On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
-S
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Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
Nathan
2009/11/17 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
- d.
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:13 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/11/17 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
- d.
Which makes his article and his book _Silicon Snake Oil_ all the worse: he knew better! (Although as an astronomer turned sysadmin who hasn't done anything interesting since, I'm not sure how much we could credit Stoll with in terms of history & sociology & trends.)
For example: "None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later.""
Seriously, Cliff? Seriously? This is your idea of a cogent point, that bandwidth sucked in '95? Yet you should've known perfectly well about all the fiber being put in, that broadband tech like ADSL and cable modems were realities in not just the labs but were becoming commercial tech, that all the trends - all! - said that bandwidth would just keep on going up.
"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
Amazon was founded in '94, and started selling books just a few months after this article. And Amazon was by no means the first to sell books online. And his prediction we would never read books on computers, with Kindle, has obviously been falsified. (E-paper, incidentally, was first invented in the '70s, and the early '90s saw the development of what Kindle would use, e-ink.)
And his 2 paragraphs on e-commerce? Equally risible. We can forgive him for thinking salespeople necessary. (Although I can't; what, did mail-order not prove in the *previous* century that salespeople were unnecessary?) But saying that there was no way to send money online is both ignorant and stupid. What, had banks for all the 20th century been schlepping around documents and whatnot in cars and trains? No, by '95, they had long been using electronic methods, routed over - *computer networks*. Astonishing. (Paypal, BTW, was founded 1998.)
Cliff gets exactly *1* thing right: that computers will be largely useless in juvenile education. When your competition is a stopped clock and your predictions could be seen to be wrong or dubious even before they were made, you know your prognosticating skills are bad.
On 17/11/2009, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
I can't remember whether I read this when it came out- if I did, and I think I did, I quickly dismissed it; it was clear even at the time that things were going to continue to change, and more and more things were likely to pile online. His essay was essentially a static view of the *internet*. Even then... not going to happen.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/11/17 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554 Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
- d.
Amusingly enough I met both Clifford Stoll and Stallman when they were in the same weight class (I think that dates me).
(RMS has gained some weight, lol)
I shook Stallmans hand in Boston in that early year when even Marvin Minsky attended a Worldcon, and asked him when HURD would come out of the closet.
RMS came out with his classic line of not owning crystal balls...
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect as foresight is rare.
Its not about having some kind of crystal ball, though. It's about giving credence to people who understand the components and can, in their mind at least, put them together long before they can be put together in material form. It would help any confusion of course if visionaries could explain their visions with more conviction and convincing detail. But in that case though, the writer was just completely and perfectly wrong about everything.
And that's in part due to (as you say) that conventional tendency. The point here is that it's a tendency based in not giving credence to the most competent visions, not just in natural incapacity. Even the objections which haven't yet been totally disproven ('no hypergovernment') will of course have to fall also, just to satisfy statistical idealism.
And are laypeople today really going to start arguing with a David Deutch or a Peter Shor? I think Stoll must have hit mid-age and that set his thoughts back to 1983, in which state of mind he penned a treasure trove's worth of postdated humor. Nobody could actually get all the answers wrong - that is, nobody, but a guy who really knew all the answers.
-Stevertigo "And carried on without a comma...
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:07 AM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
So cool!
The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,
reddit.com pretty much did for me.
no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher
Jury's still out.
and no computer network will change the way government works.
How did Obama get elected again?
Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
Answer: blogging.
How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach.
Answer: Kindle. Or any netbook, really.
Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
He was wrong about the books, but right about the newspapers. We don't "buy" them.
I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them--one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question,
Answer: Wikipedia
Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Boy, that sure changed. I love what the internet has done to state government departments in particular - you can get access to so much information so easily now.
We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.
I'm going to agree with him on this one.
Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts.
Wow. I can't even imagine buying plane tickets any other way. (Oops, not quite true, I bought a ticket at an airport in Borneo last month). Restaurant reservations...well some sites do it, I'd still ring up to be safe. Negotiating contracts by email, definitely.
Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
Because malls are about much more than buying stuff. They're places that deranged people go for pleasure. The net has replaced a huge chunk of my offline shopping though. Food and secondhand books I always buy offline. Everything else is probably 70% online.
Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Not anymore it's not. I've made tame enquiries into a couple of products and been followed up by extremely keen salespeople. But as pointed out, they're redundant in general.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.
Twitter, facebook, IM, Skype. But he's still kind of right.
No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert.
For once, he's dead on the money.
I actually love Cliff Stoll - I bought a hand-manufactured, signed Klein bottle from him once. But it's interesting to see how all sorts of assumptions and prejudices can make you so, so wrong. It appears in retrospect that the correct vision for the future would be "anything that genuinely relies on physical presence and sensation, like a rock concert, can't be computerised. Everything else can, and will."
Steve