Slashdot Mirror
Time To Take the Internet Seriously
santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he's also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious. "6. We know that the Internet creates 'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. ... 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool."
As we all know, the Internet is serious business.
http://drunkenachura.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/internet-serious-business.jpg
I.O.U One Sig.
Somebody help me understand this statement, it does not compute.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Where are we going to take it?
And did Al Gore give us a curfew?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
David Gelernter must be a Bing user.
It sure is good to know that all of the OWL people http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ have been fannying about until now. /.?
We really should take all of this stuff seriously.
Oh, wait: is that a codephrase indicating that we should commence the final assault on
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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Let's come up with something to replace HTTP/JavaScript/Flash/what-have-you. It's huge waste, but even worse, distortion.
We have the technology. We can do better than this.
x86 assembly, bogus sessions, they do not have to be fate.
Right? Right?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Maybe one too many, I says.
My language parser borked on 'cybersphere.' The words 'cyber' and 'virtual' leave a terrible aftertaste making whatever came later deteriorate into gibberish.. oh wait, this whole thing is gibberish to begin with. gibberish that seems (not entirely sure) to be a justification for everyone to throw their data (and I mean ALL their data) into the public space for the sake of...I'm not entirely sure, but I'll assume it's in the interests of whatever social/political/economic institutions he's a member of.
I know, how about letting the user decide the 'how' as well as the 'what' when it comes to interfacing with the technology at his disposal? I know, I know, that would be asking people to think for themselves for a few nanoseconds and we can't have that or else the terrorists win, the children lose, and 'freedom' dies. damn, what was I thinking? Gotta dumb everything down so even the most dull witted soccer mom can process it without the knees jerking upward..
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The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story. (But the world's own story is full of private information — and so, unfortunately, no human being is allowed to hear it.)
The future of the Internet is information streams blending together? What the fudge does this even mean?
Hey, if you like this guy, you will probably enjoy reading this as well.
No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now, when I started speaking.
This is a joke, right?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some of his predictions seem also to be very interesting if true but possibly wrong. For example, in regards to 11 which states that "the Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work" which is probably true under some interpretations and is already possibly falsified under other interpretations (Larry Lessig's "Remix" discusses this issue in detail).
Other predictions such as 9 and 10 which discuss how daily work-live will change are interesting although they sound somewhat pseudo-utopian.
Overall, this is interesting speculation but probably could have been summarized in about a third the length. Still worth reading though.
I don't care if he predicted Nostradamus and first described self-sustaining fusion. The points and problems brought up are in large part already known and understood in other terms, with many of them dismissed by those who understand the problems in the terms commonly used.
6. The internet does not create information overload. It doesn't create information, or anything for that matter. It is constructed and filled by people who either handle the information load well or do not (hence over-load). The number of sources and amount received from them is under the control of the receiver. This is only a problem if the person does not develop a suitable technique for handling the flow, or is prevented from using it. Simultaneity is not a way to handle a large flow except in unprocessed pass-though. Regardless of the technologies that might be employed for any of this, sucessful collection of new material requires serial reception with the majority of attention focused on the item is interest.
Far more useful in developing the ability to absorb more information faster is the concept of 'media richness'. Plain text is just that, very plain, while human behavior is very rich (language plus nonverbals, etc.). Most of the net is low richness. It could be made more dense, but to be richer would then also have to be made cleaner, with less noise within the signal.
14. Creating your own new ideas and presenting them as validated concepts by comparing them with existing concepts is a technique well used in fiction writing. In non-fiction people expect to be able to compare the old and new and see justification for why the latter is useful before they should be expected to see arguments as to why one is better. Nobody can agree with what they can't understand. You can't even say to understand it if you can't explain it, you can only say you know what you mean.
I strongly recommend getting a job selling, installing and supporting a large installation so you can see just how much thought and work goes into making the internet happen. It has never just happened on its own.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The article says "internet", but it really means "the HTTP based family of applications that use the internet". Sometimes a customer gets me by mistake when they need help because "their internet is down". I start to get mad because of self contradictory statements, but then I remember that they really mean, "my web browser stopped working". (You can tell I'm not really tech support because next I try to find out what browser they are using, and they are never able to tell me. Which means they are using IE.)
Having cleared that up, I can only see consolidation of HTTP applications under some super googly company (perhaps one the article writer envisions heading) as making things worse. I suggest that clutter in your web browser is not much different that clutter in your house. Get a book on Feng Shui or equivalent and start deleting the stuff that isn't helping you (making you happier, needed for work, etc).
P.S. I discovered a very important, but little known principle of error page design. If you put something in giant type at the top of the page, no one reads it. It you put it in little bitty 6 point type at the very bottom, everyone will read it. Even if they need to use their magnifier app. I can't explain it (it must have something to do with lawyers), but now that I know, I save a lot of frustration by putting the most important message in little bitty type at the bottom. (I still leave it at the top in big type also in case any old fashioned types like me see it.)
A friend of mine, Sam Joesph, was working on a project called Neurogrid http://www.neurogrid.net/php/index.php to develop a platform for distributed information sharing. I think he was looking into connecting some of this information using multiple dimensions like time and not just location (space).
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
So appearantly we have someone who predicts a WHOLE DAMN LOT of stuff (seriously, most people wouldn't even THINK of that much, let alone PREDICT it), and he predicted the internet. Ok. I'm fairly sure if I spend my life predicting stuff I am supposed to guess right from time to time. If you want to impress me, give me all his predictions and a percentage how many were true. More than 50% and I will start listening.
And what does the Unabomber have to do with it at all? Is surviving an explosion now something that boosts your credibility? In that case, I'd guess demo experts should run for public offices.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
---
This guy is half way to inventing my Feed Distiller, except he didn't see the usefulness of similarity filtering to some source, to keep the stream on topic.
Anyone can make a prediction. I'll make a prediction right now that one day we'll have a man on Mars.
The problem is how ACCURATE is the prediction. And his predictions are pretty useless. They're filled with current buzzwords and have no falsifiable content. Take prediction #5:
WTF? I'm not going into whether a search engine is an "easy problem". Everything is easy once it has been done by someone else.
But why does he believe that finding PEOPLE is an issue? This is the INTERNET. You can find published information ABOUT people. But PEOPLE are not abstracted and defined on the Internet.
And yes, in the "future" this "problem" will be "solved". When, how, where and by whom is skipped. So this "prediction" cannot be falsified. Therefore, it can never be shown to be wrong.
That article is crap.
And the worst part is how similar is becoming to the spanish inquisition
It’s like religion, but without as much power. Kinda like a predecessor.
The only revelation that ever stunned me, was the following:
I was still a teenager, and I read in the German computer magazine PC Welt about Nostradamus and what of that “actually happened” in the computer area.
And one prediction for the very close future was, that a new OS would come, to rule the world. Something big.
Mind you that was long before Linux (created 1991-92) was even remotely mainstream. I constantly read computer magazines, and know that it was not mentioned once or known.
They joked that maybe Nintendo would create a Yoshi OS. (Super Mario World, the first game to feature Yoshi, was released in 1990-91. Which gives you a feeling of when this was written.)
Years later, when I heard more and more about Linux, and even IBM started to pick it up, I started to realize that this was that OS! ;)
Doesn’t mean anything, but somehow that was such a moment that really made me think. Like: Was he an Alien and/or time traveler from the future?
To this day I wish I could get that article back. I know it was in the summer as we were at the beach. But the oldest issues they have in their archive are from 2007. So if you got an old archive from maybe 1990-92, please contact me! :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And we also know that the streams will be crossed, and it will save the day.
The idea that the internet is ever going to deliver massive quality ignores the simple fact: previous mediums were controlled by the elite. To hold a medium controlled by everyone to the same standards as mediums controlled by a select group is to ignore the very nature of the internet!
The internet is LolCatz and Rickrolling and Facebook Pickle people talking shit on Nickelback.
Acting like this fact imperils our ever present need for another Rousseau is elitist bullshit.
Too long our humanity has been defined by assholes who sniff at the notion that our useless and infantile pursuits aren't good enough. Fuck them! What proof is there that Icanhazcheeseburger isn't this generation's Guernica?
We have a right to just be human, without some shit-eating prick telling us we're not doing a good enough job of meeting his definition of awesome.
Quantity is not quality. I get it. But, have you seen some of the shit they call quality? 90% of Shakespeare is stupid and unreadable. Foucault is downright fucking retarded. And frankly I still don't get how Plato's Cave helps me make ends meet.
Quality is just elitist bullshit. We have a right to a stupid and useless internet.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
You know, like about 10 or 15 years ago I saw this TV presentation by a guy who swore up and down that filesystems should store & display documents solely by timestamp order of creation. (Is this the same guy?) "Time instead of space... cyberstream or lifestream... shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information...," all that jazz.
I routinely think back on that because it's one of the wrongest, most idiotic epic fails I ever remember seeing. I'm astonished to see it popping back up with a bunch of "web" buzzwords plastered on top.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"...better suited to the Internet than a conventional website." What?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
He's "...someone worth paying attention to..." but he cannot make decent predictions about the material he is supposed to be worth listening to about?
He cannot even clearly define the buzz words he fills his "predictions" with. That article is not worth reading.
Anyone?
So that would make an attempt to IMPLEMENT his "prediction" taking place when he was FIVE YEARS OLD.
Isn't it kind of hard to "predict" something that someone else has already spent the time and energy on to attempt an implementation?
Oh, and
You might want to check with Cisco first. They might have a problem with you using that TLA and name. It's rather close to what they've been marketing FOR YEARS.
Now, why are the ramblings of this guy of any interest to anyone?
So when did he predict 'the internet' ? Was this before or after Al Gore invented it?
AFAIK Shoghi Effendi predicted the internet back in 1936:
"A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity."
This sounds suspiciously like a lot of what http://linkeddata.org/ + friendly end user tools could give us - data from multiple sources which can be combined to enhance what you are looking at, viewed through a 'lense' (specific application) to make it meaningful - say, an interactive graph.
I reviewed this guy and his lifestream idea back in 2004 (http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2004/08/10/scopeware/) and ultimately found myself pretty unimpressed. I mean, the core ideas are interesting but so patent-encumbered that it will be a decade before they are touchable, and the man himself holds some pretty irritating/intolerant views (cited a few in that post) that left a bad impression on the whole. Sad then, sad now.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Hate to say it, but I use MS Outlook (with lots of RSS feed subscriptions) to integrate all my communications sources, inculding Slashdot. I get all of it in a seach folder called "Unread messages".
this might just be rambling nonsense.
Taking the internet seriously is what leads to all these "internet laws" that slashdot seems to rally against. In fact, the internet's existence as an international object that isn't technically, on the whole, legal in most jurisdictions, for one reason or another, is due in part to the internet not being taken seriously. Now, people are taking what they read online reasonably seriously; as seriously as any other medium. The internet is now no longer just for geeky adults, but also for children, and as such, a large portion of the population will look to have it censored or at least rated, just like any other medium (the logistics of such a task is another issue entirely).
The days of the internet being a wild west of vocal freedom are in danger of coming to a close, for as much as living in a wild west can be exhilarating and can make you feel more free, there will always be people who want to develop it to make it as safe as the colonised areas.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
3. Here is a simpler puzzle, with an obvious solution. Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished?
Free speech, that's what. Not only free as in libre, but free as in gratis. It's possible to replicate ideas across the world at real-world cost far too small to meter.
One of my ancestors wrote a book, the only copy of the manuscript was destroyed when the house was flooded by a nearby river. The publishers also lost the only other copy of the text, but the family considered they'd be unlikely to actually accept it and publish.
So one can see the fundamental advantage of not being bound by a pencil or a typewriter. In the information age what we really have in excess is truly inexpensive duplication.
It's ironic then that data can still go missing, although this is for other reasons rather than cost of making a backup, like intellectual property.
The question the author poses is not quite the right one to ask. What has been ubounded by digital word processing is quantity. Quality is different, a subjective and arbitrary value.
Looking at it another way, I consider readily ubiqutious free speech too cheap to meter as a pretty nicequality.
Indeed the 'du-' in duplication implies you create a second identical copy which is what you'd have to do with a pen or typewriter. This word is no longer accurate for what is possible with the Internet.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
So, it seems that David Gelerter was blown up by the Unabomber, survived and wrote a book about the experience. In a cavalier attempt to "Take the Internet Seriously" I dredged up two reviews from Amazon's customer comments which show opposing valances of political opinion regarding the book's content. I thought it might help to explain the kind of filters Mr. Gelerter views the world through and thus help one decide whether his little treatise on the Internet is worth anything.
Review Number One. . .
"Drawing Life" is by David Gelernter, a computer science professor who survived one of Ted Kaczynski's mail bombs.
The book is about a well educated, intelligent man who has descended into a fear of the future and a hatred of the society that nurtured him, who dreams of a glorious American past that never really existed, who has written a venomous yet pedestrian political tract that would never have been printed without the author's notoriety, and who has come to the conclusion that sometimes people must be deliberately killed to remake society.
This book is also about the Unabomber.
Gelernter has endured an awful lot, and for this one is prepared to grant him slack. If he's cranky, he's certainly earned the right to be this way.
Yet, I've come away disappointed, not just with "Drawing Life," but with Gelernter himself. He is a profoundly bitter man who believes modern society has been ruined not just by the Unabomber but by the likes of unwed mothers, liberals, lawyers, feminists, intellectuals, working mothers, left-wing journalists, Hillary Clinton, and the usual gang of suspects straight from Rush Limbaugh's enemies list.
Tiresome and unoriginal. Not worth reading.
And David, enough with the kvetching already!
Review Number Two. . .
One of the most powerfully written and elegantly thought out books I have ever read. Should be mandatory reading for every American. I used to think only Vietnam veterans had this kind of sane view of the world after adversity. I was wrong. Buy it, read it, pass it along.
Right. So Gelernter is passing judgment on the great social commons known as the Internet, is he?
I'll pass, thanks.
-FL
This guy is smarter than you, and he might be right only 10% of the time. I've seen a few ideas of his not gain traction.
He still has you beat.
Have you read anything else he's written, or are you just snarking it up with your ignorance?
The latest Slashdot meme.
Only if they force you to listen to them.
Igor from Cell Block 3 says he bought it all and can't wait to prove to his new mates how well their wares worked for him.
Gelernter is going to win the 2010 Ig Nobel for Vacuous Internet Punditry. Your average Facebook user can come up with more insightful takes on new technology than this tired hack.
>I've never heard of him before
You have not been paying attention, and this reflects badly on you.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I'm not sure if this is the same guy, but I think it is. In the video I saw the concept was called a "lifestream" then as well.
To me the idea also seems bad. I understand the motivation, he was trying to get people away from filesystems and into some more natural system for understanding how to find data. But temporal based is just not it. Humans can have a hard time ordering things absolutely in time, so to make access time based only obscures how to get to things, and also makes things that happened long in the past very hard to access - basically like storing all data in an array instead of a hashmap. People want to be able to get to things quickly and a time based interface does not really help much with that except for the most immediate things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It could end up producing a grey ecology with a distorted space-time just as easily. See the argument given by Paul Virilio in Open Sky: http://books.google.ca/books?id=OF_cPrltMmsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=open+sky&source=bl&ots=6LTgd95t6S&sig=svNqi6GKruEYnHufc1BxMSZtgVE&hl=en&ei=O6KUS-CXHJSSsgPM3eT8Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=16&ved=0CDIQ6AEwDw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Never heard of tuple spaces?
His comments about the Internet, while they do seem dated, did push me on to a further view of the Internet.
One of the recent formulations points out that the Internet is so fast and so vast that the resource now in short supply is human attention. I thought about Gelernter's "information streams" and demur: There is data on the Internet that sometimes becomes information in the mind of the beholder. Natural language text processing does only modest specific tasks in a data processing manner. Attention is the thing a human applies to data to reach a state of "readiness to act" that Donald MacKay once defined.
Here is what I suggest is a further view:
The Internet is a data transmission medium of revolutionary low cost. There is an abundance of low quality data but the higher levels are stalled due to the shortage of high quality input data. An instance of solving the high quality input data problem is Wikipedia. But symphony music, Building Codes, scientific papers, journals and books are stalled for economic reasons. Our society with it's economic structure is mismatched with the cheap bandwidth and flexibility of the Internet as a publishing solution.
People who make predictions for the sake of making predictions are only doing so because they lack the required attributes to make their ideas reality, but want the smug satisfaction of thinking they're at least equal to or better than the person that does have those attributes because they thought of it first. If you want to be impressive, predict it and then make it happen (which, by the way, is a good way to be right about your predictions.)
The fundamental difference between your analysis and his writing is that you are thinking of technical concerns while he is thinking of people first.
The internet does not create information overload.
Not by itself it doesn't. What he has observed is the universal truth that humans in combination with the internet produce information overload. It allows us such easy access to information that was can (and do) become overloaded in the mass of it. It allows so many people to create information that independent of anyone consuming it, the great mass of it is still there waiting to fall on you like an over-stuffed closet when you go looking.
The number of sources and amount received from them is under the control of the receiver.
And people never overeat because after all, the amount of food intake is controlled by the receiver.
People are not good at turning off the spigot.
Simultaneity is not a way to handle a large flow except in unprocessed pass-though.
Now you are attacking his proposed solution instead of his observation. But I think you should keep that distinct.
Plain text is just that, very plain...Most of the net is low richness. It could be made more dense, but to be richer would then also have to be made cleaner, with less noise within the signal.
I disagree vehemently that plain text is "very plain". The right words can be far more illuminating than any video, as long as you are able to assemble root meaning in your head. Video can be better at building context but I think video lacks the fundamental power that raw text can deliver many concepts, no matter how tightly you edit.
14. Creating your own new ideas and presenting them as validated concepts by comparing them with existing concepts is a technique well used in fiction writing....
If you are writing this paragraph in response to his point 14, I'd say what he was talking about has totally eluded you. He's not talking about physical structure, at all. In fact he never really had a thing to say about physical structure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Considering this piece reads like the sleep-talking of a singularitarian
He runs in those circles:
Kurzweil Debates Gelernter at MIT
I'm shocked how many smart people have a deep intuition that computation can't underlie consciousness when we have so many formal results that the limits of computation are inscrutable (complexity theory).
Users Are Not Reactionary After All
I thought I would find a soul-mate in Gelernter, since I believe strongly in aggregating *my own* data, but in truth I don't get much out of his ideas. This is what I wrote to myself when I first read that piece:
Edge question 2010: made the absurd statement that 99.9% of the technocrats involved in creating the internet will be displaced when the system evolves to operate in a top-down mode. This is extremely insulting, because it implies the technocrats have created the system in the image of their personal limitations, and denies the possibility that we've chosen to work at this level because that's where the action is. If we'd started top down, the internet would have never made it off the ground.
Many of us were well aware that we were cutting rough stone to build a cathedral. I use a personal wiki to keep track of my ideas, and I rely heavily on being able to determine when I added a comment through the page history. The time axis can be immensely useful. Still, it doesn't strike me as a liberating force. I had an Econtalk lecture on my iPod that I ended up listening to in six minute chunks over two weeks. Time can be quite messy in its own right.
Gelernter might be brilliant on some level, but he's Ted Nelson brilliant, FWIW. I think the silver bullet is a metaphor. Gelernter thinks that metaphor is a silver bullet.
[The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing...]
Indeed - a new free parameter has been thrust upon a world once held to the whims of the information oligarchs... and you agree with Gelerter that this is an UNDESIRABLE development? At a minimum, to the extent your assertion is true, it can at least be revealed and measured in a system allowing for free open information exchange. Intelligent analysis of such patterns would reveal to conscious readers (consumers of information) how to further undo distortions.
To suggest that additional freedom will result in some wholesale detriment to society is to suggest that such freedom should be withdrawn by an oligarch. It really comes down to a decision. Do you want to advocate and fight for freedom, or be a passive subservient to the oligarchs?
I have to say I wrote that response before I had read through all 35 points.
Yes the lifestream idea is still there. Along with the kinds of concepts that made me question it before in terms or organizing my own data - that something I wanted to deal with later I would just "move into the future".
But you know what? He has a good point that a great deal of the internet ended up using lifestreams anyway - blogs are all organized inherently along a timeline. And if you think about it meshing streams of data in a temporal way we are doing all over, from email readers hooked to multiple accounts to twitter clients feeding us information from many people that is interleaved according to when exactly it was produced.
In fact related to Twitter I thought all of his observation in the later section about the culture of "now" to be really astute observations. The internet has made it so easy to look backwards, but with such a volume of information that we almost never do...
I'm not sure he has the right answers to solve the problems he observes. But that does not diminish what I feel to be the accuracy and insight of his observations.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The search engine is the easy problem to solve. Finding and cataloguing words is fairly easy.
Determining the right information from the wrong, finding the experts amongst the 'internet experts', is truly a difficult problem. Which I think he is alluding to.
It's called usenet.
The web 2.0 version is RSS feed of a blog (woohoo). And the application is an RSS agregator.
Taken to it's logical end point you get Lotus Notes.
Deleted
that these "predictions" completely miss.
That problem is that it will be easier than ever to re-write history, or make it disappear altogether. In point number 31, he speaks of historians using the information on the internet to re-construct what happened historically. He implicitly assumes that no one would ever try to tamper with history.
Already today, main stream media organizations (e.g. cnn.com among many, many others) alter their articles after the fact, without even bothering to make note of it.
For example the headline "Republicans Cheat in Elections, Again", is soon changed to "Republicans Cheat in Election", then to "Republicans Accused of Cheating in Election", then "Accusations of Cheating in Election", and finally "Losers Make Accusation of Cheating in Election".
If everything is stored in the cloud, than how can we stop this from happening?
Apple removed copies of the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (which, ironically, describes a pre-computer version of this problem) from peoples Kindles. Apple could just as easily have revised the book if they wanted to.
Just think, in the future you could read a sentence, and then as soon as you finish reading it, it could change right before your eyes to say the opposite of what it originally said.
The internet is for porn!
Anybody else thinking of Al Gore complainig "nobody takes me cereal!"
I think you missed his point entirely, which is spot freaking on.
What he is referring to, IMHO, is the Fucking Google Effect . Somebody enters some search criteria into Google, quite often some sort of error code, and Voila! the first page contains entirely correct answers.
There is credibility given to answers in a way that is mind boggling to professionals. If I had a nickel for every time I have been cc'd by somebody with a link to one of the top 3 search results for a problem asking me, in all freakin' seriousness:
1) Did you try that yet?
2) Are you an idiot? The answer was right there, you just had to Google it!
3) But this guys says this... Are you sure you know what you are doing?
What is tragically hilarious is the apparently complete inability for these people to observe that the 'answer' came in the form of a post to a forum on a website tangentially involved in their problem wherein... the poster had no fucking clue whatsoever what they were talking about.
I think you got caught up in the word 'people' when only just a little behind that was 'Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet -- if we could find them'. Perhaps he is referring to finding not only a possible answer to your question, but also ranking it by some sort of indication of credibility. That would be incredibly valuable if you had a way to create that.
I use search engines all the time to troubleshoot error codes, find manuals, locate snippets of code, find other people that had my problem and found a solution, and a working one at that. If I could get a ranking on the credibility of the source, and the overall credibility of the website, it would reduce the amount of work I have to do searching by at least an order if not more.
I don't know about the rest of his predictions, but I don't see the problems with #5 that you do, assuming my interpretation of what he is saying is correct.
Why does he need to predict when, why, where, and how? The when is obvious. The future. The where is also obvious. Planet Earth, unless you want to know specifically the country, although that is becoming less and less important and relevant. That leaves How and Whom, and I fail to see why that is so critically important. He only identified the problem and stated that it will be solved.
I don't see it as an insurmountable problem to solve either. It's just more data and interaction with users. If we were to seriously discuss this problem I am sure that Slashdot could come up with some interesting ideas on how to serve this need.
You are prejudiced that anyone that makes points that agree with Rush, must be some kind of idiot. After all he does not agree with you philosophically, no matter the domain is not politics but technology. Therefore, his opinion is worthless.
That sums it up neatly, I think.
If one can't measure reality correctly from a social standpoint, it means he is adept at lying to himself in order to foster his emotional truths. This system of reasoning is always applied to all levels of problem-solving. He must be right, therefore facts will come second to ego.
Nothing a man of this nature says can be taken at face value.
No, that's not what he is doing at all. The sad thing is you will never know what he was doing while at the same time congratulating yourself for keeping the purity of your worldview intact.
Um, yes, he is passing judgment on the internet. Perhaps we have different definitions for the word. . ? Further, in reading through his notes, (which I did, thank-you very much), it is clear that his ideas rest firmly in the realm of sociology and philosophy, which is inescapably connected to his political views; ie, the value of people and how they behave and by extension, how they should be managed.
He's blowing smoke which anybody can blow. He just happens to be doing it with a degree of marketable paunch and undeserving arrogance.
-FL
The sad thing is you will never know what he was doing while at the same time congratulating yourself for keeping the purity of your worldview intact.
And that is the real shame, that you would willingly ossify your beliefs instead of exposing yourself to new ideas when possible.
It doesn't work that way. Internet facilitates finding consonant voices to your own, but it doesn't help you filter out dissonant ones. Your opponents can always spam you, or "target" you with Google ads. On Internet, alternative is always offered, always a click away. Therefore, ossifying your beliefs or exposing yourself to new ideas was decided in advance. You are either assured or curious and that is perhaps deeply entrenched in genetics and upbringing.
what a load of shit.
>> What he is referring to, IMHO, is the Fucking Google Effect .
I believe that this is precisely the problem: that his "predictions" are so vaguely described that they can mean anything to anybody, and thus can never actually be falsified. Kind of like a garden-variety translation of Nostradamus' quatrains: somewhere, someone will twist their interpretation until it fits into some sort of reality.
And that's not "predicting the future". To paraphrase Toy Story character Woody, that's just "guessing with style."
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Yes, exactly. People are not abstracted, not defined on the Internet, not searchable. There may be 3 experts in the world capable of answering your question, and not a single webpage even approaching it. It would be extremely difficult to find these people and ask them your question (having them willing to answer it is an entirely different matter.) And to filter out all the questions that are better suited for their less competent colleagues. This is a problem that needs to be solved and Internet may become capable of solving it (today, it isn't.)
Your indignation resembles indignation of a person who swears about people predicting cars will move on the roads. After all, roads are busy with horses and the noise of cars would spook the horses!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Oh, that's an overstatement.
The real limitation is you can't cross the same river TWICE.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I actually read the article, it reads like one of those hack academics in 1995 trying to sound hip (and/or pompous) by writing long tedious screeds using technical words they don't understand, to discuss a culture they have no experience with. About 1/3 of the article is about how great the guy used to be and how important and relevant his every utterance is. However, I'm not buying it.
I think its an elaborate hoax, like a modern "Sokal affair", and most of you fell for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
'information overload,' a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source.
Yes, access to information without the mediation of the academics and priesthood, and control by multinational corporations is a big problem, for them. Not so much for everyone else. I think we'll survive despite their best FUD.
The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast -- especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload.
Sorry teacher I couldn't read chapter 3 last night because chapters 4, 5, 6 ,7 all exist so I was too intimidated to read chapter 3. I can't read my slashdot firefox tab because I have other tabs open. WTF is this guy talking about?
But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate,
I strongly suggest each user operate their own mouse, as opposed to operating each others mices. My kids figured this out around K or first grade, although their previous failure to follow that rule was probably more sibling rivalry and/or comic relief rather than actual ignorance.
and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information -- his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts.
Translation: Google docs, gmail, and google calendar is really cool. Facebook too. Thanks for letting us know, academic dude, without you guys we'd never have known!
To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis
Cool idea dude, like a log file, but on the web. I'm sure no one would ever think of putting a log file on a web. Actually the log file could be human generated prose and comments instead of the insights from my /var/log/syslog. Why, we could call it a web log. Or even a 'blog.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
Stagnant pool... thats kuro5hin, right? information-in-motion, thats like the front page of slashdot.
Come on Alan Sokal, admit it, you're the one behind this hoax, aren't you?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"640k (of usable ram) ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
/. but I like it that way, and its been doing everything I want it to do for several years now. This whole thing is a pile of semi-dated garbage at best, and a thinly veiled promotion of Internet censorship and legalized, /encouraged/ monopolies at worst. The timing and wording of this entire thing shortly after a M$ announcement of a large investment in the cloud too...
People try to make these kinds of far-reaching predictions without really thinking it through all the time. This is nothing new, though this guy has less balls than most in that his quotes aren't even concrete enough to truly be ridiculed in the future.
Some, like this one:
"1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to."
at least have the decency to be stupid enough for it to be ridiculed right now.
The Internet, as it is, is in perpetual Beta. I don't know about the rest of
Or perhaps my tin foil hat is wedged on a little too tightly this morning.
Sounds gayh
If HTTP based applications are a "human right", then people will demand government funding for them. The more government funds them, the more they will control the content. The more government controls the content, the less actually useful the "internet" will be.
Indeed. Like any good charlatan fortuneteller the man keeps to the vague and puts many things in the form of questions which he can claim to have predicted either way they turn out.
Some of the "Predictions" are really just calls for what he wants in the computing world. One Internet interface? Cloud computing ruling all? He strikes me as the type who can't see the computer world beyond windows or purely business needs. He even sorta looks like Dilbert's pointy hair boss to go along with the spew.
He doesnt have any credibility anymore . . . sadly he just another necon isreali propagandist
The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast -- especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat.
That's why the Internet is still mostly text. Typing is slower than talking, but reading is faster than listening, and reading doesn't suffer from this problem.
Apple removed copies of the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (which, ironically, describes a pre-computer version of this problem) from peoples Kindles. Apple could just as easily have revised the book if they wanted to.
This is satire, right? You're illustrating the point by substituting "Apple" for "Amazon" here?
Just think, in the future you could read a sentence, and then as soon as you finish reading it, it could change right before your eyes to say the opposite of what it originally said.
Google Buzz Trick - The Edit Button
"With the Internet, the greatest disseminator of bad data and bad information the universe has ever known, it's become impossible to trust any news from any source at all, because it's all filtered through this crazy yenta gossip line. It's impossible to know anything."
Soft-science academics have been complaining about the Crazy Yenta Gossip Line ever since it got big enough for them to notice.
Doesn't stop them from being a hugely active part of it.
The Cloud will take care that your information is safely encrypted, distributed and secure.
I've seen the inside of "The Cloud". It looks a lot like the "non-cloud" environment. The parts that are different have nothing to do with enhancing security. Fail.
In many ways the internet is like the Total Perspective Vortex gone wrong. In many ways it give people to much information then our minds can safely handle but what happened was it also allowed us a soapbox to give our response to what we learn.
So minorities can yell as loud as the majority, insane unverified half truths can get as much if not more attention then proven documents. Analysis of actions without correct context etc... It is too much for people to handle.
There was an interesting study. People were give anywhere from 3-10 numbers to remember. And go to an other room to give out those numbers. Then when they were going to the other room they were asked if they wanted Cake or a fruit salad. People who had more then 7 numbers to remember choose the cake higher then people who had less. Linking to the theory after we get to much information our rational side of our brains stop and our emotional kicks in.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...describing the "world of tomorrow", showing flying cars, people movers, and personal jet packs. Most detailed, meaningful predictions - even by informed people - are almost invariably wrong. I can agree that the internet is basically an information conduit that focuses us on what is happening "now", but as for the ways in which it will morph in the future and become something much more, I disagree. In the early days of television, it could easily have been predicted (and probably was) that the medium would be used to do away with classrooms and bring education into the home, but in reality it turned into a vehicle for watching trailer trash win prizes and distributing serial stories of meaningless drivel. Thus are the noble dreams of the educated and visionary elite hammered into reality by the voracious appetites of the masses for ever-increasing couch-based entertainment.
Lesson: If you have a noble ambition for your invention, never, ever, let the public "help" you mold it.
You hit the nail on the head with "theoretically". We now have such joys as presentation through JS and semantics through CSS. Will the madness never end?
Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources.
Oh, hyphens. Are there two words you can't improperly join?
Here we have an adjective joined by hyphen with a noun and the compound improperly being used as a noun when it must be used as an adjective, casting the following word not as a verb but as a noun, leaving the sentence without a verb. And of course the plural is misapplied on the compound adjective and must shift to the 'nounified' verb, so you have:
"Blogs and other anthology-site [adj.] integrates [n.] <missing verb> information from many sources."
Unless of course you 'verbify' "information" to "informationize", which leaves open whether or not you can "informationize from" something. Or would it be "informationate"?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side...
Or you just need http://www.netvibes.com/
The other respondents hit the nail on the head: Gelertner's point is about finding and querying expertise rather than written information--the difference between reading a book by Donald Knuth and being able to ask him a question directly.
However, that problem has a solution on the Internet already: communities of Interest. Dating back well before Web search engines, newsgroups allowed people to find each other according to subjects of interest and to share expertise. Web forums like Slashdot continue that user experience on the Web, with the advantage that many are also indexed by search engines.
The hard people problem is access. I might know exactly who can answer my question, but that doesn't mean they want to or have time to. And from the other side, we each have our own strategies and tools to filter the requests that are made of our time every day.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
More importantly, how to filter out the answers from those less competent people. I don't really want to fade through the IT equivalent of chiropractors claiming to be able to cure asthma.
There's simply too much incentive to try to fool such search engines about your abilities for this to be useful.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The Unabomber didn't like him either.
We form tribes of relatives, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, etc. Anthropologists/sociologists have discovered there is an optimal tribe size of around a hundred (plus-minus fifty) before it becomes unwieldy, bifurcates or dissolves. The internet allows us to construct social and commercial "tribes" from across the planet.
Yeah, he forgot:
36. I'm nuckin' futs.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
David Gelernter was still a kid when Douglas Englebart and Ted Nelson were inventing all the hypertext ideas the Web was built from.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I agree. I even started working on a user interface protocol based on TCP (actually, any serial connection - RS-232 or USB would work just as well), but I didn't have time when moving to a house, and haven't started up again.
If you've done event driven GUI programming, you probably noticed much of it is in the form of (set up windows and controls), ... etc, until the final (closes windows and so on). So why not define a standard set of messages so your application can be on a server, and your GUI is on your local machine? You only need one client (viewer) for any application on any server anywhere on the internet - much like a web browser works.
As opposed to traditional solutions which have consisted of shoveling megabytes of pixels down wires, and getting thousands of mouse/pointer/keyboard events back (X windows, remote desktop), neither of which you actually want.
My prototype (Java client, Python server) can open windows, display buttons and labels, not much more. It's called HICP (Holistic Interface Control Protocol). Someone else also tried something like that, using SOAP, called XUP (eXtensible User-interface Protocol) - at least they have a web site.
But why does he believe that finding PEOPLE is an issue? This is the INTERNET. You can find published information ABOUT people. But PEOPLE are not abstracted and defined on the Internet.
Speak for yourself, human.
We already have something that will allow folks to evaluate information from multiple sources. It's called an EDUCATION! We're just doing a piss-poor job of it.