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.
Where are we going to take it?
And did Al Gore give us a curfew?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
?! Stop staring at me, goddammit! I'm schizophrenic and you're goddamn staring is exacerbating my paranoia! FUCK!!
No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now, when I started speaking.
Parent was talking to me idiot.
The BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8548190.stm says access to the internet is a human right. That sounds serious.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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'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
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.
>> 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
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.
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.