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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
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..
?! 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.
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
replace HTTP/JavaScript/Flash/what-have-you
Every time I do "web development", I feel like I'm duct taping popsicle sticks together to build a house and then throwing in a bit of mud to seal the holes. Even after 10+ years everything still feels like a really bad hack/kludge/bodge.
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.
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."
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
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.
eclecti.cc
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
Because it is. You have a sessionless protocol trying to do sessions. Amusingly enough written on top of a connection based protocol (so you have a session built in- the TCP connection). You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays. You have a language that they had so much faith in they decided to name it after another popular language in hopes people would confuse them. And that language has no built in method for transfering data to/from the server or doing RPCs, you have the whole AJAX hack thrown in on top to do that. There's nothing about the whole stack that's well designed for modern uses. But its universal, so we're stuck with it unless Mozilla and MS work together to push out something new.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?