And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.
I believe this assumption is flawed. I would argue there is exactly a 50% chance that computing would have improved without Microsoft, and a 50% chance that the alternative time-line would have produced a worse outcome for users (by current standards).
The challenge of analyzing alternative outcomes is that it is impossible to determine what other factors would have risen to dominance to in determining the course of the industry in the absence of Microsoft. For example, just to take the context of your own statement (Microsoft's monopolistic approach), it is easy to forget that when Microsoft emerged, the IT industry was already in the grips of a different monopoly - IBM.
Had Microsoft not created a level playing field enabling the growth of a multi-vendor PC industry, IBM might have been in a better position to sustain its monopoly by constraining the growth of PCs so that they remained in the "comfort zone" of its own business model, leaving the choicest opportunities for its lucrative mainframe/mini-computer business. In this "alternative universe", we might all still be using variations of mainframe terminals for our day-to-day computing.
Do you really thank that state of computing would be "ahead" of where we are today?
The rise of virtualization proves the validity of the microkernel concept, whereby the hypervisor now takes the place of the original "kernel" (note the similarity in block diagrams: microkernel vs. hypervisor designs). Virtual machines are now used instead of function-specific modules in the original microkernel designs, with specialized VMs for performing I/O and to host virtual appliances with just enough user-level code needed to support a particular application.
This editorial in Forbes entitled "Wireless Shootout: Suits vs. Cowboys" points out that cellular carriers and next-generation WiFi technology may be replaying the past competition between mainframes ("suits") and PCs ("cowboys"). The cellular carriers are inherently limited in their ability to adapt to modern wireless requirements because they operate under three fundamental constraints: a build-out mentality, vertical integration, and complicated pricing. The author points out that this same mindset ultimately caused mainframe suppliers to lose their dominance to the more nimble PCs in mainstream computing, and predicts that for the same reasons, more adaptable next-generation wireless technology such as WiMAX and ZigBee will ultimately prevail over cellular infrastructure in the future.
At the press conference where he wore the penguin suit, Scott took off the head to give his speech, and an aide rushed up to grab it and take it offstage. But Scott insisted that the head be left perched up on top of one of the props behind him. "I kind of like the way it looks up there", he said dreamily, almost as if it were on a pike.
It was pretty clear then that he really hadn't come to terms with Linux yet, almost as awkard as his famous "Mo-Mo-(slap)-Motif" moment years earlier.
The way to reach the masses will be through video games, mobile devices like smart phones and media players, and ambient computing devices -- not cheaper PCs, which are fundamentally designed for productivity workers. The vast majority of the world's population has no use for spreadsheets and word processors.
This presentation from Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier reveals the Top Eleven Reasons VR has not yet become commonplace. He identifies a number of factors that have held back the adoption of VR by consumers, including key limitations in hardware capabilities and backlash from unsound business practices in its early days. He also points out where research still needs to be done. However, he concludes with the observation that VR has already succeeded as an industrial technology, where it is used regularly in product design and other automation tasks.
Personal computing will thrive, but the PC won't
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
He is right that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come, but the "PC", as defined by an Intel Processor + a Microsoft operating system, is dead. That doesn't mean that the PC is somehow vanishing or becoming irrelevant. Mainframes and minicomputers were once also thought to be obsolete, but those platforms continue to be used widely today. It simply implies that, like its predecessors, the PC will remain important, but its central role as a driver of innovation in the technology industry is waning. The real growth and innovation is happening with new kinds of devices that are definitely "personal", but have a completely different design from the classical "PC". For example, worldwide mobile phone sales jumped 30 percent in 2004, reaching 674 million units. That compares with PC shipments that grew 14.2% to 176.5 million units. Other devices like handheld music players are just getting started. These types of devices will define personal computing for the vast majority of users in the future, not PCs.
I think there might be things that the developing world needs a little more than $100 computers.
That is often the first response that projects like these elicit. The typical reaction is "aren't these people more concerned with surviving than surfing the web?"
Well, the intent of these devices is to help as much as possible with improving the basic qualities of life, rather than enabling typical "high-level" PC tasks most of us Slashdot readers are concerned with, like creating spreadsheets or writing code.
For example, a farmer in a developing country might be able to use such a device to determine whether his crop would fetch a higher price in a village to the North or the South. In the past, he might have had to walk 10-20 miles to find out what price he would get, so if he picked the wrong village, the mistake would be costly...and probably irreversible. Believe me, a device that could help him make that decision would make a very big difference in this fellow's life.
Information can improve people's lives regardless of their relative prosperity.
This idea is getting popular
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This effort joing some other projects targeting cheap PCs at users in developing countries. For example, the PCtvt was recently proposed by Raj Reddy at CMU (an academic rivalry?).
But both efforts are predated by the Simputer, a low cost device that was designed to be shared by Indian villagers. Each user stores their data on a Smart Card, which is plugged into a single Simputer as it is shared by various members of the community.
Most of the 3D user interfaces that people usually mention are designed for 3D file system visualization. As others have pointed out, it is not clear that 3D adds any value for navigating the hierarchical structure of current file systems.
It gets much more interesting when you combine 3D navigation with Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs). For example, Zoom Quilt is a collaborative art project based on Macromedia Flash that illustrates what a 3D ZUI might look and feel like. ZUIs work by creating an intuitive information landscape. The user moves "further away" to get an overview, or "closer" for more detail, while keeping a sense of orientation and structure that traditional pop-up windows and dialogs can't match (see research papers and Java demo). Zoom Quilt was assembled from different frames of content contributed by various participants. For another Flash-based example of a 3D zooming experience, see also the older Christmas Zoom.
Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis, MIT Haystack, and Fenfire.
With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.
The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.
Yes, but have you seen the *gasp* 3d command line?
Well, here are some starting points in that direction:
3D alphabet XMLTerm is both a command line "terminal", like an Xterm, and also a web page. XMLterm adds powerful hypertext and graphical capabilities to the Xterm-like terminal interface through its use of XML. Textmode Quake (ttyquake) uses plain text characters for its 3D rendering.
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruiser lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:
Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.
Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.
kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).
Here are links to some of the 3DUIs that are available today:
- FSN (pronounced "fusion") produces a cyberspace rendering of a file system. This was the original 3D file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park ("Hey, this is UNIX. I know this!").
[Screenshot] | [Download] (IRIX)
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruise lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Visual File System is a 3D file system visualizer for Windows. The tool scans a drive selected by the user, and then models the contents of the drive in 3D, based on the directories that are selected in a tree browser on the side of the display.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- Vizible WorldViewer distributes windows across the exterior and interior surfaces of spheres, providing the means to visualize and navigate large numbers of web pages and data sources simultaneously.
[
This article in Reuters describes the Heliodisplay, a device that creates a two-dimensional image which appears to hover in mid-air and can be seen from several angles. Similar to the Fog Screen, the Heliodisplay projects the image into a cloud of "benign" particles that it sprays into the air. The developer states that he was directly influenced by the hologram communicator shown in the "Star Wars" movies. Here is a set of video clips demonstrating the device in action, and there is more detail about the design on p. 14 of Emerging Display Review (PDF).
Slashdot Mirror
then go and help to build the cloud
And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.
I believe this assumption is flawed. I would argue there is exactly a 50% chance that computing would have improved without Microsoft, and a 50% chance that the alternative time-line would have produced a worse outcome for users (by current standards).
The challenge of analyzing alternative outcomes is that it is impossible to determine what other factors would have risen to dominance to in determining the course of the industry in the absence of Microsoft. For example, just to take the context of your own statement (Microsoft's monopolistic approach), it is easy to forget that when Microsoft emerged, the IT industry was already in the grips of a different monopoly - IBM.
Had Microsoft not created a level playing field enabling the growth of a multi-vendor PC industry, IBM might have been in a better position to sustain its monopoly by constraining the growth of PCs so that they remained in the "comfort zone" of its own business model, leaving the choicest opportunities for its lucrative mainframe/mini-computer business. In this "alternative universe", we might all still be using variations of mainframe terminals for our day-to-day computing.
Do you really thank that state of computing would be "ahead" of where we are today?
Oh, that's right...you cant't.
The rise of virtualization proves the validity of the microkernel concept, whereby the hypervisor now takes the place of the original "kernel" (note the similarity in block diagrams: microkernel vs. hypervisor designs). Virtual machines are now used instead of function-specific modules in the original microkernel designs, with specialized VMs for performing I/O and to host virtual appliances with just enough user-level code needed to support a particular application.
This editorial in Forbes entitled "Wireless Shootout: Suits vs. Cowboys" points out that cellular carriers and next-generation WiFi technology may be replaying the past competition between mainframes ("suits") and PCs ("cowboys"). The cellular carriers are inherently limited in their ability to adapt to modern wireless requirements because they operate under three fundamental constraints: a build-out mentality, vertical integration, and complicated pricing. The author points out that this same mindset ultimately caused mainframe suppliers to lose their dominance to the more nimble PCs in mainstream computing, and predicts that for the same reasons, more adaptable next-generation wireless technology such as WiMAX and ZigBee will ultimately prevail over cellular infrastructure in the future.
You know, an appliance specifically designed for accessing and playing YouTube movies. Well, where is it? Does it exist?
At the press conference where he wore the penguin suit, Scott took off the head to give his speech, and an aide rushed up to grab it and take it offstage. But Scott insisted that the head be left perched up on top of one of the props behind him. "I kind of like the way it looks up there", he said dreamily, almost as if it were on a pike.
It was pretty clear then that he really hadn't come to terms with Linux yet, almost as awkard as his famous "Mo-Mo-(slap)-Motif" moment years earlier.
The way to reach the masses will be through video games, mobile devices like smart phones and media players, and ambient computing devices -- not cheaper PCs, which are fundamentally designed for productivity workers. The vast majority of the world's population has no use for spreadsheets and word processors.
You should use a distributed trust metric system like Advogato. This allows you to develop a hierarchical system for rating peers in a community.
Mobile devices are the future:
Here are some market stats for the first quarter of 2005:
Mobile Phone Handsets:
170 million units sold (19% growth YTY)
PCs:
46.2 million units sold (11% growth YTY)
iPods:
5.3 million units sold (558% growth YTY)
PDAs:
3.4 million units sold (25% growth YTY)
Video Games (Portable):
3.8 million units sold (72% growth YTY)
Volume rules...control mobile platforms, and the desktop comes for free. That's where Linux UI developers should focus their efforts.
This presentation from Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier reveals the Top Eleven Reasons VR has not yet become commonplace. He identifies a number of factors that have held back the adoption of VR by consumers, including key limitations in hardware capabilities and backlash from unsound business practices in its early days. He also points out where research still needs to be done. However, he concludes with the observation that VR has already succeeded as an industrial technology, where it is used regularly in product design and other automation tasks.
He is right that the most revolutionary years for personal computing are yet to come, but the "PC", as defined by an Intel Processor + a Microsoft operating system, is dead. That doesn't mean that the PC is somehow vanishing or becoming irrelevant. Mainframes and minicomputers were once also thought to be obsolete, but those platforms continue to be used widely today. It simply implies that, like its predecessors, the PC will remain important, but its central role as a driver of innovation in the technology industry is waning. The real growth and innovation is happening with new kinds of devices that are definitely "personal", but have a completely different design from the classical "PC". For example, worldwide mobile phone sales jumped 30 percent in 2004, reaching 674 million units. That compares with PC shipments that grew 14.2% to 176.5 million units. Other devices like handheld music players are just getting started. These types of devices will define personal computing for the vast majority of users in the future, not PCs.
I think there might be things that the developing world needs a little more than $100 computers.
That is often the first response that projects like these elicit. The typical reaction is "aren't these people more concerned with surviving than surfing the web?"
Well, the intent of these devices is to help as much as possible with improving the basic qualities of life, rather than enabling typical "high-level" PC tasks most of us Slashdot readers are concerned with, like creating spreadsheets or writing code.
For example, a farmer in a developing country might be able to use such a device to determine whether his crop would fetch a higher price in a village to the North or the South. In the past, he might have had to walk 10-20 miles to find out what price he would get, so if he picked the wrong village, the mistake would be costly...and probably irreversible. Believe me, a device that could help him make that decision would make a very big difference in this fellow's life.
Information can improve people's lives regardless of their relative prosperity.
This effort joing some other projects targeting cheap PCs at users in developing countries. For example, the PCtvt was recently proposed by Raj Reddy at CMU (an academic rivalry?).
But both efforts are predated by the Simputer, a low cost device that was designed to be shared by Indian villagers. Each user stores their data on a Smart Card, which is plugged into a single Simputer as it is shared by various members of the community.
Most of the 3D user interfaces that people usually mention are designed for 3D file system visualization. As others have pointed out, it is not clear that 3D adds any value for navigating the hierarchical structure of current file systems.
It gets much more interesting when you combine 3D navigation with Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs). For example, Zoom Quilt is a collaborative art project based on Macromedia Flash that illustrates what a 3D ZUI might look and feel like. ZUIs work by creating an intuitive information landscape. The user moves "further away" to get an overview, or "closer" for more detail, while keeping a sense of orientation and structure that traditional pop-up windows and dialogs can't match (see research papers and Java demo). Zoom Quilt was assembled from different frames of content contributed by various participants. For another Flash-based example of a 3D zooming experience, see also the older Christmas Zoom.
Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis, MIT Haystack, and Fenfire.
With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.
The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.
I would like to repost one of your past comments on my blog, but not without your approval.
If you are interested, please send me a note (nooface@nooface.net).
Everyone else, sorry about the offtopic spam, but I don't know any other way to contact him!
Yes, but have you seen the *gasp* 3d command line?
Well, here are some starting points in that direction:
3D alphabet
XMLTerm is both a command line "terminal", like an Xterm, and also a web page. XMLterm adds powerful hypertext and graphical capabilities to the Xterm-like terminal interface through its use of XML.
Textmode Quake (ttyquake) uses plain text characters for its 3D rendering.
Here are some other 3D file system visualizers:
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruiser lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:
Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.
Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.
kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).
For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, see Neal Stephenson's essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line.
My site has been collecting 3D UIs for some time.
Here are links to some of the 3DUIs that are available today:
- FSN (pronounced "fusion") produces a cyberspace rendering of a file system. This was the original 3D file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park ("Hey, this is UNIX. I know this!").
[Screenshot] | [Download] (IRIX)
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruise lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Visual File System is a 3D file system visualizer for Windows. The tool scans a drive selected by the user, and then models the contents of the drive in 3D, based on the directories that are selected in a tree browser on the side of the display.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- Vizible WorldViewer distributes windows across the exterior and interior surfaces of spheres, providing the means to visualize and navigate large numbers of web pages and data sources simultaneously.
[
This article in Reuters describes the Heliodisplay, a device that creates a two-dimensional image which appears to hover in mid-air and can be seen from several angles. Similar to the Fog Screen, the Heliodisplay projects the image into a cloud of "benign" particles that it sprays into the air. The developer states that he was directly influenced by the hologram communicator shown in the "Star Wars" movies. Here is a set of video clips demonstrating the device in action, and there is more detail about the design on p. 14 of Emerging Display Review (PDF).
...are listed here.
Examples:
Asynchronous Web Interfaces
Shared Zoomable Canvas
Seeing The Web Through The Eyes Of A Calendar
For an alternative perspective on mob behavior, see this article in Wired.