Inventing the Future

a rant on copy protection

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<rant on>

I could just slap Steve Jobs. He really had a good thing going with me, until today.

All the people I hang out with are pretty avidly anti-Microsoft, on technical, business, and moral grounds. I work at a University where I and everyone else use Macs. My wife was a Mac pioneer from way back, has a business that may soon be buying educational computers by the truckload, and is a perfect candidate for the “Switch’ ads. I like Pixar movies, and I’m tickled that ol’ Steve’s iTunes was able to show those RIAA guys what morons they’ve been.

Well, it that’s all changed.

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I was just thinking of you…

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I just had one of those damn computer things, where I send an email to someone who I couldn’t reach by voice, but just after sending it, I get an email from that person that changes the conditions of what I was writing to the person about. Arghh.

I’ve written before about how Croquet fosters both synchronous and asynchronous communication, like combining chat and email. Here’s how it plays out in this particular scenario. I go to the special space that Alice and I have created (with a few clicks or voice commands) for the stuff common to us. (Or maybe common to a group of three or more. It doesn’t matter.) I create a message in that space – voice, text, or video. The idea is that Alice will see that message (and possibly be notified) and will review at her leisure. Alice starts to do the same thing, but since each of us has a presence (an avatar) visible to anyone else in the space, we see each other. Then we just start talking, directly. While we do so, I can even point at the paragraph that I was just composing. Alice can edit it, too, so that she or I can then bring over the collaboratively revised version to Bob. No mail client. No telephone. No chat client. No whiteboard. No filenames or email addresses. No server.

OK, this isn’t that different in principle from the little colored balls in Macintosh Mail that tell you which addresses belong to people who are in your buddy list and available for iChat at this moment. But maybe it’s enough different to actually be useable.

components

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The computer spreadsheet doesn’t get enough credit among computer programmers. I think that more than any other one concept, VisiCalc, 1-2-3, and Excel were the killer app for the personal computer. As a programmer, I have tended first to think of formulae and calculation mechanisms when I think of spreadsheets, but the UI and development style are perhaps more significant. For each individual cell, you can look at the value, the formula, or the formatting, and change each through a menu. You can incrementally build up quite a complex application all on your own, never leaving the very environment you use to view the results. Why doesn’t all software work this way, only better? That’s what I’m working on.

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welcome Joshua!

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<%image(20050317-josh-gimped.jpg|400|400|Josh)%>We are excited to have a new developer joining us on Croquet at U.Wisconsin. Joshua Gargus is moving to Madison all the way from Atlanta, which is quite a big step for such a young man. And he and has wife had just bought a house in Georgia! Both my boss and I have moved our families cross-country for new jobs, including a period where our wives had stayed at the old house, and we know it’s not easy.

Joshua has already clearly dedicated his work to highly interactive applications on the cutting edge of technology. A haptic controller that lets you physically mold “digital clay,” including the ability to pull the molded surface out as well as merely pushing it in. (Think about it.) A sketchbook that recognizes individual strokes (not bitmaps) on a timeline for playback, annotation, and hardware rendering in various styles. Much of his work has been in Squeak, done at the leading centers for Squeak development. (Croquet is built on top of Squeak.)

I’ve looked at some of Joshua’s code, and I’m excited that we’re getting such a talented developer. Coming up: what we’ll both be working on…

Inventing the Future: connectivity and freedom

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My dear friend John, whose generosity and interests drive this site, has said something in comment to this entry, which I just have to call him on:

“The more everything ties together the more we are open for invasion. But the Paris Hiltons of the world seem to embrace the great borgification, the assimilation into the overmind, in which notions such as autonomy and privacy are not so much quaint as incomprehensible.”

Whoa, there buddy! You’re going to have to explain why tying stuff together makes it more open to invasion. Ever try to invade a strawberry thicket? There’s good design and bad design (with respect to various desirable or undesirable effects), but I see no reason that a good interconnected design is any more pervious then a bunch of isolated stuff. In fact, in my admittedly limited understanding of military and tech. security history, the concepts of “defense in depth” and “divide and conquer” suggest to me that interconnected stuff (if done right) may be inherently safer.

Besides, I’m touchy-feely enough that I just plain like the idea of interconnectedness (done right) being not only safer, but freer and more open and enabling, not more oppressive. Croquet architect David Smith just attended the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid. They have produced a document that begins to articulate how I happen to feel. It is called The Infrastructure of Democracy.

I had a conversation with someone at the University here about architecting Croquet – or a class of Croquet applications – so that the infrastructure can be centrally controlled. By the University, by a consortium of universities or what have you. “This is wrong,” I thought. If you design it so that the whole thing – the very infrastructure — can be controlled by you, then it will be controlled, but not by you. Either Croquet will be a success or it won’t, and if it is a success, then the Elephant in the Hallway, Microsoft, will come along and control their version. Or some government, or terrorists, or whatever bad guys haunt your anxiety closet.

I’ve recently learned from some folks in the tech security community that security is weakened when you rely on prohibiting that which you cannot prevent. Systems fail, so design your system to fail gracefully. Connectivity is abused, so design your systems to respond to it. Openness and interconnectivity are powerful tools for dealing with the attacks we cannot prevent.

Inventing the Future: iPods

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Duke and other schools are giving iPods to students. This site explains that they are looking for innovative ways to introduce technology in education. Poems and lit. to go. School fight songs. Info on the frosh dorms. I think that’s great. Why be so focused on visual information? It’s interesting to me that cell phone surfing seems to be done on phones outfitted with tiny visual screens and abuses of keyboards. Why not aural displays and voice interfaces? (Although I’m not too keen on the image of zombie students walking around in their own little isolation enforced by earplugs piping in the university’s message.)

Duke doesn’t mention anything about file sharing, but I wonder how much of their IT push is also meant to get them off the hook that some universities have been placed on in order to try to force them to be responsible for the file-sharing actions of their students.

Inventing the Future: enchancing performance

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Like many people I’ve talked to, I tend to imagine using Croquet for automation. We envision physics and molecular chemistry simulations running on their own, while the people in the collaboration walk around among the ball and stick model forest and observe. Maybe we reach up and grab an atom or two and pull on it to see how that changes the path of the simulation. That’s my nature. I’m an engineer and I want to automate stuff so I don’t have to work so hard, even in visualization. I’m so lazy I even want to automate my imagination.

I worked for more than a dozen years creating some kind of automation or another. The biggest misconception I had to clear up with my clients was that you can’t automate what you don’t understand. You have to tell the computer exactly what to do. I learned this lesson in high school when we had a model bridge-building contest in physics class. Everyone assumed that I would design my bridge on a computer, and I sat down to try it.

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Inventing the Future: the Croquet Generation

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Older academics generally like Croquet demos, but they often give me the impression that they’re not quite sure what they’re looking at. We gave a demo this week to a young local reporter and she was much more enthusiastic. She wants to use it right now, as is. Julian tells me that anyone under 25 who sees Croquet goes nuts over it.

I was surprised. I assumed that younger folks would be jaded by video games. Our demos don’t have drop shadows or reflection. The fish world is not as cool as the one at the Boston Museum of Science. The avatars don’t walk and bend like the Sims. It’s a proof-of-concept, and the features and effects just aren’t like what you would find in a movie.

But I think people under 25 see Croquet and feel like it’s made for them. What school and office programs are really of their culture? Windows isn’t. (Maybe its for old farts that were too conservative to buy a Mac 20 years ago.) The closest thing to a mainstream generation Y app might be chat rooms, which are not rooms and you don’t actually chat, you type. Successfull, yes, but not exactly laden with Y culture.