But the rollout, that was just the worst way to ever get a product into the hands of users. If you got in they gave you some number of invites. You'd set them up to be sent out to your friends or coworkers or whatever. Turned out, it just put them in a queue to eventually get an invite. Wave was fundamentally a collaboration platform, without anyone to collaborate with it had zero value. Fantastic way to fail.
The collaborative document editing in Google Docs improved afterwards, the Google Wave wikipedia entry doesn't mention this but I have some vague recollection of some of their work being migrated into Google Docs to improve it in that regard. That may be completely wrong though since I can't seem to verify it.
What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.
[0] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...
[1] http://blog.atom.io/2017/11/15/code-together-in-real-time-wi...
For 2009 hardware running javascript in a browser, you mean? I was running much fancier native stuff much faster (including 3d games) on low-to-mid tier 2009 hardware.
> So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.
I think it definitely accomplished its goals technically, but it certainly failed on adoption. I personally never got into it. I tried it quite early and didn't like it. It was clunky and confusing and didn't seem very useful to me at the time. I wonder if it were re-created with slicker UX (and good performance), would I like it...
facetious comparison aside, i think the (Yegge)? rant about how Google does things applied here.
But email was already an existing protocol. So invites meant nothing. I could still communicate with my family even though they were still on their ISP account. Or my sister with her university account.
There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes.
I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading.
I would piggyback on the social graph of existing networks to get started. I actually had a prototype of the friend discovery code, based on XMPP (using custom stanzas). You login with your credentials, and it shows you all your friends that are using the same app. It worked with GTalk, Facebook Messenger, and Skype (via Skype API). One nice feature was that this worked without getting an API key from Facebook etc., or having a central server. I was so pissed when they all changed their APIs to make this impossible. It felt like a conspiracy to stop this use case.
I still think if somebody pulled this off, it might work, and it would be pretty distruptive (in the good and the bad sense of the word). It would be the last word in the debate between "data wants to be free, change society to enable what technology promises" and "data has to be a commodity, restrict technology because in capitalism we can't feed artists otherwise".
This very thing exists and readily available for use in form of Freenet https://freenetproject.org/
What I envision is more like a modern version of Kazaa. The experience would be like iTunes or Spotify. Select your media folder, give it access to your contact list, and voila, "Pirate iTunes". The closest current analogue would be RetroShare.
A warning letter from the ISP is not quite the same threat as a few years in a fed pen.
Using sharehosters with for-pay premium accounts is popular, as is using VPNs with bittorrent. The alternative is low-quality streaming.
I think the content industry isn't pushing for eradicating illegal downloads, they just want it to be at least as expensive, or more inconvenient than the legal options. (Which are quite good by now, if the shows you want to watch are available from your provider.)
This brings up a good point though. Bittorrent is not free. People who use Bittorrent do pay to use it (bandwidth, setup costs, etc), and pay more to get good quality stuff, but Bittorrent offers better quality and better selection than any licensed service.
Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.
We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google.
We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++
The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.
Public school? Probably not. Tech school? Absolutely.
The RIT DC hub was the shit back in the day....
Back in the day there was nothing underground about it, at least for CS students. :) Connecting to the DC hub was a right of passage. So I am speaking from experience. :)
You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload.
From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy.
There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.
At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.
In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry.
YouTube (Google) pays the recording royalties out of their own pocket for those videos to keep user engagement on the site. If YouTube actually banned this sort of content, everyone would have left the site a long time ago. (IIRC, some gamers moved to Twitch after ContentID flagged their channels on YouTube.)
This meant that you could search out a whole bunch of files you wanted, and queue them up for downloading, and whenever the sharers came back online the downloads would start and go through. These days, BitTorrent operates the same way.
I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content creators multiple of times more then my little ad revenue. How is it that people flaged YouTube Red as anti-content creators and were going after Google with pitch forks and now content creators keep saying that Red Members give them so much more per person. One creator says 1/4 of his income is from YouTube Red (He makes a living on YouTube).
If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD.
If you take audiophile-level paranoia like buying vinyls, SA-CDs or FLAC masters, I think there's an argument to be made that an artist could make more money from people buying high-quality editions of their work to pirate than from people streaming their music.
It's food for thought.
Disclaimer: I am a music student.
[1]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-r...
Justin Bieber has very roughly 5 billion plays on spotify. Using your math, that would equate to 17 million CDs sold. Seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure he would have been better off before the internet, but it still seems doable.
Besides which I think youtube celebrities and twitch gamers have shown it is clearly possible to make a decent (if not quite profitable) living off creating content to be streamed. It's just music doesn't have the pre-eminent spot and advantages over other media it used to.
And if we divide those 238 streams by the 10 songs on the CD, it seems as though we only need to listen to a cd about 25 times before streaming becomes a better option for the artist.
Of course, I won't listen to all my albums this much. Some might only get a few plays. So I suspect that the Miles Davis estate would be better off if I streamed 'Kind of Blue' rather than owning the CD. Conversely, Creed have done relatively well from my ill-advised CD purchase because I can guarantee I'm not going to hit 25 plays on that.
So I guess the moral of the story is that I should stream from artists that I love, and buy albums from artists I am on the fence about.
Even if royalties are the biggest source of income (which I don't believe to be true), I still think streaming is beneficial to small artists. Using your math of 238 plays per CD, at 10,000 listens they would have to sell more than 50 CDs for CDs to be more profitable for them. There are an incredibly high number of artists on Spotify who have 10k plays on a single song who probably couldn't have given their CDs away.
I've gone to shows to see the opening acts and co-headliners because of streaming services. I've bought merch from plenty of small artists that I never would have even known existed. I've listened to genres I had no interest in and found artists I like and support because of streaming services.
I feel like the exposure and the ability to produce your music (and actually have people be able to find and listen to it) massively outweighs any potential loss of revenue. There are potentially some medium sized artists who would have done better in the CD model, but probably not with how prevalent music piracy was in the 2000s.
[0]https://splinternews.com/buying-an-album-isnt-the-best-way-t...
I wonder what percentage of the top 100 artists on streaming services even own their rights? I don't know for sure, but I suspect more money flows to the rights holders when I listen to a Pandora station while I work than if I turned on an actual radio.
> 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD
This is just one data point, but before I signed up for Google Music, I was buying two CDs a year and spending around $35. Now I'm paying $10 / month. How does the amount spent on streaming today compare to the spending on CDs in 1990? Does the equation change if you consider environmental costs of making those CDs and getting them to consumers?
>>In the U.S., recording artists earn royalties amounting to 10%–25% (of the suggested retail price of the recording[37] depending on their popularity but such is before deductions for "packaging", "breakage", "promotion sales" and holdback for "returns", which act to significantly reduce net royalty incomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment#Mechanical_roy...
LPs and such, while coveted by hipsters, is really tough to recommend as a revenue stream for more mainstream genres. The music business has devolved back for many cases where it’s possibly better for an artist to experience play local shows and promote themselves as an entrepreneur rather than to be an employee of a label as almost an unpaid intern.
Also worth noting that 238 streams is ~20 playthroughs of your average 12 song album, for those who frequently listen to entire albums.
Add to that the fact that streaming services have made discovery a much bigger thing. The less mainstream artists are now getting the benefit of appearing on streaming radio and such, making their growth that much easier (after they've passed a certain threshold of course).
Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc.
Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month.
Even if I wanted to go back to my old ways... its just not there any more. I believe iTunes patched out the features that made mytunes possible, and people don't have computers full of mp3s discoverable on a network anymore.
The history is a bit different. Napster was sued out of existence. As I recall, this was done by the record labels, but the argument was that file sharing was unfair to artists. Which it was. But that was obviously not the real point. Streaming services are notoriously stingy when it comes to paying artists for their work. So access to music is still easy, and the net change is that new middlemen are profiting wildly.
(Streaming vs. file sharing is a different issue. I want to own the music I listen to. I don't want to be dependent on an internet connection, a server, a revokable license, etc. )
I still remember the days when P2P connections over the internet "just worked, always" (the early Napster/Kazaa days), and then it went to "it works sometimes", and finally to "almost never works (except if the service offers some kind of middle-man datacenter to bounce the connections between the two NAT'd peers)".
Try to do a IRC DCC file transfer with anyone these days and see what I mean... long ago, it "just worked".
I blame today's unfortunate centralization of internet services largely on NAT breaking P2P connectivity. Who knows, maybe spread of IPv6 will fix this mess... some day...
Anyone remember what that protocol is called?
Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago.
But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" and results would come up. You could enter your data, interests, hobbies, etc. in the program and mark yourself as available (only if you wanted) and it was a really nice way to meet people. I collected stamps at the time so I remember I would search for people who were stamp collectors in countries for which I had no stamp, leading to stamp exchanges apart from some interesting conversation (as you could also throw some of your interests in in the search window).
I thought that was the future and the tech could only get better from there, but then came MSN Messenger, with really bare-bones features in general and in particular no "searchable" functionality, and displaced ICQ. And since then, nothing similar has appeared. Instant messengers are focused on talking to people you already know, and if you want to meet new people, you have to use specific-purpose communities or dating sites. But good luck finding someone who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music at the same time... That function of searching people by interests in a huge directory of people (not restricted, e.g., to a dating site) is what I thought would take the world by storm, and as far as I know it doesn't even exist anymore at enough scale to be meaningful, at least in the West (maybe in WeChat, QQ or one of those apps used in Asia they have something similar, I don't know).
Too many people named Dan.
I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting.
Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at the same time before it could but critical mass.
> something like a real-time Reddit
Reddit did that with Robin, their April's Fools Day experiment two years ago. It randomly connected small groups of the participating redditors in chatrooms, and would gradually merge the chatrooms if the majority of the users voted to do so. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I don't think anyone managed to successfully replicate it since.
You’re right that people didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy model. People assume that privacy by obscurity is a guarantee. Never mind that anyone could write a bot that did what Graph Search did. Graph Search was actually more conservative than it needed to be to avoid surprises.
In the end that all mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem people had.
But there is a lot you can still do with it.
I'm sorry to hear that.
This is probably the reason it was abandoned.
As one of the sibling comments points out, once such a system becomes popular it's also going to be a target for spammers. If there have been any advances in chatbot AI over the past couple of decades that is also likely to make the problem worse.
I guess there would be creeps, as anywhere where you can be exposed to unknown people, but I don't think the problem was worse than elsewhere. In fact, in my later experiences in chats, dating sites, etc., most women seemed to be (understandably) on the defensive due to the amount of stalkers and creeps they had to endure regularly, and in ICQ it didn't seem so much that way, I got plenty of conversations, girls (and guys) giving me their address for exchanging stamps or letters, etc., which I found much harder later in other media. Although maybe it's that both the Internet and myself were young and naive back then.
Anyway, if stalkers did become a big problem, surely the tech could have improved to deal with it.
There are probably several factors, but I think the main reason it was abandoned is simply network effects. MSN Messenger rose for reasons orthogonal to this, and then no one of the main IMs that succeeded it implemented this. Sadly, the question of what IMs gain more traction depends more on network effects than actual quality (see Whatsapp vs. Telegram, etc.)
Just kidding. I would definitely support such a crowdfunding within my modest means. The problem is that I don't think the tech is the main issue (after all, ICQ did it with 90s tehc). Obtaining an userbase is the main issue, and network effects go against new contenders.
Maybe the fact that pretty much everyone has a digital camera in their pocket now means the world has changed into a world where ICQ as the OP described it just can't exist anymore
I met a guy to play Dota 2 with in 2012 and we've been friends since.
After a few years, setting your status to "Skype me" meant every few minutes a chat from a new person advertising porn sites or other scams. So I stopped using it. Presumably so did everyone else; at some point they disabled the feature. And now Skype is just a tool to talk to people you already know.
I loved it. And this was back in 2000 maybe.
Back in the day (yeah, I'm old), you could drop into an IRC channel of strangers and be having a good conversation within minutes[1]. ICQ, as mentioned, had a 'find friend' feature, and many other early social platforms encouraged like-minded strangers to interact.
So we all end up just talking to the same 20 or people we've always spoken to, re-enforcing the echo-chamber-effect, and never introducing new ideas and viewpoints into our lives.
---
[1] IRC these days, if you are lucky to find an active channel, is now so cliquéy that any interlopers are largely ignored.
Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches?
The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem.
Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).
"females who are single, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing" would have returned precise results.
It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.
What's keeping them from being more popular is the price, anything over a 1" e-ink display costs a literal arm and a leg.
Anything that needs to be browsed or flipped through, nope. Very few electronic versions are usable in this case, be they normal LCD screens or eInk.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400x300-4-2inch-E-Ink-displa...
And I don't know why everyone seems to think they aren't successful. Amazon sells a ton of Kindles. They're very successful.
No meaningful latency while writing unless you draw fast large figures while watching for lag.
Upsides: Feels like pencil on paper. With iPad Pro I keep going back to paper. With this... it’s paper.
Downsides: Mobile software clunky, doesn’t connect to all WiFi, hardware paging buttons should not have been on bottom.
The only other major issue is software stability especially when reading. I've had it hardlock while reading something, then have to wait for the battery to drain because it won't respond to any input, then once I have it back up it forgot where I left off so I lost progress. So for the time being it sits, though once a software update or 2 come out I'll try again.
I was blown away when I was able to write some technical specifications in emacs, render them to PDF and share them to the device, then go for a coffee and review my work. I can markup my documents, sync them back to my machine, etc.
I do wish the resolutions of the documents on my desktop were better. I've drafted presentations on the device while thinking. I vastly prefer paper for thinking. This device is perfect for that.
I just wish I could do more with it. I want to be able to hook up a cloud service to interpret my math hand-writing, run it on my theorem prover or checker, and return the results, etc.... much like what people were doing in Xerox Parc ages ago.
There's so much potential here.
[edit: Reviews I read said that the drawings are scalable vectors, but two posts below talk about poor resolution, so maybe not the right device for her]
It's not for everyone, but it might be an option for your wife to consider.
// Digital ink junkie since the Newton, currently own and use latest models of Wacom Cintiq, Surface, iPad, and Remarkable.
Seems like in this day and age, that's not too much to ask for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
E-ink display, good for elder people, you can drop it from 100 feets height, or run a tank over it, drop it in a pool. It will survive.
I haven't looked into driving them yet; that's step 3 and I'm still on step 1 (monochrome OLEDs) but I think you might have to do some funky temperature adjustment stuff to get good results out of them...maybe that hasn't quite been integrated into the display controller chips yet?
Isn't that supposed to be "red all over"? Or are you making a pun?
I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.
There are already E-Ink displays with much a faster update rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsY3T1uzjAI
Who knows how much faster this could get with enough investment? Unless there's some fundamental physical limitation to the update rate that I'm not aware of.
The video serves to demonstrate that given some technological development the entire screen could be like that, and aside from that there are E-Ink screens in common use that can't refresh even such a small area that fast.
Edited video is the slowest kind of content to produce.
I have a much easier time digesting information at my own pace.
Imagine reading news above your sink while doing the dishes.
Imagine the entire walls constructed with e-ink displays in your home and being able to change the wallpapers in your living room depending on what's currently in your mind.
All of those could have a "read-only" mode until you push a button, they would use pretty much no electricity, and would ideally be water-proof.
Instead, what I have right now, is an e-book reader. Which is nice and all. I'm often sending articles to my Kindle (kudos https://p2k.co/) and all sorts of things, but I had much higher hopes from e-ink technology (and still kind of do). The hope of having my home filled with e-ink displays is much greater than having a home filled with sensors.
I don't know how much research is ongoing into it, and I do think it's underutilized (I can't understand why smart watches use LCDs), but there are many breakthroughs before we can get those things you mention.
I still expect it to get all over the world, eventually.
Refresh rate. If all a smart watch did was be a watch, it would be sufficient, but there would be no reason for it to exist. Once you want it to do non-watch things, you need a better refresh rate.
Now (after some time to think) I do think it's mostly a design restriction. Nobody was able to make an e-paper watch look futuristic and expensive.
Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".
[I'm frantically resisting the urge to redraft that sentence]
Since then I had been waiting for E-Ink based laptop for work. It doesn't need to play videos or even display color. As a backend developer, I can live with grey scale display. It doesn't need high refresh rates either.
But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen.
> But now almost 10 years later, it doesn't look like this will ever happen
Some Chinese are trying to do that already : Dasung-Ink-Paperlike-13-3-Monitor
There are reviews around the web about it and you can buy one on Amazon. I have not do it yet for the price is still high at 1200$
I also met with a great manager from the Taiwan Eink company. Eink technologies (for they have several similar ones) are mechanical based which implies many constraints.
For the stories the MIT guys who develop it spend around 20 years on it before passing the baby on to the Tawain based company.
Except Amazon, most big companies are not pushing it, I guess because pictures and videos are so prevalent nowadays.
It was that second aspect that I thought would totally eliminate all credit card fraud and make people comfortable with online purchases on smaller sites. I have no idea why PayPal killed the program, but even before it did, not many people used it. I was the only person I knew that was even aware it existed.
EDIT - if anyone is curious, I looked it up. Two ex-PayPal employees explain here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-PayPal-discontinue-their-one-t...
In my defense both start with C....
So next time my card gets compromised because I used it in a restaurant (seems to happen regularly) then none of those have to be reset. Just get a new "physical" card and go on my merry way. Many hours saved.
We took a hard deep look at a massive stagnant industry (credit cards) and use experience and features as differentiators
I use privacy.com for something similar, but it's a debit card (so it just connects to your bank account) rather than a credit card and doesn't offer any rewards.
Surely they could have very easily sent the CC details to the users by email or SMS (security risks) or better still they could obtain the details by logging into their PayPal account.
Seems odds that the execs axed the product over this when they were so many solutions to the problem.
Interchange fees and their associated bulk volume rate discounts are.
This is how the innovater's dilemma works. Big entrenched company, too scared to make changes that will jeopardize existing partnerships and businesses, upended by a nimbler competitor that doesn't have to care about those things. It'll happen!
They might have been when it started, but clearly something changed. If it was desirable, the moment PayPal decided not to continue, MasterCard would have started looking for alternatives. Since they didn't (and haven't), its pretty reasonable to assume they decided intentionally not to pursue it.
The two other functioning alternatives listed in this thread, getfinal.com and privacy.com, both Visa. Kinda says it all there.
Hell, i just looked it up and they still have it: https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
The last time I logged into my PayPal pre-paid debit card portal, they still had this functionality (sans Browser plug-in), but I don't recall seeing it on PayPal proper for a while...
The last time I talked to the MC folks (granted, it has been a long while), they actually thought it (OTP) was a nifty client-side (plus closed-loop) technique and was a nice (and orthogonal) add-on to the types of security that they are pushing vis-a-vis tokenization on the merchant side...
Edit: Since I started writing this comment others posted the same one - and pointed out it's not really a credit card.
edit: And of course you have the credit card company on your side to assist with fraud awareness and refunds. You won't get this with Paypal, Android/Apple pay, and especially not with any blockchain technologies where there is no intermediary working on your behalf.
I keep a Citi mastercard just for the Virtual Account Number feature and use it every time for online and phone purchases. The BofA feature has some severe issues.
I underestimated the momentum of MS, the power of embarrassment of hiring a high-profile figure to be shown up by a researcher, the incredible anti-FP and even anti-generics...resentment(?) that MS kept towards them. Plus the insane comments from actual developers that literally did not understand the basics of C# ("C is a subset of C#" and "var is dynamic typing" <- comments from a public high-profile MS hire).
I've basically given up hope on programming becoming better over time. A lot of apps are boring grunt work anyway, so the edge in using better tools can be beaten just by throwing a lot of sub-par people at it.
On the plus side, for people looking to strike it rich in "tech", knowing tech isn't really a prerequisite. Persistence and the 'hacker' spirit, even if it means you spend all night writing something in PHP that would literally be one line if you know what you were doing, hey, that's what leads to big exits.
There's two kinds of programs being made. First most common one is the kind you're talking about here: grunt work. It's not about the code, but more about having the code do a straight forward task with very flexible constraints. A web app that talks to a database and does a few simple transformations -- like forum software or a todo app.
The second type is the interesting one: actual difficult code that does something unique and difficult and can take years to write by very experienced developers. Usually the difficult part here is coming up with the correct algorithm and then applying it, often with performance considerations being extremely important as the code is doing a lot of work. An impressive new MMORPG game, a new rendering technique, complex simulations, control code for rockets or advanced batteries.
The big program with functional programming is that it's never been positioned as a solution to the second type. Generally people trying the second type are told to use C, C++ or recently, Rust. Functional programming is marketed as making the first type "better" because trying to market it as being more efficient than C/C++ has not worked as people rely on micro benchmarks for these decisions. But this falls apart with the argument you gave: for the first type, it's better to just hire more junior programmers as there's nothing really difficult involved. And using a functional language makes it extremely difficult to hire junior programmers, because functional languages are aimed at advanced programmers.
It's a massive product-market fit problem.
The examples you gave of difficult problems are mostly soft realtime, which not everything needs to be.
Granted this is a relatively small subset of problems.
(If the whole .NET Core thing gets sorted out.)
DVD-audio. Great multi channel, high rate, high resolution audio. But it required the whole production chain to upgrade as well as new consumer equipement, and they competed with sony own format ( which was also a failure)... But it would have given the record industry a few more years of revenue before the bandwidth would have been sufficient to download or stream music with this resolution.
I was really excited when I got my Lumia 920 [0]: The OS was just so solid, sleek, and fast. Too bad Microsoft didn't put adequate effort into it. It's as if they couldn't care less about this OS.
[0]: Not to mention the great, solid design of the hardware by Nokia.
BIG Music Business sucks and the slow death to the Pop Music Industry. http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/2011/02/death-of-pop-mus...
"...things are actually much better for independent musicians than in the past, just as we would expect. In fact, there's been an astounding 510% increase in independent musicians making their full time living from music in just the past decade."
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130529/15560423243/massi...
As to your specific DVD-Audio example, I think it didn't widely catch on because most music is consumed (1) with earphones (2) in the car (3) as incidental background while multitasking. The scenario of "purposeful" music listening by sitting in the center sweet spot of a 5.1 setup is very rare.
There's also a long history of technology that's "superior" but isn't accepted by the masses. There's a "law of diminishing returns" and/or other dimensions of utility (such as convenience) have higher priority than quality. Examples:
- quadrophonic sound[1] is more immersive than 2-channel stereo but people didn't buy it
- satellite radio is higher quality sound than FM radio but Sirius XM remains a niche and won't penetrate the market like FM did. Yes, FM had higher fidelity than AM and listeners switched but the same didn't happen for satellite.
- 24bit-96kHz or 192kHz audio did not take over 16bit-44kHz (1411kbps). Instead, the opposite happened and more listeners consumed lower quality 128kbps mp3 and AAC files. Lower quality was driven by Napster + iPod + Spotify. Convenience trumped highest fidelity.
- Bluray discs : more customers pay for digital streaming (often with lower resolution than 1080p) than upgrading the old DVDs to Bluray. There was more market penetration with VHS to DVD.
- large 3D tv screens : the explosive growth is smaller screens on mobile phones playing Youtube rather than 3D content like Avatar. 3D is now seen as a gimmick fad.
History has shown that we always overestimate how technical "quality" drives consumer adoption.
I'm not an audiophile, but when I listen to SiriusXM it hear compression artifacts. I'd way rather listen to FM.
Also check out Crystal Method's Legion of Boom in DTS-ES.
I wish there were more releases in 5.1 or better, and specifically EDM releases.
Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference.
95% of the reason why is people don't care about quality audio. It's something about human brains. MP3 sound horrible compared to a FLAC and good equipment. Instead people wear Beats Bluetooth Headphones listening to streamed Audio.
I also blame myself. I use $15 in ear bluetooth ear piece (Looks like a hearing aid) Inovate G10. I listen almost exclusively to podcasts or YouTube videos. The convenience is so much more needed than sound quality. I listen to music at home (When my kids aren't around because all they do is complain). I need to get a good pair of headphones.
For at-rest listening, God made Sennheiser.
Do you have an explanation of how that is possible? On the face of it, CD seems to have more SNR and frequency response than necessary. I've got intelligent friends on both sides of the debate, but I've never heard a plausible explanation from the "I promise I can tell the difference" friends. I tend to believe Monty Montgomery (of Ogg Vorbis fame). After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qFjdQP7Ep0 there's little obvious room for doing better than CD. The best explanation I've heard is that CD mastering is generally aimed at mainstream equipment, and therefore isn't optimal for good equipment.
Technically here is how it works. CDs are at 44.1khz sample rate and you record at 96khz back in 2000s, similar how video recordings are 8k for 4k or 1080p. Then when you exported your mix to be mastered it would get knocked down to 44.1khz not very noticeable in the least unless you listened to stuff all day everyday and had to train your ear to hear everything.
If you compare the two 96khz and 44.1khz there is a distinct difference BUT it is not something that people would care about because their equipment only gives a clarity of less than 44.1khz. My system from recording all the way to audio output and DAC were 96khz and cost my thousands and thousands of dollars.
I do believe that you can tell when you hear the two. Kind of like how FLAC and MP3 sound different on my LG V20 phone.
EDIT: upper ear response is presumably limited to ~20 kHz
I can tell the difference with my now-old ears, if it is a good recording of real-world instruments in a common space.
That is a lot of qualifiers, but on playback you can ‘feel’ that other space.
I believe that it is because of the way that the higher frequency components of the sound interact with the environment and effectively down-transpose and affect the rest of the signal before they hit the listener’s ear.
A 1000 times this.
High bit rate (FLAC/DVD-Audio/etc.) sounds way better than standard CD Audio, even on mid-range ($3k) kit. Of course you DO need to listen to proper music on it, that uses real instruments[2], instead of all that bump-n-grind poplet-R&B stuff that kids like these days[1].
Modern 'pop' music is also mastered for MP3/Streaming nowadays anyway, so high bit rates of that stuff will never sound good no matter what you play it on.
---
[1] Get off my lawn.
[2] No I don't just mean Classical, but good Rock/Metal also.
Probably GoNovate, right? https://www.amazon.com/GoNovate-Bluetooth-Earpiece-Smallest-...
It nearly happened too - they got down to talking price[1]
Eventually some company, Google comes to mind in particular, would have invented a device similar to, but not as well-designed as the iPhone. The development might just not have been that momentous and perhaps technology would have developed in an entirely different direction because of that.
Perhaps - due to a lack of an App Store business model - we even would have had a continuous boom of the web and more open technologies on mobile devices rather than the lull web technologies experienced on mobile devices until fairly recently. Who knows?
BeOS was very much a desktop OS. Like other operating systems such as AmigaOS it performed very well on some stripped-down desktop platforms such as set-top boxes, too (those were all the rage back in the 90s, at least some companies bet the whole farm on that assumption ...). I'm not sure if BeOS would've lent itself to mobile devices as well as NeXTSTEP did.
NeXTSTEP was a forward-looking, POSIX-compatible OS that was ahead of its time.
Most importantly though, Be Inc. didn't have Steve Jobs. They had Jean-Louis Gassée but I somehow doubt he would've had a similar influence on design, technology and the business world.
Someone once quipped that NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million. There's something very true about that statement.
The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device.
Maybe. Let's see what the next generation of visual programming and IDE UX bring.
This user is a strawman. The problem we didn't solve was decoupling ourselves from corporations controlling our user experience, because we didn't create a good enough alternative for getting stuff done.
Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc.
To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I want to do with e.g. office would not have 0 wait time except non-user centric design. My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC.
The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization.
I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming but if I had to guess, it were the mainframe vendors. Cool for embarrassingly parallellizible batch processing jobs for massive bureaucracies, not so much for desktops.
And don't get me started on the idiocy of thinking it's fine software developers don't need to develop domain understanding in the field they operate.
With the general purpose computer desktop development, we have a system that's broken on so, so many levels.
At least Os X seems to try to do the right thing at an attempt at fluency and I can get a linux desktop to operate smoothly. Even windows 10 starts fast but O brother and sister of the clunkyness of software.
Despite what I said, I think the situation is improving. Immediacy in handheld devices puts pressure on the desktop to concentrate on not wasting the users time as well.
Let's see how it goes.
I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels.
I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for granted and nostalgia.
Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't.
I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly.
One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time.
The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint.
Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not.
And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.
In theory things have gotten a lot faster, doubly so if you consider UI and logic can be distributed over multiple cores, and even moreso considering file access is a factor 10-100 faster than back then, and memory size has increased by over 9000.
But it'd be poor on features and nobody would want to use it because of Feature X. I had been looking for a lightweight Slack client alternative, but the only thing I could find looked like shit.
You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted environment to limit damage when some malware did get through. It didn't even support multitasking. My point is that computers today do so much more, but responsive UI is entirely possible for desktop applications, but the development cost is more than most companies/people are willing to pay.
If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.
I have to add that most computer I see of my friends are extremely snappy, I don't really see what you are talking about.
Developer and corporate status games select for political skill and self-indulgent overcomplexity, with added spice from dark patterns. There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance.
The culture at some companies would have been hugely improved with a few literal angry-users-with-pitchforks moments.
Then why do it? I like a good UX just as much as you, and I value simplicity, but people just want "good enough". And that is all there is to it.
I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consumers who live in tablet land and should be ignored for desktop/workstation use cases.
"It didn't do dynamic language processing "
Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. Then notify user. Don't rob the system of its low latency just because you want to run the analysis in the same thread because it's "simpler". It's simpler only if low latency is not a fundamental requirement.
"It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware"
Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis.
"your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI,"
This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.
It's a blocking operation, so doing it in a different thread will not magically mean the requesting application can get it faster. Besides, this is already done in a different thread, but it increases the load of updating the UI.
> Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis.
Which is already what is happening, but all data in and out needs to monitored. But regardless, it cannot operate in an unsafe unrestricted environment, because that implies full access to the memory.
> This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.
As I started to say, you have some merit to the argument, but I simply pointed out that modern UIs require multiple orders of magnitude more computational power to render. And providing a fallback is yet another cost of developing, and for the most part not something people/companies will pay for.
See how fast it felt.
https://youtu.be/XwbrCYJcrKQ?t=4m34s
No way and NO HOW! That statement is 100% false. The issue is you remember that it felt fast. My Amiga felt like lightening to me in 1985 and I still boot it up from time to time. The delays in everything is over the top and Mac 128k were horribly slow.
This was of course done because the systems back then were so slow that they would be in danger of regularly dropping key presses or clicks otherwise, which would have turned people off these newfangled electronic typewriters. But the result was that the interactive experience with respect to latency was given great importance in the design of those systems, unlike today, when it is taken for granted that people will accept whatever laggy system they are given, and will just be directed towards a CPU upgrade if they complain about it.
A Windows 3.1 PC from that era, not so much :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Plus
I think the example is a bit too sluggish but is probably a more correct presentation of the actual facts than my nostalgic outburst.
I was an Amiga kid. I had friends and co-workers who had Macintosh Plus and they always seemed to be so S-L-O-W to an Amiga.
Amiga 1000 from 1986 https://youtu.be/CDWdVk-hmgA?t=51s
The window draws were also slow BUT Ray Tracing and full animation compared to that lame Macintosh is just a whole different generation. Amiga lost and it took till 1994 or 1995 to beat an Amiga in 1986.
Of course, the newer one has newer graphics, but it also has enough transistors to replace each one in the 68k with a whole new 68k.
It was the CFO's idea. Software is expensive, and hardware is _incredibly cheap_.
Moreover, if you're in the business of selling hardware, be it PCs, mobile phones, white goods, whatever, it is in your power to throw cheap hardware at the problem, because software development will always be one of your highest costs. You will never be able to just drop readymade code into your new hardware design. And you can more easily recoup the cost of hardware development because you can mark up the price of anything with a faster CPU or more memory accordingly; you can't so easily charge for software features.
As computers become "locked app collections" they become appliances, appliances business and government institutions can control and regulate. "Can you make the iPad just not do that thing?"
1) Some would say that the open web isn't so open anymore, and is under constant assault. One example might be the recent W3C adoption and endorsement of EME.
2) The fact that the open web "lost" in the battle for mobile dominance is a thing. Most "serious" apps have a native version on at least iOS and Android, and the webapp version (if there even is one) is usually a worse experience.
There are still good technical reasons for some native apps, but that will dwindle more and more.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
We sandboxed away innovation, so now all we have is web apps that process text, video and audio all in the same way.
Sandboxing applications and ending the free-for-all over the user’s entire file system were a long time coming. Then spammy software download websites and “Download Now” banner ads bigger than the official download buttons for popular software made it obvious that we needed a trustworthy distribution center. Of course someone starting an OS in the mid 2000s wasn’t going to adopt the Windows shareware distribution model.
The Linux distribution model of a vetted, quality controlled repository of software from a trusted middleman was so obviously superior, of course it won. I guess it’s surprising that iOS got so far with no escape hatch, but Android is the far more popular platform and has always let more technical users peek over the walls if they so desire.
I’m more surprised that so many people are content to type on glass. I was sure that the blackberry keyboard was the future.
I agree that mainstream desktop OSes have failed to give us this yet. Fuchsia sounds like an opportunity to do better.
Never heard of Sandstorm before. That's a really impressive product. I'll definitely be using it in the future.
Why in the fuck do desktop computers have user-based permission models? Don't answer that, I know why, it's because they inherited them from the server-OS ancestors, but it's retarded. Desktops are personal computers, there is no reason to stop the user from doing what they want because it is their computer. Some might say, "oh, well, we can protect the system from malicious software by limiting user access to it" and they're correct, but who gives a shit? If my OS gets destroyed I'll reinstall it. It's a bit of a pain, but whatever. What's really important to me are my documents, my work, and the user-permission model does jack and shit for protecting those as the ransomware wave proved.
Application-oriented permissions are the obvious and correct way to do things in personal computing.
Network resources, hosted on servers, need user permissions. Not desktops.
Did people really think the arms race of heuristic
malware detection in bolt-on security software would
be be sustainable?
My old Palm TX did the same thing, showing the graffiti area when a text input had focus and otherwise giving applications the use of all but a status bar's worth of glorious 320x480 screen space. Granted that Palm OS did less to help applications really leverage the extra space than iOS does. But most of what I did on that device was reading anyway.
Of course, Graffiti via stylus suffers less from a soft UI than keyboard input via touch, so it's not quite apples to apples. Still, though, as annoying as a soft keyboard so frequently can be, I wouldn't give up half my phone's display for a hard one.
Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future.
But that's the thing, there's no "os market" for appliances. ChromeOS won't 'take over' computing devices any more than toasters will take over your kitchen.
The web is a big success story, but it's not all there is in computing.
As a shortcut to understanding this, consider what hardware support something like ARKit [1] needs. Or consider whether you could write a multitrack audio recorder as a web app (no, because the web audio APIs aren't multitrack).
My point is that you need "general purpose computing" that is not the web for many things. The web is indeed open, but we also need our general purpose computers to be open. Android is better than nothing, but it's arguably not as open as a PC running Linux.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmen...
The answer to the second question is also no.
It came out in 2010 for Android and Microsoft phones, but has been hamstrung by Apple for most of its development. I had several startup ideas which required NFC market penetration on phones, but which even today are impractical due to Apple's chokehold on NFC APIs for fear of a payments competitor.
In order to even find "tap to pair" devices, you often need to seek out the one manufacturer or option available. There should be personal phone-to-phone "tap to pay" by e-cash or cryptocurrency. "Tap to auth" using your phone. "Tap to key exchange" should be part of doing business, sending "business card" contact details as well. Samsung had S-Beam, "tap to share files" securely with WiFI Direct.
But even with the addition of Core NFC, you need to find a responsible adult with an Android phone to even write a single bit as an iPhone owner.
To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc.
GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc.
You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparently back and forth between the client and the server.
It was released in around 2006, it was not without issues but seemed to be a much better way to develop complex client code than the Javascript options available in 2006, as far as I could see.
It never really took off.
Google moved their team over to Dart at some point. I guess the Oracle Java lawsuit meant Google were unenthusiastic about continuing to have anything to do with Java where they didn't need to.
The compile times were slow. Not all Java compiled so you had to have a mental model in your head not only of Java but also the Javascript that was going to be generated which was mental overhead.
There also was a huge impedance mismatch between Java and JavaScript at the time. Nowadays you can write decent functional code in Java but back then you needed anonymous classes for that.
They’re just sugar around protypical object-oriented code.
The open source movement is still ongoing, but there is apparently no help from Google any more.
Apparently Google do use GWT internally, but it's a fork and not the same as the open source version that we can all use. Apparently the reason is they integrate it with their own build tools (i.e. not Maven) that themselves are not open source.
At the conference they were talking about GWT 3 which is basically a re-write, open source, but it seemed to lack a lot of the features that made GWT good. I appreciate the time they're devoting to the project, and don't want to sound ungrateful, but I do not expect a useful GWT 3 any time soon.
Also, it had a debugging version where it actually ran the client code in a JVM, and you could step through it with Eclipse etc. Of course that didn't help if the bug only happened after the Java-to-Javascript compilation process, but in my short experience with it I never had such a bug.
Of course Javascript and the browsers have caught up, but I would have expected these features to be gladly embraced by the development community at the time, as they really did help. But they weren't.
Now we have React and JSX.
Maybe the tooling just caught up.
Closure is from Google, but is independent of GWT which is also from Google, despite the two projects having similar aims. Closure is modern, whereas GWT is not.
The open source team who maintain GWT now (after Google abandoned it) are in the middle of a re-write, which will be called GWT 3 (current version is GWT 2). GWT 3 will convert Java to unoptimized Javascript and use the Closure compiler to optimize it etc (as Clojurescript does). Current GWT 2 does not use Closure but does its optimizations itself.
I may have got some of that wrong, corrections welcome!
Beyond some very nice pieces of software created by clever SW developpers (let's mention DBPedia Spotlight, RelFinder, Semantic MediaWiki, N3.js) I mostly agree with your argument.
To be the devil's advocate, in my opinion, data lakes are just a new buzzword that will eventually become what the Semantic Web was supposed to be. With some millions dollars, companies will aggregate and interlink their datasets. There are then one step away from extracting their master data from their data lake & publish it as Linked Corporate Data. From that, the public part of will be published as Linked Open Data.
I'm sure most of you don't miss it, but there was so much amazing work. Rather than the budgets shifting to Three.js etc, it went to apps or dried up completely.
I think there is great stuff to be done (and is done) with WebGL, but most of it is in the background and subtle. "Walking through a data world" is just a dumb idea, for lots of reasons. But using WebGL to speed up 2D visualizations works great, as is using it to make more interesting 2D visualizations. However, that is a subtle art.
The reason that 3D web hasn't been big is because, the most effective way of making and consuming content is via natural language, or text.
text, by its nature, is 2D. 3D won't be mainstream, because it's too demanding to make.
In retrospect I maybe should have just started with ThreeJS or another higher level abstraction.
Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
I dunno, ten years ago a lot of people were predicting that Second Life would be the Next Big Thing, and assuring me that I should really be buying up Second Life real estate with my hard-earned real-world money because soon it'd be worth a lot more.
Second Life has survived, but it certainly hasn't gone mainstream. It's just another weird corner of the internet with its own community, and good luck to 'em.
But you don't need to put on VR helmet and you don't need a fibre and you don't need to ride a VR motorcycle to get to HN, but on the other hand, you can hang out in multiple bars simultaneously from a tiny, wireless multiverse terminal that you carry in your pocket everywhere. In many ways, we're far beyond the metaverse imagined in Snowcrash.
Remember to slow down when crossing sim boundaries. There's a big bump as the avatar is handed off from one simulator to another. Physics engine handoff is a tough problem.
Letting people use their devices without looking at or touching them would be a huge improvement over what we have now. Input especially is terrible, I'm typing this on a phone and a part of me hates every second of it. Someone, anyone, fix this crap!
Not really! Watts does something a lot closer to what you describe with "ConSensus" in Blindsight, and handles it deftly enough. I think it's more just that the idea of VR as virtual space was the dominant metaphor of its time, and contemporary fiction reflects that time every bit as much as Watts's ConSensus - thought-controlled wireless information access, rendering to the optic nerves - reflects its own.
I think the persistence of the older style has to do partly with the fact that we can't yet implement the newer one no matter how much more useful it would actually be, and partly with the fact that VR metaverses look really cool in demos.
I would like to try a virtual world with facial feature tracking, like the new Animojis on iPhone X. It would be interesting to play a multiplayer game where you communicate with voice, body language, and facial expressions.
A VR headset obscures the eyes, so you couldn't use a 3D camera. Maybe a combination of 3D tracking and sensors inside the headset.
Simple applications already exist; look at Rec Room for example. That's got voice, limited body language (mostly hands) and I think even simple facial expressions that it infers from... idk, something. Voice chat too.
I never got the value proposition of Second Life. It wasn't game-y enough to be a game and, for me at least, it didn't really add much over more "traditional" collaboration/communication/socialising methods like text and video chat, social networks, twitter etc.
The idea isn’t terrible, but the implementation had some horrific flaws, and Linden Labs became notorious for infuriating users.
SL might have taken off if both servers and clients were fully open-sourced, and LL had concentrated on building a global system for connecting open servers together.
I strongly suspect someone will rediscover the idea 5-10 years from now, do it properly, and replace today’s web.
Very likely, also happening in VR.
> and replace today’s web.
Not likely. It's just not going to happen. Pretty sure there have been multiple attempts at a 3d internet, but, nope.
They tried, but so far it has failed to catch on and i predict more of these projects will go abandoned , including second life's own experiment, Sansar. IF anything the side-detour in VR has stalled the progress in virtual worlds for a few years.
Another problem is underpowered laptops with intel HD graphics and tablets.
I don't think the idea of metaverse is going away per se, it's a freeing and creative experience . I do think the focus on VR has held it back for 2 years now.
Notice how all the sf implementations have a lightweight & fully immersive interface? You need tgat tech - and at a cheap commodity price - before you’ll see virtual worlds be a thing.
Until then you just have MMPOGs with some more creative options.
On the other hand you have people who master the language on a whole new level, like Douglas Adams.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
So depending on how you choose you metric, English wins overall
It seems like a much better idea than esperanto.
i'm no linguist but my familiarity with german/chinese and a smattering of other languages has led me to conclude that humans have an inbuilt tendency to just mess things up just because. If there's a grammar rule that can be broken or inverted, some language out there will do it. the tower of babel is encoded in our DNA. The Diryabal language even has a gender for vegetables and fruits. (http://www.superlinguo.com/post/5746695497/lady-nouns-and-ve... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language)
Just think, it could’ve been French. It was dominant for many many years.
Russian was a huge candidate as well. Wanna learn that? I’m a native Slavic speaker and I wouldn’t wish a Slavic language on anyone who needs to become fluent enough to do business.
Spanish was (is?) a big candidate too, that one is about as hard as English i guess.
Portuguese? I can’t tell how hard it is, but it sounds more difficult to me than Spanish.
Arabic was a strong contender once upon a time as well. That to me seems very difficult to learn.
Of course we could go for Chinese. I hear that’s easy to learn conceptually, but hard to learn how to speak properly.
Ultimately we landed on English in part because of the cultural and historical dominance, and in part because it’s just easy enough for anyone to become fluent enough. The nice thing about it is that it steals language constructs and words so liberally from other languages that anyone can find something familiar to grab onto.
Unfortunately there's a lot of resistance to accepting it as the official universal language, not in small part due to the anti-multeralist stance of the major anglo nations. One can only hope Brexit doesn't make German a virtual necessity to deal with the EU in the long term.
The EU has had more than twenty official languages for many years, I don't think it is likely at all that this will suddenly change to one language. I also don't think there is any chance for English being removed, since it is the most widely understood language in the union (the UK being a member or not has no relevance to that).
To me English doesn't feel logical at times (maybe a subjective observation) but at least we all can agree that the ortography with its historical baggage is not optimal.
Personally, I think the most helpful thing has been the cultural dominance of English language movies and TV series in my youth. Also, much of today's computer technology coming from the US, all that material is in English. It could have been any of those languages, because I don't strongly believe in that languages are intrinsically difficult to learn. They are just different. And typologically, English is quite distant from my native language.
I travel a fair bit and it still surprises me how often I hear English, usually lyrics, regardless of the local language.
English isn't particularly logical. This is partly because it is a hodge-podge of Germanic and Latin roots. I think its also because it's so widely used. It's accepted a ton of vocab from around the world and usage seems to have a "natural selection" effect on grammar.
I'm not sure I agree about French. It was the main diplomatic language before American hegemony but I'm not sure it ever really took off much as a second language. I actually think that German was the natural choice if things had turned out differently. The reason is that, in the 20s and 30s, German was the lingua franca of science and technology. Germany was also a pioneer in film. These were only just starting to dominate culture at that time and, without the upheaval of WWII, could easily have spread from there.
Also English had multiple support points instead of 1 (France): UK, US, British colonies.
Earlier? The French invented the movie theater.
Or German, which was also a very widely internationally used language in science before the wars.
But if you are interested in universal languages, I suggest you to check out Sol-re-sol [1]. I have read the story in Paul Collins' "Banvard's Folly" and have been fascinated by it ever since.
English is also an official language in Malta, but not Cyprus.
Still I think UE should keep English, since it's already in place and I don't think it would be useful to switch to French.
I, naytiv British, wud go for speling reform in preference to pronouncing "wo-uh-ld" or "deb-t'", et cetera.
oh no don't do that! that's like british teenage slang. even their parents cannot understand tem!
For some reason, it's not half has horrible to listen to broken English. Unless it's by Germans, in which case I usually leave the room. Or drop the class, as it happened during my studies.
The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like.
After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-wei... has a couple of nice examples.
Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.
I'd go back to the Roman invasion, at least, and the mixing of Latin as the official language of Roman Britain with the Brytthonic language(s) [themselves already probably mixing with other earlier Celtic tongues].
Some of the Latin in English (and Cymraeg) was adopted via the Norman/French tongue but there's pretty clear evidence -- AFAICT, I'm not a linguist -- of Latin being retained and adopted from the occupation. That presumably gave us a Creole as a starting place to add in Germanic (Saxon, Frisian, Jutlandish), Celtic (Irish, Pictish?), and Nordic languages in the first millennium AD making the mixing of Norman French just more of the same??
So I'd say, "after two thousand years of this" ...
It can be hard to tell the history though, eg sovereign came from French (rein) but got Latinised (regnare) in spelling reform.
One interesting thing for me was finding English loanwords in Cymraeg (former Welsh language) that are no longer used in English. I'll bet there are some French loanwords in English that aren't in French any more?
There are words adopted twice too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Fre... has lots of examples. Giving us chief and chef in English with different meanings but based on a single French word (I gather) adopted at different times.
I don't know any and I don't think I'll be able to spot them since they aren't in French anymore.
But (from your link), there are words coming from Old French in English which then went back in French, but usually keeping the English pronunciation.
The main reason is that it's so much easier to learn than English, it can be taught "for free". Basically, instead of just teaching the target language, first teach Esperanto. At the end of a fixed time, students are better at the target language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
In the same way that having a single programming language would be, right? :)
Joking aside, I find having multiple languages part of the charm of being a homo sapiens. We would be missing some colour in our world if we all communicated in the same tongue and, indeed, I don't think it would solve many real-life issues around _miscommunication_.
Still waiting...
The impression I got was that they did work excessively well on a very narrow niche of problems (simulations, mostly). But "programming" them was a huge pain, and for the general purpose arena, they were not useful.
There's a reason people used analog computers back them, and there's a reason nobody uses them now. Most of the reason is about how noise interferes with small components, and it's a physical reality that won't go away.
However, the research did find it's way into telecom, high speed multiplexing switches, with massive bandwidth in a compact formfactor would not have been economically viable without photonics.
So he's right about optical computing, but just not in the way you anticipated :)
Just extremely fixed functions with mind-blowing capacity.
It's all fine that I ended up not taking more pictures becuase the one place you could see them is being shut down at the end of the month.
They appear to have pivoted to professional cinema.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/06/lytro-camera-lets-you-focus-ph...
On the other hand, what I do expect to happen maybe is my mobile camera will advance to the point where it takes 1000 images in 1/1000th of a second so I can just wave it around then then post process any image at nearly any resolution any dof so I don't need lenses, don't even have to aim much. Unfortunately actually processing 1000 images in a short amount of time is 10-20yrs off?
I'm a little surprised at their pro video camera hasn't been more popular. It seems like the no need for a green screen feature would be useful for getting better lighting for effects scenes.
but big metal industrial parts that were impossible to machine might be a thing? I confess no knowledge as to their real commercial success so far.
Could you talk more about what that entails? That sounds fascinating as hell.
Basically, I'm an epidemiologist, and I work on mathematical and computational models of disease spread, usually trying to respond to either clinical or policy questions.
Let me know if you want more information?
https://www.adidas-group.com/en/media/news-archive/press-rel...
And it's not all plastic
The patents for laser sintering are running out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering
my colleague at my Uni 3D printing society showed me a fully working planetary gear unit about 30mm x 30mm x 30mm yesterday, made from titanium and printed in one pass with zero assembly.
It's coming
I'm hoping we'll have some affordable SLA printers fairly soon.
But I agree that desktop 3d printing certainly didn't transform much in the home.
I made the mistake to 3d print in white plastic, which is turning yellow very quickly, not very durable as you say.
My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets.
There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market.
8 to 10 new ones come out each day.
Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets."
Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimized with more data.
The more data you feed in the more obfuscated the truth becomes.
Drug discovery is hard and CRISPR modifications are technology way ahead of clear problem framing.
https://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2017/03/targets-drugability-...
For 12 years, I've had a chronic autoimmune disorder that I had hoped would be solved by the likes of a massive genetic dataset of Ulcerative Colitis twins that had been separated at birth where one twin had the disease and the other didn't.
I had hoped that CRISPR would be the solution given enough problem context from a solid GWAS, but this was foolish.
Our best bets in biotech are not in the latest technologies, they are in ensuring that basic science, phase 0, and phase 1 trials get large unfettered funding.
I had hoped Liz Parrish's outfit would make leaps and bounds in genetic modification for patients like me, but that ended up being baloney. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11560943
CRISPR technologies are like bullets to attack problems, but the operator is always increasingly blind. Bonferroni Corrections abound and family wise error rate are unforgiving in all things related to GWAS studies.
This is a correct and useful analogy. Nonetheless, biologists are excited about CRISPR because, to continue your analogy, we were previously working with spears. And now we have bullets. Still don't know where to quite fire them yet. But it's a nontrivial advance.
He explained CRISPR as "one of the crucial technologies we don't yet have the wisdom to wield"
I recently learned (I believe on here, in the past week), CRISPR was used to develop a genetic treatment on the first human patient to solve an inherently genetic disorder.
I'm honestly terrified we're accelerating our technology faster than our societies can adapt to the potential threats they may pose.
They are different technologies but zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) but they both do DNA editing.
I think the original warning is still valid.
We are on the cups of this being an actual treatment. My niece and mife's MS might be next.
I made a couple of apps and used a ton of Adobe Air apps (non-Flash) back in the day. Thought it was the future.
It failed, for some reason.
^^^^ this is the reason why the rise of Electron wasn't surprising to me. In fact, I was surprised by people being surprised. I realize that Electron is WAY more sophisticated but "desktop web apps" have been around for a while.
It’s still around however.
On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general.
Gah, aren't we all? Watching John Carmack push Scheme for the Oculus Rift 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs] made me feel like something was right in the universe.
Since I found Haskell, no. Not anymore.
And I don't expect Haskell to take over the world either. I do expect a large crop of new languages that extend on the concept, and some of them to take over the world.
Scheme pursued a foolish simplicity, foregoing the complexity necessary to deal with the real world.
It's a wonderful language for implementing language interpreters, but I wouldn't want to write large programs in it. For that, the only thing worth using is Common Lisp.
And dynamic-wind is the price you have to pay for call/cc. UNWIND-PROTECT is not the same thing. Multi-shot continuations is he reason. One way would be having explicit one-shot continuations and escape continuations. Those are faster and will make UNWIND-PROTECT work.
I am more in favour of delimited continuations though.
Delimited continuations makes that a bit simpler (since you can easily implement something like dynamic wind using them).
It could have revolutionised journalism, and I still think we will eventually get something like it once the tech is really invisible, but the social aspect will take ages to sort out.
When they reach the age when all that is legal, the need for privacy goes down quite a bit.
You can spot the exact moment all the hype died, in that one post.
Google engineering was unwilling to remove such a useful feature... but Apple has withheld seemingly crucial features... so I still hope one day there'll be iGlasses.
Now that the hype over the original Glass release subsided, there are actually some promising developments for the enterprise market. Notably Augmedix, a company aimed at optimizing doctor-patient interaction uses it as a tool allowing for remote medical assistants (https://www.augmedix.com)
By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on.
However, we just haven't seen that. We have a lot of gambling, a lot of whales moving the waters, and a lot of irrational exuberance.
But no solid tech. It's still early, but I haven't even heard of anything in the works that really knocks my boots off. All in all, I'm glad people are getting rich (although my hunch is that most getting rich were so to begin with), but so far the tech part of it all has been a big disappointment.
I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.
It's easy to look at the space right now and see that it isn't currently viable, but that sentiment completely ignores the passage of time and the fact that we are moving towards the goal of general applicability.
Yes, there will probably be a 2000's style shakeout of all the failed or mislead or me-too attempts, but the fact that there are so many projects popping up should tell you that we are still trying to figure out what we can and should do with blockchain.
"Market" and "market cap" are two different things. The market cap of a currency is inversely driven by the velocity of money, which for bitcoin is quite low. The "market" (cap) of the US dollar is in the trillions even by low conservative estimates.
You're right that most of it is over-inflated hype. But to say the technology is useless is a stretch.
1. subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion.
The rules are for one thing and one thing only: To maximize the price per share of the company. This correlates with privacy and security, but only because the market has eliminated the players that do not provide security and privacy for users. But even then, there is plenty of evidence that your data is not secure or private, in the hands of tech giants. The definition of security is itself subjective and contextual.
What the market does not eliminate (yet), are companies that abuse their power once they have it. Google dropped "Don't Be Evil" and backed it up with actions that aren't quite so benevolent. Although other services such as DuckDuckGo have launched, to try to compete, the market ultimately did not change. If this were to happen in a decentralized blockchain service, the back-end would be fully transparent. Therefore, the end users could have easily chosen another engine which is built upon that same back-end, rather than a fully watered down version that tries to reinvent the billion-dollar wheel on a sub-million-dollar budget.
I love decentralisation as much as the next guy but it's not a feature. Apart from the obvious authority-circumvention (both positive and negative), what killer features do these systems have?
All the interesting projects I've seen for ethereum rely on Intel SGX to bring ground truth about the real world onto the chain.
About relying on Intel SGX. Yes, blockchain oracle to be trusted needs to be run in some kind of protected environment. So what? It doesn't imply that technology is useless. I would say, we have a synergy of different security technologies to get really impressive results.
However, you're right that most of these projects fail to deliver any value. Many projects are riding the hype-train, and many more are outright scams. However, the example I named is none of those.
Edit: I should add that a big problem of centralized markets is that nobody wants to put all of their eggs in one basket. Take Second Life for example: In SL, your digital avatar and assets are siloed into that world. You cannot transfer them to the next great virtual world. This is conceptually similar to the standardization debates. Anyone can make their own protocol, but if there are profit motives behind one, the industry will be reluctant to adopt. Standardization takes a lot of time, trust, and debate. And for good reason!
With decentralized marketplaces, standards are not quite as important. An implementation can be as fluid as an app, and the cost of replacing one interface/implementation with another is much lower than the cost of standardization. The internal workings of the marketplace itself can be altered with a democratic vote.
This is all theoretical, we have yet to see these ideas produce real returns. But the killer feature is that people have more incentives to invest their resources toward adopting the platform, and that itself is a tangible value, as long as the adoption of the platform itself creates value in other ways.
That may change, of course.
But: There's already tech available enabling these very use cases (see https://webtorrent.io/) and the adoption is pretty low. Plus IPFS doesn't solve the problem of disappearing peers at all. If no one's willing to mirror your awesome IPFS page, it will be gone the same way as with centralized hosting.
Fun Fact: IPFS is not BlockChain tech.
I have bought and sold items on open bazaar when it was working and it works flawlessly. The buying and selling experience is by far the best I've had. Since there are no fees (other than transaction fees charged by BTC/BCH) you can make more profit compared to selling on ebay/amazon.
While it's just a Chromium with an integrated ad blocker + no-track, I think their curated publisher model might change the online ad industry for the better!
They want to decentralize AI and facilitate democratized AI economies on the blockchain.
That's the fundamental flaw in the blockchain, IMHO. The amount of resources in terms of computing and electricity you need to verify transactions at scale is ridiculous. Nobody's going to bother with that unless there's a serious payoff involved.
I find it helps to mentally replace the word 'blockchain' with 'triple entry accounting.' You don't expect much groundbreaking tech work to come from something like triple entry accounting.
Even more interestingly you can compute a score between author of the statement and viewer of the statement, basically telling you whether or not you can trust the information given your current belief system. For example if you are a flat-earther, you can get spaceX news filtered quite easily. From the computational point of view it's faster not to compute the whole matrix of score but use some lower dimensional embeddings so you do a matrix factorization, and that's how you get all the user recommendation systems ala Netflix.
There were plenty of people warning about that by then (I wasn't). And time showed them right.
Interestingly, now we have Google pushing for the opposite extreme. There is absolutely no objective reality on its searches. Even the meaning of the words are linked to your persona.
I was convinced at that time that 3D would eventually be the way that everyone watched sports and that this would eventually top the in game experience. I'm still surprised that theaters and sports networks haven't partnered to display more sporting events in this fashion.
I forgot how the device was called, but there was a Blackberry or similar device that didn't have your oily fingers smearing the very screen you're trying to interact with. You didn't obscure the display with fingers. Instead, the touch-sensitive rectangle was on the back of the device, and cursor was displayed on front side, in the spot corresponding to the spot you touched.
I have a pixel 2 and I can swipe down the notifications by swiping down on the fingerprint sensor.
Minidisc. This was generally popular in Hong Kong and Japan, perhaps other parts of the world, but in the US I gather it was marketed as a CD alternative instead of a mix-tape alternative. Digital copy protection hobbled the latter immediately, of course. I still used a pair of them ten years after getting my first player as a poor man's two-track recorder.
When Google launched G+ it was actually one of two new products the primary one being Google Accounts. Before that point you needed to use a Gmail account to sign up on any of Google's services and it made everything a big pain when you had more than one Gmail.
Now with a single Google Account you could sign in to Google's entire ecosystem, including all of your Gmail accounts at the same time. It also came with a free, ad-free, totally simple, you-don't-have-to-use-it social network called G+.
Google should have marketed this all honestly. Instead they started talking up G+, and hid Google Accounts underneath it. This was a huge mistake. The general public felt like they were being tricked, because they were, albeit far less nefarious reasons than was assumed. Nobody wanted to give their name, to sign up to G+, and therefore rejected both G+ and the Google Accounts system.
This compounded because Google really needed everyone to switch to the new account system. Otherwise they were doomed to continue supporting both Gmail authentication and Google Accounts authentication forever. So Google began pushing for people to create Google Accounts, as you would imagine. People then saw this as Google trying to force them to give their full name, trust was already gone.
Amazing to me people trusted Facebook over Google because at the time Google so far had a very good record protecting private information. Now that's all gone of course but at the time they had an incredible amount of good will which was seemingly not reciprocated and now Google is a slimy gross privacy succubus the same as Facebook is. Probably they just threw their hands up and said 'fuck it'.
Google tried to further reduce complexity in their myriad of different platforms. They now had two social networks G+ and Youtube. G+ was going to eventually absorb and replace Youtube, it would have been pretty elegant really. The first step was to have the Google Accounts system absorb Youtube accounts. People resisted this again because at this point good will was gone. Eventually Google gave up on everything.
Now G+ is a cesspool of tacked on features, advertising, just a bad smell entirely. It did have a lively base for a short while. Things really went downhill after the Youtube consolidation because G+ suddenly had what was notoriously one of the worst communities on the internet, Youtube comments.
Google has I believe still not successfully moved everyone over to Google Accounts. Youtube was never successfully merged into G+. G+ is pretty much dead at this point. Nothing went well at all and now Google has to support a million different things that all barely work.
Meanwhile Youtube hasn't seen a facelift in about a decade while Google figures out what it wants to do with it.
Rationale: It was the 1990s, VRML flew but didn't quite make it. 3D hardware acceleration had arrived, gaming was exploding, Descent and Quake had proven complex worlds and freedom of movement were possible on commodity hardware, and talk of buffering 3D content in video streams seemed to make perfect sense for next generation passive entertainment. Product placements, architectural documentation, mechanical design courses, etc.
What killed it (IMHO): Took too long to standardize, too much formalism, no consumer electronics manufacturers on board sending actual products to market. If they had done an IETF approach ("rough consensus and running code") they may not have missed the window of opportunity.
I think the most successful to date is the Nintendo Switch.
Edit: https://www.amazon.com/AT-Laptop-Dock-Motorola-ATRIX/dp/B004... - Motorola Atrix Lapdock
The Switch works because it limits the options to just games. But for general purpose computing, even my slightly older Android phone can open dozens of tabs, play games, video, drive a high-res display, and so on.
If it had a dock that immediately connected it to some monitors a mouse and keyboard and the UI changed a hair I'd be a perfectly happy computing user and I get to carry around my primary device with me.
In fact, it has similar specs and a better GPU than many low-end laptops that millions of people are reasonably content to use on a daily basis.
Of course, it doesn't imclude the crucial "dock" part (except in the sense you can plug in a fullsize keyboard and monitor as you can for a laptop).
Not sure of the situation recently, but at one time they were topping amazon lists.
But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses).
So maybe they aren't that successful after all.
Tons of people use the app. The interface is central to its virality. Snap's growth wasn't a problem until Facebook did everything they could to clone it. Snaps failing because everyone is starting to realize that if you aren't GOOG or FB, you aren't worth spending $$$ on. Just the other day I saw an "OfferUp" ad on Snap that looked like a 90s banner ad. I can't tell if Snap went full self serve or if they are struggling to find people to buy on their platform. And who would after advertisers have been spoiled by FB's demographic data and GOOG's intent data?
Edit: I feel like I spend a lot of time defending snapchat when I hardly use the app.
An app whose only novel idea is that the messages and photos you send delete themselves after some time, except for the fact that once they're in your friend's phone, they can of course take a screencap, or just have an app installed to store them... so the whole idea is based on cluelessness about basic security... and yet, there it is.
Who would've known people would come to like JSX? I used to think it was an abomination.. now it's great.
Sometimes I think the only thing keeping Youtube alive as a Google product is that the internet would rip them to shreds if they were to shut it down.
Now, I think they want to use the infrastructure to build something that competes against Netflix and Amazon, but to do that they have to destroy the existing economic incentives for content creators and drive off as many content derivative users as they can (anyone incorporating or using licensed content, even as covered by fair use), and basically rebuild Youtube from the inside out.
States and law enforcement are more likely to be concerned with what Bitcoin is used for, than the mere fact that it is used.
Now I can totally understand that it's an important evolution in tech and will probably solve the last mile problem (at least some of it) in the near future.
Because that was illegal. This isn't a secret - it's constantly mentioned by pro-Uber and con-Uber groups.
Reimagine it as "it's half the price because it is not the beneficiary of a government-granted monopoly on its business".
Sharing pictures and comenting on them, like Fotolog.com in the early 2000s, but more closed (it didn't want you to browse photos on mobile without the app)... yeah, revolutionary.
I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable decision.
But beyond this, I don't really understand why it didn't catch on. The first time I tried it I was hooked simply due to the issue of presence. Though perhaps the fact I ended up never purchasing a device answers my own question -- I had no interest in a Facebook driven platform, and the price point to get involved with VR for things like the Vive did not mesh well with the availability of software, as well as the fact that hardware tends to rapidly iterate.
I bought a Vive and it's been... interesting. I actually haven't touched any games in months, but I still break it out every few weeks to prototype something in Unity/Unreal. Also, I've been using Google Blocks a ton to create lowpoly models for use in games.
I think the tech is way too compelling to go away anytime soon, but it's obviously not the splash hit that Facebook/etc predicted it would be.
Generally, VR is about natural control of a simulated environment. I suspect within a few years, when our hardware gets better/is stable and more groups are developing applications, you'll see VR become a central component of more systems.
Now spend 4 hours. Most of those things end up in closets. Or on eBay.
Even once you have the hardware, you need the space, and you need to decide to spend $500USD on a less-versatile HMD rather than a high-framerate gaming monitor.
For me, space is the hangup - my main PC has the grunt, but I share the space with another PC on another desk, and that takes up all the floorspace. The cost of getting more space makes the cost of PC hardware look trivial....
There is a very cool company who is doing VR in real world. Like if you touch the 3d wall, there is a plywood wall there.
Or training on machines, driving school, some games, 3d modelling, 3D Kitchen, 3D House Building, Journeys.
There are lots of reasons why you can't use VR for long.
physical: (wearing the equivalent of a helmet with short cables)
timing: it requires that you can switch off your real life environment for a long time - not good for working hours
controls: Sometimes in my nightmares i want to speak or move but can't, thats how it feels when trying to do things in VR.
On the other hand I expect it to revolutionize 3D design (architecture, 3d art for movies, 3d art for games (non-vr games). Manipulating stuff with your hands in VR is 10x-100x faster than using a mouse in Maya/3DSMax/ZBrush etc. We just need someone to bring the pro tools into VR.
As for games I loved both Farpoint (PSV4, bad game great experience) and Lone Echo (Oculus). Also loved Vanishing Realms though it feel more prototype than full game. To a certain degree VR has spoiled my enjoyment of certain non VR games (not all). Something is now just missing if I can't "be there". Like many who have done VR it's the difference between a picture of the Grand Canyon and being at the Grand Canyon. Farpoint is not that great of a game but actually feeling like I'm on another planet with 3 mile high volcanos and 15 mile high plumbs of smoke is a feeling I can't get from a non VR game.
Of course this is happening in some areas, but not nearly as much as it could happen.
Just one example: It's easy to imagine running a shop that works with little to no workers. The closest thing that exists are these self-checkout cashiers, but even these aren't that prevalent, the norm is still a human cashier.
- they are very expensive in relation to consumer income
- they are complex to program
- generally specialized: more or less general purpose frames (like your typical 5 axis arm) with special single-purpose tools mounted to them
- safety architecture is generally: total enclosure, no human access/interaction during operation, if not totally enclosed usually with light curtains or very stringent requirements.
A general-purpose helper bot looks like a completely different beast from this angle.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130220084442.h...
It described what seemed like an incredible advance in capacitor design that would allow xenon flashes to be installed in even the slimmest of smartphones.
I consider xenon flashes, which are found in most cameras that aren't smartphones, to be wildly superior to LED flashes, which are used in phones, and assumed that within a couple of years, the new technology would be ubiquitous.
But it never happened. So far as I know, the partnership between Nanyang Technological University and Xenon Technologies never really went anywhere.
After a couple of years of waiting, I even went so far as to try to contact the researchers to find out what happened, but never got a response.
I hope that someday this tech does hit the mass market. Although LED flash quality has improved somewhat, xenon flashes are still so much better.
they are not the same thing
they do less; the software is restricted, especially on iOS, there are _rules_ set out by the manufacturer about what is acceptable in software on the platform, both thematically and functionally. An app generally can't interfere with other apps, it can't be a dope wars style game about drugs; there are a lot more caveats, but I am far from aware of them all. For a long time you couldn't get a compiler or interpreter on iOS, so you couldn't use your "computer" to make more software... so it wasn't general-purpose at all, since you by definition couldn't change its purpose without the ability to make new software.
Phones and tablets are great for consuming certain types of content, and having a portable camera with networking has enabled a lot of content creation. But a phone isn't a great device for doing something like long-form writing.
But iOS is not a phone. Windows could set rules about what was acceptable on the platform, but that wouldn't change what a personal computer was. There are no rules about what's acceptable on an iPhone.
so iOS essentially is the phone, since there are no iPhones without it. It's not like you can just pop in an SD card with Linux on it...
I believe the situation is even better. Desktops and laptops, no longer needing to support the layman on their phones and tablets, will actually become more oriented toward the needs of power users, although their total userbase may decrease. In a decade, Macs will no longer be heading toward being "Facebook machines" because you can do that on your phone, so Apple will focus more on the target userbase of creative digital artists. Windows machines will always need to support word processors and CAD programs but in ways that are cleaner to install and manage. Linux will keep growing to keep up with the number of programmers in the world, so more professional and amatuer solutions will be made available.
There are too many cheap, low quality PC hardware solutions in the market now. Their users will switch to phones and tablets. Higher class hardware will remain the same as the power users will keep buying these.
Also, phones and tablets will remain to be as expensive or more than the future "working man" desktop computer, so this isn't a matter of one wealth class vs. another.
Hopefully now that the non-tech people are moving away from traditional PC/laptop, this trend of dumbing down for the "average user" (read: lowest common denominator) can be stopped.
I expected things like buying side quests or episodes for games. People could just pay for as much content as they would play. It would have been similar to how musicians could sell singles instead of albums.
Paradox games and CS:GO seem to have adopted this model very well but it never happened in mobile games, where microtransactions would have been most successful.
Another problem may have been this. If everyone on the internet agreed that say, watching a video should cost $0.02/minute, then people would get accustomed to paying this amount because that's such a small cost. But it's only a $0.02 decision for a content creator to restrict or allow it to be watched for free, and if say, 5% of artists just decided to "eat" the potenential earnings, then you'd have 5% of free videos and 95% premium videos. The 5% free videos would prevent the 95% of videos from being watched, because why would anyone pay to watch a video if you can watch another one for free. Basically I'm saying that this idealization of micropayment content is destroyed by free content, whether that is a good thing or not. I do this myself with respect to Android apps, since I don't take my time seriously enough to pay the occassional $1 per app.
So, the financial system is 'behind' the crapy payment scheme.
Something would have to come along to basically offer credit without all that.
I'm mostly surprised that Amazon and/or Wallmart have not simply done that.
I'll bet Bezos does some day: a low-interest rate 'Amazon Card' that other merchants can use, credit provided by Amazon (not banks), and it's 0% payment for other merchants.
A credit card alternative from Amazon would be fantastic competitor to VISA / MasterCard to break the lack of innovation in the personal finance industry.
Most people don't like having to keep a separate current amount in PayPal to buy stuff.
Also - I'm not sure if the merchant fees that PayPal charges are any less, i.e. they didn't take the 'no fees' angle for the merchants.
And of course there is the consumer benefit: even if a system only charged 0% to merchants, and not 2-3%, well, consumers don't care. So getting enough consumers to sign up is hard.
VISA / AMEX prevent merchants from advertising cheaper prices for use of other cards - so even if a merchant had a 0% processor option, they're not allowed to discount by 2-3% for that card vis-a-vis VISA / AMEX.
It's a tightly controlled oligarchy. It's huge, entrenched, it's entire consumer financial system. Going after it would be economic thermonuclear war.
A disruptor will have to come from an outside angle - or - be huge and have their own base.
So I can see Amazon just 'doing it' themselves, for their own customer base, which equals a critical mass.
Or - someone does something 'online' that shakes things up, and that bleeds over into the brick and mortar. A crypto-currency ... I can see doing that in some way.
At brick and mortars, where they are operating on 5% margins in many cases, a 3% skim off the top is massive.
A 3% arbitrary fee for every electronic payment in north America is really, really quite a huge thing.
It's quite massive form of rent extraction, given that there is no real IP, and the actual cost is almost nothing.
It's one of the biggest and juiciest forms of obvious oligarchy/monopoly that there is.
Several friends living in China tell me cash is basically embarrassing at this point. You'll be laughed at if you try to use cash (note: I'm taking their word for it)
I can buy coffee at a vending machine in my Uni computer lab without cash money by waving my NFC enabled phone at it.
Two issues have prevented this open computing for the masses IMO:
1. Spam and malware. Any open system that gets any user base becomes spam hell. This is even happening to the more open of the walled gardens now (e.g. YouTube) so the future will likely be even more closed.
2. People like "free" and with no revenue stream you can't pay programmers to work on the parts that are not fun. This includes UX, which is a brutal grind. Walled gardens have a revenue stream from being surveillance driven advertising platforms users can't customize.
Over time it seemed increasingly far out, but, possible. Eventually I realized things like how catastrophic a break down or accident would be meant it will likely never happen. I and everyone else who thought flying cars were on the horizon were suckers.
Looks like neither happened.
RSS hasn't died, but it is definitely not growing, as those who prefer to use it are already using it.
Here's a completely unprocessed feedreader that I built as a Firefox extension until #$%# Mozilla killed it: https://github.com/akkartik/spew. It answered your question with, "why yes, read each article precisely as it was intended to be read on its own website," but still used RSS feeds for push notifications. Best of both worlds.
---
Here's a third question: should I prioritize articles based on how their website shows them to me, based on when they're posted, or by some other prioritization? This may be what stunted RSS: people chose with their feet to prioritize socially (reading what their friends shared: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or by collaborative filtering (reading what people like them read: Reddit, HN, Lobsters, etc.)
---
Here's a fourth question: do I want to be notified of every single post from a source? And this may be RSS's remaining niche. I no longer use it for high-volume sites like CNN or Buzzfeed. Those need prioritization. I do use it for ~250 extremely low-volume sources (that cumulatively yield a dozen or so stories a week) from whom I want to see everything: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml.
But it is such a cool feature. Effectively, it allows me to embed a tiny RSS reader into the bookmark toolbar.
I'd take the plain text of an article over a JavaScript-laden monstrosity of a single-page app any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.
I really miss being able to quickly & easily read articles, without distraction. But then, I miss lynx — and I still harbour a deep-seated hatred for those who have destroyed the Internet I once loved.
It is exponentially harder to finance a few huge super costly projects than loads of small ones.
It has a high "PITA factor." That stands for pain in the you know what. A high PITA factor means there is a very long tail of non obvious problems that compound and multiply. It looks much better on paper than in real life because on paper that stuff doesn't show up.
An exponential is now in place for solar and storage. It would not surprise me if almost all energy outside aviation and a few heavy industry applications is solar and batteries by 2050.
Shall we consider the size of the space to explore? If n is the number of elements, at first blush it's n*2. But there are compounds -- more than nine million organic compounds alone. Electrical and temperature treatments can have different effects -- and those are functional spaces, you don't just choose a current, you vary the current over time. Simple positioning can have an effect: rotate one surface relative to another and it can behave totally differently. Wafers behave differently than strings, which behave differently than spheres and crystals, which behave differently than dust ...
If there was a race between our exploring the entire chemical space and colonizing the universe, I would not know which to bet on.
Also glass relaunched in July targeting enterprise applications.
I think main reason is UX or User Interface. It is very hard for people who do not know how it works and expect it to work perfect (in low light etc) as with normal user interface of smartphone. It was not very intuitive for normal user because of Smartphone limitations.
I can think that it might take in future if they improve the correctness of platform. It have lot of potential and let's see what future brings.
Just as a frame of reference, the original iPad sold less units in its first year than the PlayStation VR.
Virtual reality is still in its infancy, and honestly AR is a technology that's going to have to build on top of a lot of VR's technical underpinnings.
Hardware growth takes a lot longer and more iterations than software. VR is going to be huge eventually, and AR is then going to dwarf VR... eventually.
There's a lot of work in wireless signal standards, battery life, displays, and pure computational power that needs to happen before these technologies can deliver on the promise though.
We're slightly past the Newton stage, and somewhere behind the Windows Mobile 3.1 era with these technologies. It's going to still be a while before we see the "iPhone" for VR/AR, and even then, it'll be a few years before we see mass adoption.
But in my opinion, the end result is an inevitably.
(Science is legit, but needs a better website.)
why didn't they? (at a high level... im not too smart about these EE topics)
Another issue is that memristors are not part of any standard curriculum and thus limits the number of people who will work on it.
No sooner did I type that sentence than I decided to google it, WebOS has been rebranded to LuneOS, which sits on top of Android.
https://pivotce.com/tag/luneos/
Other interesting reads: http://www.openwebosproject.org/ https://www.cnet.com/news/open-webos-reborn-as-luneos-for-mo...
It was really ahead of its time and most of its major metaphors can be found in the surviving mobile OSes. Just wish the web-centric development model survived as well.
I have WebOS on my LG TV now. It sucks.
I really enjoyed the HP Touchpad with WeBOS but there were some rendering issues with it that I noticed when going to certain websites. My father in law got me one during the flash sale as he worked at OfficeMax Corporate at the time and had access. For ~$60 it wasn't too bad at all.
Working in the television industry at the time and a few companies were making tools based on UDP, for sending large files across public networks. Smartjog, Aspera, Signiant. The companies are still around, but only operating in the B2B space as far as I know.
I thought this technology was going to replace FTP. People wanting to punt bigger and bigger files around, they needed better tools. Smartjog even open sourced an early version of their tool.
Anyway, it didn't happen. I'm not in the televisual industry anymore and find myself entirely satisfied with the current file transfer tools commonly available (FTP!). I guess there was just never consumer demand and I was looking at things from the perspective of a very narrow niche.
I guess consumers just aren't punting 50GB of data around all that much, so there's not enough wait time pain to justify it.
The reason it's not used to much in file transfer is because you basically need to re-implement everything you get for free with TCP for reliable transfer. Secondly, one of the big things that made TCP slow for large file transfer was that the way most TCP congestion control algorithms worked meant that transfer rates would drop quickly as latency increased. Google have come up with an algorithm that drastically improves this [1], and contributed it to the Linux kernel. I expect their strategy will be adopted by most operating systems. I believe Google is already using it, and I read something on Netflix's tech blog that they are at least trialing it.
For small files, TCP slow-start is an issue but protocols like HTTP/2 can work around this by multiplexing multiple downloads through one connection.
So I don't think there will be much advantage to UDP based file transfer for things that you want reliability for.
From a larger "tragedy of the commons" point of view, using UDP to force maximum packets down the shared pipes is not fair towards everyone doing TCP. Congestion detection/prevention tries to make traffic more fair to everyone.
If they do, and I just don't know about it, then the future is here!
1) Bad API (too complex).
2) Awkward installer.
Here's how I set up Windows 10 coming from Linux. https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...
Unfortunately speed, security, and the need to install a seperate run-time/plugin layer were too much for people at the time.
But hey, now 20 years later we are finally starting to see that vision in Web Assembly. ;-)
1. You need a reasonably powerful PC or PS4 ($$$) 2. You need the VR kit itself ($$) 3. You need space to use it 4. You need to be physically able to use it 5. You need a lack of motion sickness, etc. 6. There's bugger all games at the moment 7. Probably something else I've not thought of
Also, after a short while, you stop seeing "3D" as it is because your brain abstracts it all away anyways and will draw a similar 3D experience out of a moving 2D image and a proper stereoscopic one.
(not to mention that the price is pretty off the charts too)
It is obvious why SOAP died (to me at least). It was a solution in search of a problem that was already solved by REST/HTTP with generic payloads.
BUT.... things like WSDL that gave you an interface description... it would be nice if something like that had survived.
The closest thing to this that I know of is Swagger. But not having a standard machine-readable way to integrate with REST APIs/services is a missing piece of the puzzle I think.
The Web Services Description Language provided that. I'm surprised that or an equivalent never got traction.
I work at a software development shop and most of our internal Email-like communication happens face-to-face or via phone.
"Will you be available for a meeting two weeks from now?"
"I just wanted to tell you that I checked in my code."
"Please answer my trivially Google-able programming question right now."
"Tell person X that I want to talk to them later."
"The boss just told me [important news that concerns several people who are not at work today]."
I have to assume that most of the world works like that and Open Source communities are the great exception to this rule.
- If you receive a call, it breaks your flow, which is bad.
- If you send an email, it breaks your flow, which is bad. (As you have to wait for an answer, and do something else in the meantime.)
So if you have a question, the optimal strategy (for you) is to make a call. But if someone else has a question, the optimal strategy (for you) is they email you.
There's even a further level, which is that if someone else has a question, it's optimal (for you) that they email you, and you call them to give your answer, and discuss it until it's done.
So if it's up to you (and you're thinking only about your own productivity above all else) then tell people to email you when they need something, but call them when you need something.
Google Keep and the now-very-good Google Docs collaborating is what we really needed all along, I guess.
The problem is that it turns out most human beings don't actually think in a clear and logical manner, and thus there's a need for someone to translate unclear and illogical statements into clear and logical instructions for a computer — that someone is a programmer.
BTW I find maths, with equations that are true in both directions, much less intuitive than programming, with functions that accept input and return output.
I suppose maths is "clear and logical statements", code is "clear and logical instructions". Does that mean maths is easier than programming for most people?
In fact, i believe even today there's an opportunity for a social network for silly games. its a great way to make random new friends.
As a programmer it was a revelatory thing of beauty. When we tried to spread it within our org we found that the 'typical' (even relatively strong) programmer resisted its concepts and found it hard to learn.
Therefore it didn't scale for us.
back when digital TV launched in the UK during late 1998, the major platofrm (Sky, ONdigital, Telewest and ntl) were all hyping up their interactive services.
Sky's service was called Open.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open....) and you could order pizza, email, go shopping, dating, betting etc. Sky were so convinced it was going to be a money spinner they gave away all the boxes for free.
The underlying technology was also used to add interactively to TV shows. For example you could choose the camera angle in some football games and the BBC made a documentary about dinosaurs that worked like a multimedia CD-ROM.
Most of these services lasted less than five years, the services were sluggish, the proprietary tech didn't help and in any case the web did it better.
I didn't think the shopping/commercial side would succeed, but I was convinced there would be a huge market for interactive TV. Nope, there wasn't.
If PGP, it's a huge hassle to set up, and both parties have to do it, so it's no surprise it is rarely used.
It naturally makes sense that allocating BW via a token would be much more power efficient and faster than transmitting into the void and hoping for no collision. Its hard to get line rate traffic with CSMA/CD but the financial services co I was working at back then had very high util in the upper 90%s for hours.
I also miss ATM and its complicated and semi-obscure adaptation layers, pretty cool although toward its death it was just a weird way to send pt-to-pt ethernet frames. ISDN was like that too, a whole protocol stack, pretty interesting exciting ideas, toward the end it was just a 128K pt-pt interface for internet access and of course a voice trunk signalling protocol replacing old E+M signalling. Both could have been interesting/cool. X.25 switching never really took off either.
CSMA/CD was much cheaper to deploy than Token Ring.
"Token-Ring has been a bit of a mystery for many people. This is due to the fact that Ethernet, and other Carrier Sense Multi Access - Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) networks, are the most widely installed network topology. This is because most network designers cannot look past the initial cost of Token-Ring. While Token-Ring does cost more per port to install, it offers vast benefits over Ethernet and other CSMA/CD topologies."
[0] http://www.let.rug.nl/bosveld/algoritmiek/aptokenhc7.htm
I was convinced that we were going to enter a new phase of computing, where the processor wasn't stuck at the speed of its slowest component.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-...
My thinking was that with a large number of cores of processors that are more general in nature, you could still do great graphics. But you could do many other things as well. There are plenty of problems that are embarrassingly parallel if done right. There are also plenty of applications for adding significant amounts of computational power at the cost of a good graphics card. Computer vision. Speech recognition. Speech synthesis. Photo and video editing filters and processes. Even amazing scream savers.
There was a lot of excitement, once blue color longevity issues were solved, how it is easier and thus cheaper to manufacture, how soon it'll outcompete LCD. 20 years later still waiting.
Linked Data & "Open Data"
On the other hand, I really wasn't convinced about the web until I essentially missed the giant early opportunities, which I was well placed to capitalize on.
It was conceivable for a time, however it didn't occur to me that doing so would mean no advertising dollars for them, unless they made their offering as "walled gardens".
Truly to me, it seems that "advertising, marketing and consumerism" are what makes the world go around.
I remember when I tried the first headset sometime between 1999 and 2002. I thought "This will be big". 15 years later it's still not big.
Tablets
I expected tablets to become omnipresent. But phones took that spot instead.
The next question was "what are the keyboard shortcuts" and the answer was "escape toggles text entry in the shell, research says using the mouse is quicker".
It was a hard sell.
- mobile devices with extremely long battery life (weeks)
- mobile devices that can be put into a dishwasher and do not need to be treated gently.
- HashCash
- non-ai personal assistant/concierge services
- Theranos-like tech
- Teledildonics
Problem is charging overnight solves this for most people, and they turn to other needs.
2. VoIP, Skype, WhatsApp, etc. Many years ago I thought they can totally replace traditional phone calls, at least for 99% users. But that didn't happen.
3. Technologies for telecommuting. Less congestion, less pollution. And it saves both time and money. But it's still not so popular. (In Asia, it's very rare.)
Right now i have already a contact less credit card and that works like a charm.
Admittedly, I’ve no idea how much either are used, and how widespread they are outside London.
There was one supermarket where i was able to pay with there app (it used a 4 digit code). It was quite nice to receive the digital bon per email.
It would have been easy to make automatic analysis from them but after just a few weeks, the supermarket switched brand.
I bought one used just three months after rollout - should have seen this as a red flag back then.
The user experience was great - for the first 30 minutes. After that the pain related to holding the hand in the air was becoming to annoying to ignore.
Switching between this and the mouse/touchpad proved to be a great optimum though.
Anyway I successfully used it for my master's thesis to precisely place a few microphones in space, but after that I stopped using it altogether - too few useful applications to bother.
Voting reform.
It seems that with fake news and real news labelled as fake news, stupid facebook memes, junk internet adverts on everything... I thought the internet would be better. It started off with so much promise. Lots of smart people connected together, they all chanted "Get the masses online!" ... it turns out that comes with its own set of issues.
I used it a lot for file sharing, exchanging contact cards. Worked like magic, until Google bought and murdered it.
Although, we now have web browsers + JavaScript (not exactly the same thing, but there are some similarities).
1. Augmented reality. When I played around it with on the 3DS, I thought the idea was going to really blow up and end up having a ton of games based around it. And in the first year or two, we did get a few like that. Such as Kid Icarus Uprising having said features or Spirit Camera being entirely based on the technology.
But it quickly died off afterwards, and since about 2012 I don't think I've seen a single major game on the system where AR has been a central feature. Same goes with other consoles and systems too. It's occasionally been advertised (like with Microsoft and the Hololens or whatever it is), but it's generally remained a niche idea.
2. Also, the eReader. No, not the Kindle type, that thing the Game Boy Advance had in the early 00s where you could scan cards to unlock features in games. I genuinely believed that would be a huge revolution, to the point of importing the device from America to try it out. Alas, it failed pretty damn hard, and even the titles which had support for it in the US dropped said support in the European versions.
3. For non gaming stuff, VRML was a good example as well. Again, I thought the future of the internet would be 3D worlds accessed through the browser, and looked at the sites writing about it as if they were a glimpse of a high tech future only a few years off in the distance. Nope, VRML failed, and pretty much every attempt to implement VR functionality in the browser died too.
4. Also, I'm not sure if it counts as revolutionary on a tech level, but at one point there was a lot of talk about using oauth to tie various communities together into something akin to a forum network or Reddit equivalent. I think a group called Zoints tried this in the early 00s or so, and I expected their service to do pretty well off it.
Again, didn't really happen. Shared login systems did, in the most basic sense (login with Facebook/Twitter/Google/whatever) but it seemed people preferred walled gardens run by large companies over individual communities networked together.
Finally, there were an awful lot of Google products and services I expected to take the world by storm too. Google Wave has already been mentioned, but Google Buzz was another one too. Think it acted as a neat alternative to using Facebook comments or Diqus when it was active.
But yeah, my record with tech predictions is not exactly a great one.
What I see now is extreme attention to design and looks of smartwatches, but little talk on the type of value the could be adding to people's lives when connected to online services, phones or what have you.
In 2012 I did not expect that you could still buy $2000 laptops with spinning rust in 2017.
The other is that the interface is too small to do anything but consuming notifications or looking at a compass. And, I just don't see the problem being solved by speech recognition either, I don't want the rest of the bus to know that I have to Google "where do I buy bigger condoms?".
I figured by now the cost of nodes would be so low and the technology so far more advanced that everyone could just stick a few nodes around and we'd have a completely free, open and decentralized internet.
They re-skinned their previous game and only added a gym fighting minigame. It's entirely their fault. Even today the game doesn't have all the features shown in the trailer. Their game has no end-game content either so even the core demographic lost any reason to play.
I still think we're due more interactive shopping experiences.
I thought it would revolutionise lots of things. Turns out it took 10 years longer than I expected and is just a "fun" feature for now.
I was convinced the entire industry would rapidly adopt it and that it would quickly replace bulk CMOS.
OpenID WS-Federation etc.
Multicast
XHTML, XQuery/XPath/XLink/XPointer/etc.
for those who dont know about it: its this thing: https://scorpioncomputerservices.com/scengen
(context: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/15/techshop-shuts-down-all-u-...)
It seems like most people don't want flexibility and configurability and they don't want to learn to manage OS. They just want to use PC comfortably and don't care about anything.
For example one of a few things I find annoying on Linux is multiple GUI frameworks, each having it's own OpenFileDialog so I can't always easily open recent folder or recent file. It looks totally different in Qt and in GTK.
I think Linux kernel is very solid and cool. But userspace is a mess, there is probably not enough standardization. For example also X11 (hacky, security problems) vs still buggy and unfinished Wayland. :( Compare that to OSX frameworks.
Yet I love free software, appreciate all effort people put into it and will continue using it. Maybe one day I will also be able to help GNU/Linux improve..
Knowledge graphs are powerful -- they underpin Google search, Facebook, Siri, etc. And open source tools exist for keeping your own knowledge graph. (Here's my favorite: https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki/. It has, to my knolwedge, two ongoing users.)
I was part of a small study group once -- four to seven people, meeting daily for a couple hours to share economics notes. It was critical -- I could not have made it through the first year of grad school otherwise. Knowledge graphs can scale to far greater numbers of users.
So many people are biting their nails about the rise of AI. I belive we could leverage existing technology to bring about human superintelligence before then.
Internally, our minds work nonlinearly, but when it comes to written media, we process text linearly. That is slow, wasteful -- if someone writes a book full of gems of wisdom, but scatters redundant illustrations, obvious examples, or unnecessary motivating passages between them, you've got to wade through that chaff in order to find the gems. Knowledge graphs let us write and read nonlinearly -- faster, better targeted, hence able to cover more information, more kinds of information. It's like tables of contents all the way down.
Writing is great because it allows a reader to build on the work of earlier writers. Knowledge graphs, in addition to that, let readers build on the work of other readers. If I mark a passage as "obvious" or "critical" or "beautiful", that metadata can guide another reader. Online systems already use this idea to some extent -- facebook likes, reddit and HN votes, etc. can help inform reader choices. But knowledge graphs in principle allow for arbitrarily general metadata -- for instance, "show me every statement [group] has written about [topic] which has been marked useful for [goal] by at least [number] readers".
Publishing even a small body of useful, organized information can be extremely valuable. Craigslist, for instance. Although there was an obvious economic argument for publishing the information on Craigslist.
In fact, economics might be making us stupid. Non-monetizable information is of enormous importance. Globally, we are experiencing an epistemic crisis. Huge swaths of the public mistrust science, journalism, history. We appear to be at least nearly as susceptible to fascism as we were in the thirties. The arguments for freedom of speech, or civil rights, or being kind to strangers, ought to be as obvious to us as which job pays how much money.
Camus talked about something he called "philosophical suicide", wherein someone stops trying to think high thoughts. They fall into an economic routine, the specialize, their awareness narrows. They might excel at what they do. But a world full of such narrow thinking is a dangerous place.
I had heart surgery, almost died, and for years after, knowledge-gardened furiously. I wrote, reviewed, organized, categorized. I pondered long passages and reduced them to a few words, which became easier to process. What is pleasure? What are the elements of consciousness? Where is my boundary of certainty in ethics? Can I enumerate the state space of a conversation? It was a transformative experience -- I changed from an awkward, selfish, angry young man to a warm, gregarious, relaxed middle-aged man.
It was also slow, because I was working alone, and I used trees, which are less expressive than graphs. I can only dream of how transformative it would be to process those ideas in a group, nonlinearly, using a knowledge graph.
Or is that some specific technology that I don't know about?