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).
snapchat's biggest problem is the interface, it's extremely hard to use. I think the plan was to make it complicated so that older people don't get into it, turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app
I think that's on purpose. So friends have to show you the app first... It kinda creates a "lock-in" effect, like "I already bothered to learn this with my friends, why change now?"
>turns out nobody wants to struggle using a selfie app
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.
IMHO even if facebook cloned all the functionality, if people found snapchat easier to use they wouldn't have jumped ship the moment it became an option.
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.
It's not based on cluelessness, people are aware that there are ways to circumvent the screenshot notification. The vast majority of people don't install third-party apps to save their friends' snaps, so content you share on Snapchat is still drastically less likely to be on someone's phone forever than if you were to send it some other way.
I was never about security.
They use FOMO to create a daily habit.
When you post, people see it and react quickly, which further strengthens the addiction.
It's like Facebook, but without pictures, friends, or events! Just status updates. Oh, and they're limited to 140 characters. It's going to be awesome. /s
i mean.. also Javascript. people learned to live with it, and it evolved to be more tolerable through a messy mishmash of tooling and language evolution.
I think Google was expecting Youtube to no longer exist as an entity in its own right, but just be a part of Google+ after they integrated all of their properties into a massive Facebook killer social media app, but that was a colossal failure.
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.
Some governments have banned it, many haven't. It's likely that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) aren't, and never were, the existential threat to governments as a whole that anarcho-capitalists wanted it it to be.
States and law enforcement are more likely to be concerned with what Bitcoin is used for, than the mere fact that it is used.
Has it taken over the world really? Techies love it but I am not convinced there is a mass market for it yet. I don't know if people really like talking to objects, and have non discoverable UIs.
x86. Even Intel seemed bent on dismantling it with Itanium. And while they were distracted, AMD humiliated Goliath with the Opteron. It was EPIC - no wait, it wasn't!
I don't really know, I just kinda got blindsided.. i saw 1 or 2 people playing with drones and i was like "this is a specific group of people like the model aircraft folk" and then the next day it was everywhere.
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.
Uber. It's a "taxi service except about half the price because it starts over with no unions". If it's so profitable, why didn't other taxi services do it instead? Is the whole reason because it lowers the bar for taxi drivers to be hired, thus reaching those who would be fine with the lower pay?
Google!
At the time I heard about this startup in the search space, I thought these people were idiots. Didn't they know that there was already Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Alta Vista, Etc. Another search engine is doomed to failure - especially if they don't even know enough to spell "googol" correctly.
Facebook. I was convinced "social" was just a fad. Played around with the app platform in undergrad in 2008 but thought it would be stupid to build something completely reliant on a 3rd party social platform. I had the opportunity to join FB pre-IPO in 2010 but I still thought it was a fad that couldn't last. I just don't get social.
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.
Flickr should have owned the simple sharing of pictures in a social network because ... they already had one. I'd consider that the biggest, most damning failure of Yahoo!'s management that they didn't immediately devote huge resources to countering Instagram when it appeared.
Is it really augmented reality if it's just a HUD overlay? I was excited for Google Glass until I found out it was more about the camera and text overlays. I wanted stereoscopic full-frame overlays and bionic camera input...
The fundamental question for the users here is "should I read an article on a website, which is designed exactly as the users should read and explore it and has 100% support for all typographical element, or on a third party reader which displays a processed copy of the article and requires effort to set up?"
RSS hasn't died, but it is definitely not growing, as those who prefer to use it are already using it.
That's one question, sure, but there's nothing fundamental about it. Here's a second question: should I have to go to the frontpage of a website to find out what's new on it, or get notifications automatically when there's something new?
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.)
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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.
With Firefox, you can turn an RSS feed into a virtual bookmark folder that always contains the newest items. I am not sure if Chrome can do this, With Internet Explorer I could not figure out how to get it to work.
But it is such a cool feature. Effectively, it allows me to embed a tiny RSS reader into the bookmark toolbar.
> The fundamental question for the users here is "should I read an article on a website, which is designed exactly as the users should read and explore it and has 100% support for all typographical element, or on a third party reader which displays a processed copy of the article and requires effort to set up?"
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.
I dunno, I think as long as you do statistical analysis that's vulnerable to adverse inputs you're going to see the same problem. Meaning that you can infer the keywords and prevent obvious lies only until the users figure out how to trick your keyword machine into inferring the wrong keywords.
As someone who only briefly dipped their toes into the semantic web topic, I found Googles' Knowledge Vault[0] to be a very interesting approach to the problem of "everybody lies".
If you do the counting properly, this can be taken into account. Just like in poker, where you can bluff sometimes but if you do it always, people will call you upon. It's called Reification Done Right (in quadstore terminology), where you store metadata about the statement. Then it's just about building a reputation score for each statement. You can use simple bayesian updates like it's done in spam filters. Pretty quickly there is very little incentive to lying in an open book world.
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.
As I've previously mentioned, it turns out that natural language processing on the natural language webpage that users see is a better way rank pages than invisible metadata.
It wasn't just about "pages". For example Nokia had a prototype of a PIM software that could handle very natural queries like "What are the emails of people who participated in a meeting on Monday?" not by a static planner but by dynamically mapping the terms to any semantic graph.
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 sure the Facebook Platform would take over the world. I thought the fast success of Zynga would create a blueprint for all web apps would be built in the future
hmm that's an interesting thought. I have no explanation for it either. My best suggestion for why this didn't happen was the world went mobile and the Android/Apple app store then become the platforms because of the install base and the tighter integration. Facebook (and msft of course) really, really, really fumbled mobile. Not news to anyone but i never thought of it in this context.
Kinect - such a human interface that doesn't require direct integration with hardware or technical knowledge or buttons, and a lot of fun in the games I played. But it failed.
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.
Wouldn't a Javascript X3D-to-WebGL wrapper solve this? That would allow time for adoption to happen during the standardization process, until browsers begin to implement it natively. If nobody is using this now with a JS wrapper, then why should browsers standardize it?
What killed IMO and what will continue to kill these kinds of things for a long time is that nearly all 3D applications need massive amounts of custom optimization solutions. Stuff like X3D gets you a few cubes on the screen. Then you want to do GTA or Google Maps or Minecraft or pick your app and suddenly your generic scene graph just isn't good enough.
In the '90s I was convinced that basically everything with a name attached to it was going to be built around PowerPC and MIPS processors. When StrongARM went to Intel, I figured ARM was basically dead outside of controller/coprocessor/offload applications and expected Pentium II/III to suffer a similar fate to Pentium Pro.
The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market.
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.
2017 was the biggest year for blockchain by a huge margin by many metrics (see https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/). there is now 200 billion dollars in this space, give it another year or two. Some things will shake out for sure, probably a lot of it, but many efforts will lead to production applications.
That's the thing. Blockchain tech is still pretty early stage in terms of reaching the general consumer. Yes, Bitcoin has been around for 8+ years now, but it takes a damn long time for a brand new type of technology to mature and work out the kinks. Ethereum has only been around for about 3 (2014).
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.
Well, what are you looking for? There's lots of tech developments happening in the bitcoin space, from mimblewimble to lightning to confidential assets & zero knowledge proofs. But it sounds like none of this is what you had in mind?
So, payments? There's plenty of work being done on that. See: lightning.
"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.
Hmm, have you heard of SingularityNET? There are plenty of projects being made that have real, valuable uses for blockchain tech. Marketplaces are one of them. If you want an app store that isn't controlled by one corporation that can force you play by their arbitrary rules, blockchain can allow this to happen. A centralized front-end is necessary, but that's all it is, a front-end. They have pretty much zero incentive to play hardball with the customers.
You're right that most of it is over-inflated hype. But to say the technology is useless is a stretch.
> The rules help protect the privacy and security of end users
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.
But what percentage of systems is actually ONLY implementable using a block-chain-based cryptocurrency?
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.
When you have a need to establish some business procedure between different parties that do not trust each other, smart contracts might be very useful. No other database is able to provide guarantees/features comparable to the public blockchain in that respect. A trust model of most modern databases just do not comply with "everyone trusts noone" principle.
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.
In the case of SingularityNET, AI agents are accessible and composable. They can interact with other agents, or act in unison to form larger, more complex agents. The market incentivizes development and maturity of both the system and the individual agents. This is a killer feature if you ask me. There will be a great number of already-useful agents available upon launch of SingularityNET, to kick-start the service's ability to provide tangible value.
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.
have you looked into IPFS/Filecoin and still view distributed storage as overhyped? or just havent looked that hard into the different ideas that are out there?
First: I love the idea behind IPFS and decentralized storage and I'm sure there will be some valid use cases.
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.
IMO, the killer app for cryptocurrency is going to be open bazaar. What is open bazaar? Simply put - it is a peer to peer decentralized market place. Think of a something like amazon except no fees to sell, no restriction on what you can sell and powered by bitcoin. Right now the software does not work fully because the only crypto you can use it bitcoin which currently has high fees. The devs are going o switch to using bitcoin cash which has low transaction fees (pennies per transaction).
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!
I'm not sure the Brave concept really needs blockchain - it could be implemented far more easily with a centralised DB. To be honest it looks like yet another ICO cashgrab
> I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.
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.
I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial proposal.
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.
True. Chat bots supply some of the functionality. In Wave you could have bots which would replace, alter, or add content based on things you typed in or some other rules. Like you could have a stock ticker bot, or one that inserted maps, or ones to do live translations.
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.
Internally in Google it was really, really hard to get in the Wave team. So many people felt the opportunity to show what they can and get a career boost. So, presumably, they had best Google engineers working on that product.
What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.
thanks for the anecdote! the politics must have been savage. also means the team probably cared more about being on a cool project than the actual problem area itself.
The alternative facts: maybe the great team they had did maximize their chance of success, it was just one of those 90% of "startups" that don't hit the market.
That's a good excuse for a product that fails to profit. But a team definitely isn't "great" if it can't release a coherent, useful prototype to the market.
Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance, OT was adopted in Google Docs [0], and CRDTs were used in yesterday's release of Atom's real-time collaborative editing [1]. So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.
> its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware
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...
Unlike Wave, you didn't have to wait for your friends and colleagues to get a Gmail account before you could talk with them. You could talk with anyone.
The difference is once you got a Gmail account you could immediately start sending and receiving email from it rather than twiddling your thumbs till someone you know got invited.
This, and also that GMail solved a need you already knew you had, and could be explained in a few words: practically unlimited inbox space, no need to delete emails anymore! Everyone wanted that, but most people didn't know exactly why they should want Wave.
Gmail invites, by 2004 or 2005(?) when I got in were instant. If I sent the invite, the friend had a chance to sign up right then.
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.
Yup, it hasn't gone away or stopped growing. It might be taking too long for journalists to find interest in it right now, but that has low correlation to the research effort.
I'm not in the field so I don't want to try to guess how long it will be. But of course it will be in gradual increments of cost, quality, and size. There won't be an exact point in time where we transition to being able to mass produce this material on a large scale.
It is interesting to imagine what WebOS would look like now with WebAssembly and the ability to load binaries into a browser interface. At this point, it might have to sit on top of for Android.
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.
Came here to vote for this. I even published an app to their store during the ~2 weeks it looked like HP was going to throw their weight behind the TouchPad.
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'm curious as to why you think WebOS on your TV sucks? I too have it and am content with it. To be fair, though, I don't have any other smart TV OS experience to compare it to.
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.
Yes Hydrogen Fuel Cells! Toshiba was claiming in 2006 that they were coming for laptop batteries. I still think the future of energy is solar cells, using water+electrolysis to get hydrogen for storage, and a fuel cell for conversion back to electricity.
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.
The bigger difference, to me, isn't so much that the walled-garden ecosystems restrict a phone/tablet's use as a general-purpose computer, than the form factors and interfaces of the device being appropriate for different forms of content creation, manipulation and consumption.
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.
I don't know about you, but for most reviews and new articles it easier for me to put it on in the back-ground than having to deal with advertisement and pop-up windows on web-pages when reading text.
> especially on iOS, there are _rules_ set out by the manufacturer about what is acceptable in software on the platform, both thematically and functionally.
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.
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.
Yeah, but I'm not sure if I would have become a programmer if "real" computers only targeted the professional market, while you had much cheaper appliances that solved the needs of my parent. Will a single mother be able to afford the difference just so her child can geek out? Turning computing into a privilege of the upper middle class doesn't appeal to me.
The "learning programming was much easier back in the day" rhetoric is exaggerated. Programming on any device is much easier than it was 10 years ago in VBScript, which was easier than 10 years before. Downloading some $1 app to write code on an iPad is way easier to dive into than learning BASIC on an IBM PC. There are even apps that actually specifically help kids learn instead of dumping a 200 page manual on you.
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.
No, it hasn't. Still, the majority of TV viewers use TV utility providers, not ISPs. When the average couch dweller sits down, grabs a remote, and turns on Netflix instead of "channel 42" on cable TV, WebTV will be commonplace, but it won't happen until the young Netflix-watching generation completely replaces the older cable-watching generation.
The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
If you're 10 or 65 this is correct, but for anyone else the PC has not only been increasing in use but other parts of your life are filled with other computers.
That's profoundly disappointing, I agree, but in a sense perhaps we geeks only have ourselves to blame. We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security, despite having decades to do so. We also didn't start routinely educating the next generation of kids in how useful and powerful programming skills are. Consequently, for many people personal computing has been reduced to little more than a mechanism for consuming online content and for relatively simple communications using a few trusted channels.
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.
> 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.
>We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security
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.
> 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'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.
I think a Word 1.0 with current tech would be awesome. Unfortunately, few parties seem interested in delivering fast applications anymore, instead focusing on cross-platform availability - you can't release a desktop app anymore without a mobile counterpart.
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.
> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC
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.
So why have a full pretty UI at the cost of latency?
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.
Because some people (including me) loves it. I don't care about a few extra ms for having an interface that's satisfying to watch / use for 12 hours per day.
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.
I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.
I dunno. Maybe initially, sure, but I've seen countless people use, for example, internet explorer where half the screen was taken up by malware toolbars (I wish I was exaggerating...), which is not pretty, not good UX, not gee-whiz coolness at all. And they never once complained, they just accepted it as the way it is and kept on going.
And there’s the reason. Users are too forgiving and too passive, because the industry has trained everyone to have incredibly low expectations.
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.
> I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness.
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.
I completely ageee that they belong in tablet land but tablets did not exist in the mid 00s. All of my older relatives who now use iPads exclusively all used OS X back then for both ease of use and aesthetic reasons.
You are repeating the same excuses the industry has pilfered to us for decades.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You're confusing throughput with latency. Those old systems were objectively more responsive because the keyboard and mouse were tied directly to high-priority IRQs which were serviced in the OS. Now we have USB keyboards and mice, which go on the same IRQ lines as every other USB device, and even if the OS could service them specially, it doesn't. So keyboard and mouse events go on a queue of things to do: disk accesses, network packets, etc. And the whole system feels slower because of the time lag between you sending a command to the machine via kb or mouse, and the machine actually receiving it.
Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?
It’s not that mouse pointers today are normally laggy; they aren’t, as you correctly say. But when a modern system is very busy, it’s normal for the keyboard and mouse input to lag too, but that wasn’t normally the case with older systems, since human input peripherals were typically given their own special higher priority interrupts or whatever.
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.
Anything that is above a netbook or a sub $500 laptop doesn't lag and today's computers and phone are spoiling us. I have a 8 year old netbook and I run a minimal Linux install with a tiled window manager and it is quick. I also have an i5 Sandy-bridge desktop and I also work with a tiled window manager because I prefer it, but my wife has Windows 10 on the same computer and it is spot on and that is 6 years old. My video work station is blazing fast and it never lags on anything except chugging through 4K/8K video renders.
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.
That did not look any less responsive than doing the same on LibreOffice on my high-end gaming laptop, with an SSD, and in many cases it looked more so.
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.
>I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming
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.
This really destroyed my day. I really have a big problem staying positive for at least a day now that you've eloquently expressed what I've had a creeping feeling of but just quite couldn't word in any discussion.
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.
I would like to think the open web has not lost yet, and that progressive web apps still have a great chance of taking over. Nobody wants to develop apps for at least three platforms. Nobody wants half their user base use old versions. Nobody wants to fear being dropped from some walled garden without any recourse.
There are still good technical reasons for some native apps, but that will dwindle more and more.
For the point of the developer, maybe. From the point of the user, not really; at least for many of them I can disable updates and keep running them even if the company goes bankrupt. The ones that depend on cloud services are arguably the worst of both worlds, though.
The only way for the "open" web to evolve is for Google, Apple and Microsoft to agree on a feature, spec it out and roll it out to their different platforms. All anyone else can do is twiddle their thumbs hoping they don't fuck it up.
We sandboxed away innovation, so now all we have is web apps that process text, video and audio all in the same way.
Did people really think the arms race of heuristic malware detection in bolt-on security software would be be sustainable?
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.
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.
There are desktop computers which are in shared environments (computer labs, public libraries, kiosks, teller lines, etc). So user-based permission models make a lot of sense for desktops.
Not really. There are better solutions than user permissions for those situations, we used them all the time in the 90s when multi-user didn't even exist in the Windows or Mac Desktop world.
Network resources, hosted on servers, need user permissions. Not desktops.
I'm not super a fan of typing on glass, especially when next-keystroke prediction is as poor as iOS has been lately managing. I am super a fan of having a device with the size of display that eliminating a physical input device achieves.
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.
Eventually at some point, you have to get some work done, and you just can't do that with a tablet screen or a touch interface. The mouse and keyboard will reign, and even if the concept of a non-sanboxed system goes away, the future will still have hardware which look like desktop computers and laptops. The OS filesystem won't go away because applications on these personal computers need to be able to talk to each other somehow, and the current iOS method of "launch a file in this application from this other application" is too limiting. The only thing that will change is the application packaging, which will become optionally centralized and have permission levels just like Android apps. I think overall, future computers will be just as pleasant to use, just as programmable/configurable, and just as easy to download software from decentralized sources.
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.
> 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.
as a web developer i am bemused at every other comment on here that seems to agree with your sentiment that the world is walling up. yes, app stores will be a control mechanism for ever and consumers may not understand what they are opting into. but equally the open web will never go away and that's what general purpose computation has shifted to, thats basically all we've done this century. am i misunderstanding what you mean by general purpose computer?
The web can't access all the sensors on your phone -- at least not in their full glory. It might have trivial APIs like "take a picture", but it can't do anything specific to a piece of hardware, by definition. It can't control the camera's imaging pipeline (lighting, focus, preprocessing, etc.).
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.
I think it can , but if your website needs to use these things, then it essentially locks itself in the "app garden" we 're talking about escaping from.
Amusing, how people fear monoculture on one hand, but a longing to have everyting as the web app on the other.
For what is worth it is good web apps cannot access everything.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadBut 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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Vault
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.x3dom.org/
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.
If you can answer that question, it'll be worth it.
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.
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.
(Science is legit, but needs a better website.)
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.
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.
Or is that some specific technology that I don't know about?
If you're 10 or 65 this is correct, but for anyone else the PC has not only been increasing in use but other parts of your life are filled with other computers.
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.
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.
[0] https://postmarketos.org/
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
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...