In this information-laden world, who really wants to deal with addresses, ss#’s, a bevy of phone numbers, even more account numbers, part numbers, and on and on? It seems we sometimes need the precision afforded by (usually non-mnemonic!!!) names, but we don’t like it. What if it’s not necessary?
Inventing the Future
Inventing the Future: sign me up – not!
My boss has blog on blogger, which I gather is now owned by Google. Hard to believe that the “Don’t be evil” folks have a hand in this monstrosity.
consumers union telecom lobbying website
‘Consumers Union launched a web site (www.hearusnow.org [love the title! -H]) that is
designed to provide consumers with information on telecom and media
industry developments, help them shop for products and services, and
make it easier to lobby lawmakers and policy-makers on issues. “This
web site addresses the explosion of activist groups and energized
consumers who are frustrated by the government’s hands-off approach
when it comes to dealing with their concerns over higher bills, poorer
service, and the fact a handful of companies control their
communications,” said Gene Kimmelman, senior director-public policy
for Consumers Union.’
SOURCE: TR Daily, AUTHOR: Paul Kirby pkirby@tr.com
Inventing the Future: timing and the pitch
Here’s a glimpse of the future. Can’t wait ’till Croquet is ready to play.
There’s a new PlayStation 2 game called Karaoke Revolution. You sing into the computer while an animated character lip-syncs. The game grades you on your pitch and timing, and the animated crowd goes wild or boos you off stage as appropriate.
It's about time…
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Worried about persistent security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, officials at the Pennsylvania State University system have taken the unusual step of recommending that students, professors, and staff members stop using the popular Web browser.
“The threats are real, and alternatives exist,” the university said in an announcement posted on its Web site this week.
Penn State appears to be the first American college to recommend against the use of Internet Explorer. However, the CERT Coordination Center, a federal computer-security center operated by Carnegie Mellon University, made a similar recommendation to the public earlier this year.
Internet Explorer, which is distributed free by the Microsoft Corporation, has more than 90 percent of the worldwide browser market. …
Inventing the Future: digital convergence happens
Croquet is “about” real-time collaboration. A bunch of people can be in the same virtual environment and see the live effects of each other moving around and manipulating things. It seems natural to add audio chat using existing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. So now you can talk to folks in the same space while you work together. We’re working on Webcam video, too, so that it’s generally suitable for holding distance meetings in a Croquet place. I didn’t think much about displacing land-line telephones. Who cares.
We thought a bit about how you could connect the telephone system so that you could call in to a Croquet place and join a meeting (audio only?) from a cell phone.
But then I read this quote from Patrick Scaglia, Vice-President and Director of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Lab:
“Croquet is a first in many ways. It represents a major step in our vision of computation as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device. Soon, Croquet will run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box; persistent Croquet worlds will be ubiquitous on the Internet, routed intelligently to each user through computational services overlays like PlanetLab. This will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive, service”.
It took a day to sink in.
Eventually, people will want and get always-on connectivity for mobile devices, just as over half of American Internet users now get for fixed-position access. After demand evens out, I think device costs are first-order proportional to the number of chips, with the complexity of chips being a second-order effect. So the cost of a PDA capable of running Croquet will someday not be inherently much more expensive then a cell phone such as is now being given away by providers.
So, will we have telephones? Of any kind?
As far as I know, the Croquet developers didn’t set out to replace the telephone. If I had, my wife would have threatened divorce for such a hair-brained idea. And I’m not predicting that Croquet will displace the telephone. But it is interesting that progress in solving an abstract and general problem
mightlead to the merging of computers and telephones.
Inventing the Future: shared persistence
The real-time collaboration in Croquet is cool. It provides a very different way of structuring applications that will allow things that nothing else can. The croquet team is working hard on this aspect. But we’re just begining to consider the implications of shared persistence. I think this is just as radical in itself, and will inspire truly extroadinary software when combined with Croquet’s other aspects.
Total Government Awareness going the way of John Ashcroft?
A long time ago, I think I mentioned in a comment to something that there was a project at the MIT Media Lab to keep a database of uncorroborated information about government officials, analogous to Ashcroft and Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” monstrosity.
The project had been written up in several places, including Wired and slashdot, but now it seems to have shut down.
Why? Lack of interest (we get the government we deserve), or were they shut down? I have no idea.
The TIA project (ephemistically renamed “Terorist Information Awareness”) seems to have disappeared from the DARPA site, too. Does that mean it has been abandoned, or just gone silent.
our computer is gross
Our home desktop Windows machine is used only by my wife and two pre-teen girls. We’ve been infected by some crapware lately and I tried to clean it up. In addition to the stuff visible on the hard disk, there’s this thing called the Windows registry. This is is used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, such as boot-time start-up of programs that you never heard of and don’t want running on your machine. I couldn’t believe what I found in there.
I did this:
start->run
(and then type)
regedit
(In the regedit menus do:)
edit->find
(and type)
fuck
(or erotic, or anything else you’d be surprised to find on your computer).
I feel so violated.
Inventing the Future: What is Croquet?
Croquet is an ambitious project to develop an entirely new way to work with computers, including 3D user interfaces and real-time collaboration between separate people manipulating the same virtual objects. Although this could be used in many domains, the focus of the core developers is on educational uses.
Imagine you could make computers work however you wanted. What would you have them do? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Fast machines. Graphics coprocessors. Fast worldwide networks. And it’s only going to get better.
-
Inventing the Future: sign me up – not!
My boss has blog on blogger, which I gather is now owned by Google. Hard to believe that the “Don’t be evil” folks have a hand in this monstrosity.
consumers union telecom lobbying website
‘Consumers Union launched a web site (www.hearusnow.org [love the title! -H]) that is
designed to provide consumers with information on telecom and media
industry developments, help them shop for products and services, and
make it easier to lobby lawmakers and policy-makers on issues. “This
web site addresses the explosion of activist groups and energized
consumers who are frustrated by the government’s hands-off approach
when it comes to dealing with their concerns over higher bills, poorer
service, and the fact a handful of companies control their
communications,” said Gene Kimmelman, senior director-public policy
for Consumers Union.’
SOURCE: TR Daily, AUTHOR: Paul Kirby pkirby@tr.com
Inventing the Future: timing and the pitch
Here’s a glimpse of the future. Can’t wait ’till Croquet is ready to play.
There’s a new PlayStation 2 game called Karaoke Revolution. You sing into the computer while an animated character lip-syncs. The game grades you on your pitch and timing, and the animated crowd goes wild or boos you off stage as appropriate.
It's about time…
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Worried about persistent security flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, officials at the Pennsylvania State University system have taken the unusual step of recommending that students, professors, and staff members stop using the popular Web browser.
“The threats are real, and alternatives exist,” the university said in an announcement posted on its Web site this week.
Penn State appears to be the first American college to recommend against the use of Internet Explorer. However, the CERT Coordination Center, a federal computer-security center operated by Carnegie Mellon University, made a similar recommendation to the public earlier this year.
Internet Explorer, which is distributed free by the Microsoft Corporation, has more than 90 percent of the worldwide browser market. …
Inventing the Future: digital convergence happens
Croquet is “about” real-time collaboration. A bunch of people can be in the same virtual environment and see the live effects of each other moving around and manipulating things. It seems natural to add audio chat using existing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. So now you can talk to folks in the same space while you work together. We’re working on Webcam video, too, so that it’s generally suitable for holding distance meetings in a Croquet place. I didn’t think much about displacing land-line telephones. Who cares.
We thought a bit about how you could connect the telephone system so that you could call in to a Croquet place and join a meeting (audio only?) from a cell phone.
But then I read this quote from Patrick Scaglia, Vice-President and Director of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Lab:
“Croquet is a first in many ways. It represents a major step in our vision of computation as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device. Soon, Croquet will run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box; persistent Croquet worlds will be ubiquitous on the Internet, routed intelligently to each user through computational services overlays like PlanetLab. This will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive, service”.
It took a day to sink in.
Eventually, people will want and get always-on connectivity for mobile devices, just as over half of American Internet users now get for fixed-position access. After demand evens out, I think device costs are first-order proportional to the number of chips, with the complexity of chips being a second-order effect. So the cost of a PDA capable of running Croquet will someday not be inherently much more expensive then a cell phone such as is now being given away by providers.
So, will we have telephones? Of any kind?
As far as I know, the Croquet developers didn’t set out to replace the telephone. If I had, my wife would have threatened divorce for such a hair-brained idea. And I’m not predicting that Croquet will displace the telephone. But it is interesting that progress in solving an abstract and general problem
mightlead to the merging of computers and telephones.
Inventing the Future: shared persistence
The real-time collaboration in Croquet is cool. It provides a very different way of structuring applications that will allow things that nothing else can. The croquet team is working hard on this aspect. But we’re just begining to consider the implications of shared persistence. I think this is just as radical in itself, and will inspire truly extroadinary software when combined with Croquet’s other aspects.
Total Government Awareness going the way of John Ashcroft?
A long time ago, I think I mentioned in a comment to something that there was a project at the MIT Media Lab to keep a database of uncorroborated information about government officials, analogous to Ashcroft and Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” monstrosity.
The project had been written up in several places, including Wired and slashdot, but now it seems to have shut down.
Why? Lack of interest (we get the government we deserve), or were they shut down? I have no idea.
The TIA project (ephemistically renamed “Terorist Information Awareness”) seems to have disappeared from the DARPA site, too. Does that mean it has been abandoned, or just gone silent.
our computer is gross
Our home desktop Windows machine is used only by my wife and two pre-teen girls. We’ve been infected by some crapware lately and I tried to clean it up. In addition to the stuff visible on the hard disk, there’s this thing called the Windows registry. This is is used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, such as boot-time start-up of programs that you never heard of and don’t want running on your machine. I couldn’t believe what I found in there.
I did this:
start->run
(and then type)
regedit
(In the regedit menus do:)
edit->find
(and type)
fuck
(or erotic, or anything else you’d be surprised to find on your computer).
I feel so violated.
Inventing the Future: What is Croquet?
Croquet is an ambitious project to develop an entirely new way to work with computers, including 3D user interfaces and real-time collaboration between separate people manipulating the same virtual objects. Although this could be used in many domains, the focus of the core developers is on educational uses.
Imagine you could make computers work however you wanted. What would you have them do? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Fast machines. Graphics coprocessors. Fast worldwide networks. And it’s only going to get better.