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."

Comments

Re:condition: buzzword alert

[zappepcs]

Exactly, kind of, I think.

The Internet is not a thing like the 'winter olympics' or recording industry. The Internet is the system of communications systems which allow the transfer of information (as well as aggregation, falsification, and overload of). It changes the source of information for those who regularly access it when compared to the time before the Internet.

What needs to be discussed is not cyber this, or virtual that, but how users use information. Lets face it, for a large portion of the population the phrase 'use information' is rather optimistic. Aggregating information, presenting it in a way that is both intuitive and useful is something of a holy grail. We've seen many attempts to do things like this, and each of them has their fans and foes. What is being suggested is essentially that we all need to have one set of cultural values. Looks good on paper, but it makes a huge mess of things in real life.

Then again, look at Microsoft Windows. How may people do you know that think this is how computers are supposed to work, and anything not like Windows is weird?

A single cultural viewpoint is wrong.

Time-Based Filesystem

[dcollins]

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.

Re:Time-Based Filesystem

[PaintyThePirate]

Interestingly, this is the approach that OLPC and now Sugar Labs have taken for file access in Sugar, using the Journal activity. This is also the direction Gnome is heading in, with Zeitgeist and its GUIs.

It's a little strange at first, and it certainly can't replace normal file browsers completely, but it ends up being pretty convenient in day to day use. Of course, these aren't filesystems, just layers atop them.

So when did this guy predict the internet?

[rossdee]

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."

Re:The question is how accurate are the prediction

[EdIII]

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.

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.

Re:The question is how accurate are the prediction

[dzfoo]

>> 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.

Obligatory Gates Quote

[Ironhandx]

"640k (of usable ram) ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates

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 /. 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...

Or perhaps my tin foil hat is wedged on a little too tightly this morning.

Re:Dear software engineers

[AuMatar]

I'd love to know what you propose would do better and still scale to tens of thousands of page requests per second, and can deal with malicious network nodes and nodes dropping off the network without notice. You do realize that TCP is also doing sessions on top of a sessionless protocol, right? Is TCP poorly designed?

Doing sessions on top of sessionless on top of sessioned is poorly designed. That's the current situation- interactive apps written over HTTP on top of TCP. HTTP is a good file transfer protocol, but it doesn't fit the modern usage of many webpages, its being shoe horned in because everyone uses browsers and that's the only way they communicate. It's past time for a new protocol at the HTTP layer made for web applications that can co-exist alongside it.

If the web was designed to be pixel-perfect, browsers would be as messy as Win32, trying to maintain backward compatibility with all sorts of different displays. Either that, or everything would be monochrome at low resolution.

But that's what every damn web designer wants, and what they struggle with HTML, CSS, and Flash to achieve. From frame hell to the equivalent in CSS, they design it assuming that it should be pixel perfect. It's time to educate them or give them what they want, the current hacks they use to try and make it so are a huge waste of time and money.

The only language I can think of that has arbitrary functions like RPC built-in is PHP. If you think PHP is the epitome of language design, then we have nothing more to discuss. Most good languages separate the language itself from the standard library.

You don't know many languages then. A good language for the web would recognize that it's client-server, and provide for built in ability for automated data transfer and calling of functions on the server. Instead we have the steaming pile which is Javascript, a bad language to begin with, married to the utter hack that is AJAX.

Sure, on the whole, it's not the best that we could do, but if you think nothing about it is well-designed, well, what would you propose? Flash?

The web wasn't designed for applications. Start over. A new transfer protocol based on sessions. A new display format based on SVG or similar technology with access to all common widget types (menus, sliders, combo boxes, list boxes, other things that the current web can't do well or at all). Scrap js and use a well designed language, one that's tier aware. And make browsers able to use this format or the original http/html stuff, as was always intended- that's why URLs start with htttp://.

It'd be a year or two to work it all out, during which we'd continue with what we have now. The end result would be a huge increase in productivity and ease of use, since we wouldn't have to wedge around broken protocols and throw in hideous hacks.

The last thing anyone needs is Microsoft reinventing the web.

As developers of the most used web browser do you really think they could be left out of anything? They shouldn't control the process, but they need to have a seat at the table.