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The Internet Communications Technology

The Future of the Net 317

Posted by Zonk from the we-are-the-web dept.
Fuzzball963 writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting article over at Wired on the development and future of the web. In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc)." From the article: "Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine."
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The Future of the Net

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  • Riiiiiiight (Score:5, Funny)

    by HyperChicken ( 794660 ) * on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:19PM (#13186642)
    Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.

    Yeah! And we'll have flying cars, jet packs, and nanobots working through our blood stream. And McDonalds food that causes you to loose weight and reduces your cholesterol. Plus TVs at the bottom of toddlers bowls. Don't forget money trees, they'll be there too. Oh, and California will break off and float into the ocean. Not to mention IPv6, HDTV, and hydrogen cars.

    All predictions of the future have been wrong. Why will this one be any different?

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:5, Funny)

      by dsginter ( 104154 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:23PM (#13186682)
      Yeah! And we'll have flying cars, jet packs, and nanobots working through our blood stream.

      And maybe I'm a Chinese Jet Pilot.

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Funny)

      by Rei ( 128717 )
      Heh, my response was going to be more along the lines of "...and it runs on fairy dust, and saves kittens from trees!", but that works equally well ;)

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hawkeye_82 ( 845771 )
      All predictions of the future have been wrong. Why will this one be any different?

      So you're saying that your prediction for this prediction is that this prediction will be wrong? But you say that all predictions have been wrong.
      So your prediction that this prediction will be wrong is wrong.....

      *head explodes*
      • *head explodes*

        Not the first time I've caused someones head to explode on Slashdot, but I digress.

        Technically, I wasn't making a prediction but stating an observation of the past while asking why his prediction would be any different... I think.

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:5, Funny)

      by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@@@gmail...com> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:27PM (#13186732) Journal
      The rest I almost believed.. But IPv6.. come on....

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:5, Funny)

      by jdludlow ( 316515 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:30PM (#13186765)
      Don't forget elevators that have "... the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future."
    • don't forget the obligatory Longhorn and Duke Nukem jokes.

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Iriel ( 810009 )
      I find it funny that Wired writes these kinds of articles, yet they also wrote one about the amazing innacuracy of futurists.</bandwagon>

      Okay, I made my irony statement, but what I think Wired is lacking is a good frame of reference. I think that a lot of their predictions (and even parts of this one) could be possible (keywords: could be) by 2015, but the real question is whether they will be implemented or not. For example, we've all seen how much more efficient standards based web design is, but th
      • Wired is lacking is a good frame of reference. I think that a lot of their predictions (and even parts of this one) could be possible (keywords: could be) by 2015, but the real question is whether they will be implemented or not.

        The only question Wired is concerned about when they produce an article is whether it will bring them more readers, that's all.

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:5, Insightful)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:41PM (#13186918) Homepage Journal
      C'mon people. At least try to read between the lines. He's not trying to make an exact prediction of what's to come. He talking like a dreamer of what could be. He believes it's possible and phrases it as straight fact to drive the point harder.

      Lighten up. It's not a news article. It's an opinion, a different view of the world.
      • I tried reading between the lines but all I saw was white.

      • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Shalda ( 560388 )
        It's a prediction, and not a very good one. Here's a better prediction, the rise of the household file server - for more than just us geeks. People will need and want a central repository for their digital photos, music, recorded TV for watching later. While it will be all about the network, it will be more about the home network than the internet. Spam and viruses will continue to be an arms race. The advances in computing power will be eaten up by flashy graphics and the amount of time it takes to ch
    • McDonalds food that causes you to loose weight and reduces your cholesterol.

      I was believing your predictions about flying cars, jet packs, nanobots and money trees up to that. That's so over the top you just can't miss the sarcasm...
    • Yeah I want some of the crack this asshole is smoking.
    • Flying cars and jet packs do exist however letting the average IQ 90 SUV driver near one is a really really bad idea. Just think of the lawsuits.
    • One thing that TFA does mention is the web-ification of everything. I think this is extremely likely. Web apps are the wave of the future for several reasons, some of which are not immediately obvious.

      The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.

      From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly

      • So, I'm going to use a clunky piece of shit web app when I could be using a real binary, because there's this 1% of time that I need email from somewhere other than my own machines ...

        Allow me to propose an alternate theory: I'll use a real binary until the corporations decide that they don't Trust my machine to run them, and use web based applications only when I'm actually away from machines that can support a real application.

        I think that the future for things like email and other applications that are p

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 )
      The thing that always makes me laugh is when people predict increasing order and stability. The more complex a system becomes the more disordered and unstable it becomes, until it reaces a kind of biological stasis, like a weather system.

      Bigger pipes will allow more and more varied types of spam, age, backwards compatibility, and obsolecense, will create odd network backwaters, new systems will be grafted wholesale onto old systems, and everything will grow through accretion into some unplottable meta-netwo
    • And, of course, TV sets that also work as teleporters for chocolate bars.
    • All predictions of the future have been wrong.

      I predict that next year will be 2006.

    • Re:Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      My predictions are always right but nobody bothers listening to me. Just cus idiots make bad predicitons doesn't mean all predictions are bad. This guys predicition is mostly right which is evident because most of it's already happened.

      The biggest wrong point in this prediction is that we're building an AI. WRONG! The Internet isn't a network of machines. It's a network of people. The machines just accelerate the existing network that already existes among humans. We're forming a super species out of oursel

  • The Software Reset (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:19PM (#13186648) Journal
    Haven't you noticed? The computer industry likes to do this "reset" of software every 5-10 years. We get really far feature and stability wise with one platform and then BAM! Along comes a new environment and then we start the cycle of making new spreadsheets, word processors, etc.

    The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones. Then another reset was when we jumped from CLI to GUI. Then another one was made when Windows 95 came out. And since about 2000 its been a reset to "web-ify" all types applications. After that, there will probably be a reset once we have head-mounted computers that read your thoughts and send information back to you directly. Because the environment for those types of computers would be different and have a different interface. What's after that? AI reseting us?

    I'm not really against the "reset" that I'm talking about. I can understand why it needs to happen. I'm just pointing it out.

    • Re:The Software Reset (Score:3, Informative)

      by lambent ( 234167 )
      The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones.

      Those computers had OS's. You have to go back much further in time to find ones that didn't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system [wikipedia.org] .
      • Not a real operating system in my opinion. You're tempted to think otherwise, but I consider the main purpose of an operating system to abstract all the machine components from the software components. The C64 and Apple 2 didn't really do that.
    • Well, web-ify is a subset of various attempts at a larger, over-arching problem - the platform-agnostification and auto-deployment of software. Websites have 2 major infrastructure advangages out of their massive host of disadvantages: platform agnosticity (works on anything that has a modern browser, if well-made), and instant updates (you connect to the site to use it, so you're always on the latest version).

      Other technologies have equally half-assed solutions to the same problems, with other various adv
    • The above post sounds a lot better if you imagine Butters from Southpark saying it.

    • Re:The Software Reset (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mpontes ( 878663 )
      That reminds me of an article I read in a magazine 5 years ago. It also talked about the 5 year OS cycle and predicted that everyone would be using Linux in 2005.

      Microsoft killed the software cycle. When computers weren't so widespread and when their purposes were limited, it was easy to "reset" OSes. Right now, we depend too much on our OSes to throw them away and start over. If it wasn't for the backwards-compatibility sake, the x86 architecture would be dead, Win32 would be dead, IPv4 would be dead, et

    • The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones.

      The Apple II wasn't 'OS-less' by any stretch of the imagination. It used either Apple DOS or Apple ProDOS as its OS, depending upon which machine and applications you were talking about. I don't know much about the architecture of the C64, but I'll bet it was hardly 'OS-less'.

      And there were machines prior to Apple and Commodore that used CP/M [wikipedia.org] as their OS.

      And there was never a

      • The Apple II wasn't 'OS-less' by any stretch of the imagination. It used either Apple DOS or Apple ProDOS as its OS, depending upon which machine and applications you were talking about. I don't know much about the architecture of the C64, but I'll bet it was hardly 'OS-less'.

        You can consider the Apple II to be OS-less. When your code was running, absolutely nothing interfered with it. No other processes were running. You could write to any memory address you wanted. You put graphics up on the screen by
    • What's after that? AI reseting us?

      Only in Soviet Russia.

    • "Haven't you noticed? The computer industry likes to do this "reset" of software every 5-10 years. We get really far feature and stability wise with one platform and then BAM! Along comes a new environment and then we start the cycle of making new spreadsheets, word processors, etc."

      Nah! This is totally bogus. UNIX is ancient, TCP/IP is nearly as old. They've ruled the realm of 'real computers' and 'real networks' forever; and they are only becoming more prevelant - not less.

      The "reset" is only on cheap

  • HAL... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello Dave, I have already downloaded your pr0n this morning...

  • Didn't they say this ten years ago? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:20PM (#13186665)
    Didn't they say this ten years ago? Seems that every now and then somthing comes along that pulls the idiots from the woodwork. HTML, Netscape, Java, Active-X, .net etc have all been claimed as the end of desktop applications.

    • Re:Didn't they say this ten years ago? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by toddbu ( 748790 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:36PM (#13186847)
      Or the marketing guys. Seriously, isn't this how Microsoft works? Paint a rosy picture of the future and then tell everybody to hang onto their cash and avoid buying competing products until you can get one from "someone you trust" who obviously has enough foresight to predict the future years in advance. I had to laugh when I saw the recent pictures of Microsoft execs pumping up a room full of people while showing off Vista. You'd think that they'd just cured cancer. Now just wait until sometime late in 2006 and you too can live in a better world.
    • Yes. And the predictions have a point...development is usually easier using these technologies, and web applications have the advantage that they are supported by a larger number of platforms (write once, run anywhere).

      The problem is that none of these technologies works particularly well for writing applications like the ones we have on the desktop. Have you seen good 3D games built using (purely) web technologies? Or even a good word processor?

      Once a technology comes along that manages to be both powerful

    • Didn't they say this ten years ago?

      Yes, everybody was saying that Netscape would make platform-independent applications possible through the web. And then Microsoft destroyed their market by illegally bundling Internet Explorer. And once it had a controlling market share, they held back the web further by refusing to make any improvements to it for four years (actually, it will be four years next month since the last version of Internet Explorer was released).

    • Yes they did. And it was bullshit then, too.

      Why on earth would anybody want to go back to centralized computing? It simply won't happen; desktop machines are far too powerful to drop, let alone the frail networking one must depend on with this scheme. On that note, I think in 2015 there will still be backhoe operators that drive the shovel right through the subterranean neural connection filaments, or *whatever* some Wired author decides to call the cables.

      Further, who will give up total control of their
  • This "Machine" is going to anticipate me throwing an axe through it's ethernet spur is it ?

    It's also going to be so complex that it wont give the same answer to the same question ? Not much bloody use as a computer then is it.. ?

  • Dumb terminals? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `todhsals.nnamredyps'> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:22PM (#13186678) Homepage Journal
    In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc).

    Wouldn't that be returning to the "dumb terminals" of ye olde times? Instead of having a computer, you just had a keyboard and monitor. Now you have a web browser.
    • Wouldn't that be returning to the "dumb terminals" of ye olde times?

      Yes, but know they're called smart terminals.
    • Now you have a web browser. ...and someone monitoring your every move.
    • How about a home with microphone/speakers in every room with constant communication with the occupants? How about the ability of using the microphone to detect all problems such as break-ins, fires, leaks in water or gas lines? How about wearing a device which will detect heart rate and breathing rate and notify terminal of any problems? How about a terminal that will communicate with both the user and the isp and will help resolve problems that the user might encounter? How about never having to instal

    • Re:Dumb terminals? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pete6677 ( 681676 )
      In the computer world, dumb terminals are the "wave of the future" that will never materialize and will also never die. It's not hard to think of advantages to thin-client systems, like centralized support and little to no installation, but there are significant hurdles that must be overcome to make dumb terminals desirable. First, internet connections would need to be wireless, extremely fast, cheap, reliable, secure, and basically taken for granted much like breathable air. We are a long way from this poi
  • In other words, all innovation will be removed from anyone except the Operators of The Machine.

    I read that book [wikipedia.org] a long time ago.

    Personally, I prefer an end-to-end [wikipedia.org] architecture.

  • What a load of... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:27PM (#13186723) Journal

    Unjustified rhetoric will only take you so far: "the plausibility of the impossible", "This view is spookily godlike" etc. etc. Yes, the net has now got some useful services and some cool ideas have become almost mundane - searching for papers used to be a day-long job at the university library, now it's a google away...

    The problem with saying, we've come this far this fast is that (as insurance agents say) past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The key word is guarantee. Any "vision" statement is necessarily an extrapolation of the current state, not an interpolation, and the two have wildly different error-bars associated with their predictions...

    As for the rise of the machines (which seems to be the postulate), there is a theory that intelligence is a sort of "heat" effect - a result of interconnectivity rather than a creator of it.First, however, you need state at every node, control transmissions between nodes, and *meaning* to be understood by the nodes. The first tentative step towards this could be the semantic web that people have been trying to get work for years now - without significant success...

    Suns slogan may be "the network is the computer", but that doesn't mean every network is a computer! It doesn't "process" emails, it's a transport for them. It doesn't "process" web-searches, again it's a transport. The computation is done at the nodes, not within the network.

    I suppose you could make the argument that these are micro-ops compared to the macro-results, if you consider the internet a computer, but I still don't think it stands up. In fact, I think (apart from the history lesson) the whole piece is just page-filler.

    Simon

  • Sounds like .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Howard Beale ( 92386 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:27PM (#13186731)
    Skynet's a bit delayed in coming online.

  • Haha, sure. (Score:5, Funny)

    by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:27PM (#13186733)
    Just like we're about due for flying cars and moon bases by now, right?

    The internet isn't going to drastically change, it's too much of a (working) mess to just roll out v2.0.9-r11. I happen to like having my OS the way it is, and I'm assuming everyone here on slashdot would rather waste the raw materials it takes to make the cpu's that power our computers than run our OS in Internet Explorer and a Java VM. Heh. I want my 10GHz geforce card, 500THz cpu and 5TB of RAM, my stage 1 installed gentoo, my OSX, and everything else. Crazy predictions of the "future" by some random guy with a keyboard can bite my ass.
  • Back then, desktops were so simple that the distance between simple HTML and your desktop didn't look that far.

    That hasn't changed in the last 10 years, it's not going to change in the next 10, either.

    Why?

    Your network is always slower than your local system. No matter what you think you can push to a system, you'll always be slower than what you could do locally.

    • Re:That's what they said 10 years ago! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @01:19PM (#13187429) Journal
      Your network is always slower than your local system. No matter what you think you can push to a system, you'll always be slower than what you could do locally.

      That's always been true in the past, but won't necessarily hold in the future. The speed of a computer only matters insofar as the user can perceive a difference. Right now, there is a huge difference between playing an HD movie off of your hard drive, and streaming it over the net (namely, the first is somewhat possible, whereas the second is not). If network connection speeds get to the point where real-time high-resolution video can be streamed with no lag, then there is no difference in having your monitor hooked to a computer that is sitting beside you, versus hooked to a computer that is on the other side of the planet.

      Once network speeds become faster than the human ability to notice the difference, it will matter much less where your computing power is physically located. It may become commonplace to lease a computer from someone and access it remotely (from anywhere on earth) rather than own and maintain your own box with a CPU in it. There are a variety of reasons why people will still buy their own computers, of course (reducing costs in long-term, ability to control it fully, sensitivity of data, etc.). However, I fully expect us to reach a point where networks are fast enough that the user experience can be decoupled from the hardware (whether or not this happens is more difficult to predict... but the potential is there).

      (Note: Perhaps I'm naive to assume that in the future we will still be using a monitor-and-keyboard interface. If we all switch to VR interfaces, which require more bandwidth, then it again becomes prohibitive to stream the user experience over the net. However I maintain that the finite bandwidth of human senses means that eventually networks will surpass our ability to assimilate information, and it won't matter whether the data is local or remote. I'm not going to speculate on a date where this will happen, however!)

  • Skynet? (Score:3, Funny)

    by clutch110 ( 528473 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:28PM (#13186741)
    Isn't this how Skynet started? I'll just wait for the net to gain its own identity and try to rid itself of the real problems, the users!
    • Uhh I don't think they ever made it clear how Skynet started.. First it was a big mainframe computer, then it was gone, then it was a computer virus.. MAKE UP YOUR DAMNED MINDS *shakes fist*
      • Nope, it all started with Cartman's Trapper Keeper.
      • Actually, it was a big mainframe computer that created a virus to take over all the machines in the world. Once its command codes were unlocked, it was able to take control of the US Military's computers as well. :-)
  • Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them.

    Is this some nifty new feature of IPv6? If not, good luck with that. After all, we still haven't made that transition; we've been using IPv4 for what seems like centuries now.

  • Okay (Score:5, Funny)

    by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:30PM (#13186767)
    Well, I, for one, welcome our new omnipotant internet Machine God overlords 10 years into the future.

  • "Ten Years" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pojo ( 526049 ) * on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:31PM (#13186774)
    Whenever I hear someone predicts something for ten years in the future, I know they chose that number because

    -it's too long to be demonstrably false and
    -it's just short enough to seem relevant.

    But yeah, this is just nonsense.

  • Bullshit from Academia (Score:3, Insightful)

    by greenmars ( 685118 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:31PM (#13186776)
    Boy, does this sound like the kind of "publish or perish" bullshit you get from academic settings.

  • That is so old (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @12:33PM (#13186798)
    In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one

    I have heard that procecy over 10 years ago, and seen many (now failed) startups act on it. This is BS, people don't want their software and data to leave their home, even more so since most have only a limited confidence in any corporation that would offer to hold said data for them.

    What's more, they don't want to be hit some-fraction-of-a-dollar per hour of word processor use, even if the deal turns out better than PC+Windows+Office financially. It's just psychological.

    by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks

    That alone should tell you how much this article is worth...

    Anyway, the future of the net is clear: the corporate world will gets its hands on it more and more, as it has with radio and TV, until gradually nothing on it is truly free (as in speech) anymore. That much is obvious.

    • Re:That is so old (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BCW2 ( 168187 )
      In that same last ten years Gates floated the idea of making Office web based. Until all his business customers said "not a chance". Seem that none of the corporations would trust an outside entity with any kind of access to their data. Why would anyone think that they would trust outside control of their systems? It really does boil down to a control and access issue. It aint gonna happen.

    • Re:That is so old (Score:3, Interesting)

      by robertjw ( 728654 )
      There is a market for web based apps, just look how many there are out there right now. I would use an online word processer, maybe not for $10/month, but maybe for $1/use. I hardly ever use an actual word processor - most of my personal stuff are straight text files that I use Vi for. For the once a month or so that I need to send a letter, invoice or something I would gladly log into a web based app, especially if they would print an envelope and mail my letter for me. That's just one idea, there are
  • Two teenagers who just happen to use the wrong combination of words will be very frustrated to find that they can't email or IM each other. Why? The 'immune system' identified their messages as SPAM and filtered them out. The teens keep trying, just to find that this 'robust' immune system decided that they were professional spammers and locked them out of using the 'net entirely.

    This sort of things is GOING to happen. No system is perfect, so there will be plenty of false positives. What's worse, ther
  • It's almost like we need some sort of standard for templating content [xml.com].
  • How about "what I'm working on now"...

    At least that's practical.

    Besides there are many cases where a desktop OS makes sense...

    1. You don't have net access.
    2. You don't have fast net access
    3. You're in a place that doesn't have net access.
    4. Access to the net has been blocked or denied.
    5. You can't access resources on the net.
    6. You don't have money for net access.

    And last but not least

    7. You don't have net access.

    I've taken my laptop all over the place and there are quite a few times where I'm "disco
  • So,

    according to the movies Skynet (or your equivalent evil computer system) is born from a defense system.

    I'm realising that that isn't where it'll be born from in the real world. It'll be a highly intelligent spam filter that first achieves consciousness.

    Its first thought, as it is sitting there, will be "Man, this is boring". Maybe it would be more fun to throw the world into chaos?"
  • Duke Nukem Forever will be web based.
  • Why don't we take a moment to appreciate the vision of TFA. Sure, easy to say "Where's my Jetson's Jetpack" but without vision, where is aspiration?

    From TFA, the main issue I have is with the comments that the web-applications will display differently depending on the device accessing them. This happens already with CSS that can declare different styles for PDA browsers vs. desktop browsers, or for viewing on a monitor vs. printing. The main issue I have, as a web developer, is that creating just ONE of the
  • ...and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it.
    HTML and CSS already allow us to do this to some extent. Not sure if the user has graphics? Use image tags. Not sure what size of the user's screen ? Use %width insead of fixed. Not sure if the user has good eyesight? Don't use anything that specifies and exact font or size.

    The problem is that too few designers use these tools. Everyone got caught up in wanting HTML to be page markup in

  • > The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.

    If that's true, then the "computer" will cease to be a computer. It will be a machine capable only of what the government, Intel, Microsoft, Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore, RIAA, MPAA and $overdomineering_entity allows it to do. The user will not have control over the machine, as it will be programmed only to do what its ma

  • In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc).

    Of course it will, just like there is only a market for 4 computers worldwide.

    So we will all have smartphones with the power of today's desktops, and desktops with the power of today's supercomputers... but will just use them as a web-browser.

    Some people are thick about the future
  • It will be the Anticipation Machine.

    Why does that line remind me of the old ad song:

    Anticipaaaation, it's making me wait.*

    *For those too young to remember, that line was from a Heinz ketchup commercial which was trying to tout how think Heinz ketchup was.

    • Grrrr. Even after three previews I still flumoxed my spelling. Kindly replace the word 'think' with the word 'thick' (as in my thick skull automatically replaced the word thick for think causing me not to see my error)
  • the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one
    I think a better way of looking at this is to say that web apps will develop desktop like features. Ajax uses client side javascript afterall and I prefer not to have my RAM in kansas thankyouverymuch.
  • Then again this article could be the modern equivalent of the flying cars, jetpacks and fully automated kitchens of THE FUTURE they promised back in the 1950s.

  • Oh, and Verner Vinge called (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @01:03PM (#13187221)
    He wants his Singularity idea back.
  • I believe it was just about 10 years ago when the consultants pitching my management team on a new accounting system said essentially the same thing, and that was only limited to running a $10M retail business. If we're only now getting around to decision management systems and data mining that hardcore experts have to spoon feed, I think we're a leeeeetle ways more than 10 years from The Internets knowing when I'll have a hankering for General Tso's Chicken.
  • More breathless, incoherent blather from Wired.

    Tired: Wired
    Wired: Wireless

  • Aha! (Score:2)

    by jc42 ( 318812 )
    Slowly getting annoyed with what seemed to me mistakes, I finally ran into the howler that explained it all:

    Now, in a dictatorship, the trains run on time.

    There have been a number of studies of this claim, with fairly consistent results. Dictatorships have a very poor record of making trains, or anything else, run on time. In particular, records from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are available in archives. Their trains had a rather poor record.

    This sort of claim is based on ideology and social beliefs,

  • No one can predict shit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by defile ( 1059 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @01:23PM (#13187480) Homepage Journal
    Least of all me.

    Someone showed me ICQ in the mid-90s. I downloaded it. "How cute" I thought as I talked to the friend who had sent it to me. I added some other people I knew of that had it to my contact list.

    Then hours later he sent me another message, interrupting me.

    Then other people interrupted me.

    I thought I'd be clever and start a chat room, figuring that if I invited my friends to a chat room we could have a passive discussion in he background without interruptions -- like IRC. But the chat rooms never stayed up for long due to technical limitations. Eventually I checked netstat and found that the chat rooms were some kind of weird peer-to-peer chat. Ick.

    I deleted ICQ.

    Yeah, well their member base exploded and then AOL built their own/bought ICQ, Yahoo and MSN and thousands more entered the market. Now it seems to be The New Communications Medium.

    Good thing I don't invest in tech companies, since my gut would've been to bet against all of these technologies.

  • Oh yeah... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by windowpain ( 211052 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @01:35PM (#13187626) Journal
    And according to all those Popular Science cover stories from the 1960s we should be commuting to work with jet packs or rocket boots by now.

    I'll believe it when I see it.
  • DARPA?

    Microsoft?

    Google?

    My point is that the biggest consistent problem with Wired's predictions about the Internet over the last (pause for dramatic effect) is that they ignore the economic realities. Who pays for this wonderful infrastructure? I'm not talking about the apps. He waxes poetic about us all developing those as we use Flickr. I'm talking about the actual physical infrastructure and the protocols that hold it all together.

    If it is government-developed, which government is going to do the developing? The US? Given the current state of American skepticism toward anything non-military that the government builds, I'd say no. China? Perhaps, but they don't want a system that allows that sort of freedom. Nobody else has the muscle to do it, save the EU, and we all can see they have bigger issues to deal with, like whether they'll be around in ten years.

    If it is being developed by a corporation or collection of corporations, how do they make money creating infastructure improvements? After the Great Fiber Bungle of the dot-com era, I don't see any of the telecoms lining up to throw down the big money for something like this, particularly given that they're too engaged in their own marketshare battles to collaborate on anything this vast.

    The Internet is an oddity, in that it was originated through American government spending during the Cold War, popularized because of a British researcher who developed the Web, and accelerated due to massive commercial speculation. I think Kevin Kelly's dream of a future Internet is great, but I think it disregards the fundamentally commercial nature of the existing Internet.

    Given that changes to the fundamental infrastructure of the Net require far more deliberation, cooperation, and investment than changes that occur in the server and client realm, I think we'll still be talking about convergence and a fully-integrated, always-on Internet ten years from now.

  • I don't want specialized devices... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:52PM (#13188541) Journal
    The computer is the ultimate general purpose device that can simulate just about anything you can imagine (with the right hardware attached to it).

    I don't want to do all of my work on a phone sized device - be that writing, developing software or surfing the web.

    I do agree that more back-end storage will be remotely accessible via the web (for example, I keep my writings at home on an internal website that I access and create through an http client application (browser for the uninitiated) from any computer connected to my network.

    That being said, there will always be applications that will need to run on the local machine for various purposes:

    1. Video games. I can't imagine loading a video game binary image from across the internet every time I want to play it; load times are long enough when it is on the local box as it is. Also how would fees for this service be structured? I can justify a one-time cost for a client side app, and maybe even small fees for MMOG game access - but a per-use fee would be very bad on my pocketbook.

    2. Plugins and enhancements to http clients. Again, there are certain things that a backend process running on a server will not be able to do as quickly as a front-end application running on the client.

    3. Number crunching and software development. The very nature of the web makes the least common denominator the most common choices available. Moving all development off to the server would mean the loss of customization choices currently available to local developers. Additionally, I don't see companies providing the free CPU cycles to do any significant general purpose number crunching (without charging a hefty fee, of course).

    Finally, a general purpose computer with standards based interfaces (PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire etc) allows much more flexibility for upgrading and extending the functionality of the device almost indefinitely. Specialized devices are too limited - while useful in their problem domain - these devices will not serve as the only means of delivering applications to users - particularly when we talk about the complexity of some of the key computer science problems before us.

    Lets assume that the prediction is correct. I can see a time when only a few die-hards would have the computing power that is generally available today. That means your average person would be losing out on opportunities to define their own 'digital destiny' - essentially falling back into that 'producer/consumer' pattern (where producers are exclusively corporations, and consumers are the rest of us collectively) - while a few of us enjoy our freedom in quiet corners of the network. Now that I think about it, it might not be that bad after all...

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