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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.
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.
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.
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
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?