more. So the market is getting restless and looking for a faster car and a flat bellied wife to relive the more exciting days of its youth. But the inevitable is written on the wall, the days of the OS as a superstar of the computer industry are over. Sure it will always have its hardcore enthusiast who care what OS they run but most people won't. Let's face it the OS has not been a celebrity for a long time. There will be no Unix or WinOS superstar in the consumer market's future, the celebrities will be the devices themselves and what they can do in the home.
The business OS market has grown incredibly large since the 80's. With that growth came market fragmentation/segmentation, these segments will be around for a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if the segments outlasted the careers of everyone reading slashdot today. So Windows, Unix, Linux and Apple will be around for a very long time. They just have too much momentum to stop anytime soon. Some would say Unix is the segment in danger of take-over but IBM, HP, and Sun would all have to switch before Unix ever becomes obsolete and there is fat chance of that happening in the next decade or two. Unix is loosing lower market share to competitor Linux but the three big Unix shops aren't really as interested in that market for their Unix offering anyways.
In conclusion we should expect for at least the next decade much of the same, with hardware taking most of the glory in the computer industry. So......
The Linux zealots will continue to rail against MS
The Unix snobs will continue to be snobbish
The Apple cult will continue to mock all that is not insanely great
The MS admins will continue on in quiet desperation
Bill and Larry will continue to be filthy rich and arrogant
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
The only toolkit I know that even comes close without resorting to an HTML rendering library is Cocoa.
So it's not immediately obvious that a desktop app can be "better". I'd say Google Mail is far better, in terms of both interface and features, than Microsoft Exchange (minus the calendar). The search is better, the threading is better, the hierarchy system is better, the filters are better.
Right now, web apps have limited use. I am saying that will change. JavaScript is going to continue to grow (or something else will take its place). Eventually, we'll have to make a conscious choice between browser and desktop app, and it won't be an obvious one.
First, part of the point of DOM and Ajax is to ameliorate that. Fast broadband and the scalable architecture of webapps helps handle it further. Give it some time. Second, do you realize how many people take this UI-as-data approach? KDE and Gnome both use special UI description formats which can be loaded at runtime. Cocoa actually serializes running code. Heck, even Tk UIs reduce to strings (and there are cool libraries that can freeze your GUIs). People are already doing it that way, even over network lines. Excuse me for taking so long to respond. Your joke about Java left me in stiches. Implying Java was any good. Comedic gold! Those never get boring! "Swing", "Responsive". Brilliant! Your humor works on so many levels!Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense