371–380 of 469 posts
Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have see…
Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have see…
I still think about that GUI Tom Cruise navigates in Minority Report. The film is almost 20 years old, and yet GUI design today seems to be focused on hiding more and more elements, instead of making the canvas bigger to display more info.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expected RISC to overtake CISC much sooner than it did. I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly. I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill. I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard. I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.
Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).
However, as far as I can tell every major tech company still expects that problem to be solved and for them to be the Next Big Thing. I don't know why else they'd be putting so much money & PR into consumer AR efforts when it's niche at best, so long as you have to hold up a device to use it, unless they fully expect hardware development to come through in the nearish future and make AR glasses the next smartphone, in terms of becoming must-have and driving the next wave of human-computer interaction.
I thought that by now we would get something like a global virtual reality simulation (something like one in Ready Player One)... instead now we have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Huge disappointment to see so much talent so much wasted.
I was quite young at the time writing file sharing and chat network applications, and did a lot of experiments building WANs for doom. Most things I was interested required single multicast and rebroadcasted packets with low ping time over a fully-decentralized network. Also, tiny bits of mobile code that would load dynamically as you use a network application. Binary serialization versus plaintext. Progressive data loading, especially with fractal image formats. This wasn’t really about the future though; it was how things worked. Looking back, technology was mostly not about how to do things better, it was about raw horsepower to do things quickly and poorly. A lot of things changed with ISPs too, because they started throttling uploads and now mine doesn’t even allow open ports. P2P ping time among neighbors is much longer than cloud ping, which is absurd. A lot of this has to do with security, which is a bigger desk than I thought it would be.
So, I was wrong about a lot of stuff.
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dead end minimum wage type job Don't worry, the big tech companies are spending ungodly amounts to make this happen.
Will probably be about as successful as last time.
I thought that giving everyone in the world access to the sum total of human knowledge via the internet would be all upside. And I thought that conspiracy theories were harmless fun.
This. At bare minimum, a better-informed population that would be increasingly resistant to gov’t and corporate propaganda. And in a sense, that kind of came to pass. Nobody believes _anything_ the government says anymore, and skepticism is at all-time highs. It’s just… everything. I also bet very heavily against the widespread popularity of video on the net, not due to any technical limitations, but simply because r…
This never came to be, because it has one gaping flaw; it assumes governments and corporations wouldn't also figure out how to use the Internet.
We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…
That's basically what Salesforce is.
I would say no current programming environment has matched the productivity of Hypercard for front end GUI development. The biggest advances have been distributed version control and dependency management systems.
Not quite in the 90's but a bit later I was sure that when Moore's Law would stop we would see the trend move to cores. I wrote an article[1] about this change and how we should all prepare for it :-D If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed. [1] https://www.gamasutra…