Wow. I bet he wishes he could take that one back.
Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#32Baloney: telecommuting workers - WRONG
Baloney: interactive libraries - CORRECT
Baloney: multimedia classrooms - CORRECT
Baloney:electronic town meetings- CORRECT
Baloney:virtual communities - WRONG
Baloney:Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems - HALF CREDIT (they both exist)
Baloney: freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic - CORRECT (Governemts just clamp down on the internet)
no online database will replace your daily newspaper - WRONG
no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher - CORRECT (No CD ROM can keep kids off streets while parents at work)
no computer network will change the way government works - CORRECT (Goverments will change the way computer networks work)
Finding the date of the Battle of Trafalgar takes 15 minutes - WRONG (0.18 seconds on Google)
Baloney:we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. - WRONG
Baloney:instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. - WRONG
Baloney:We'll order airline tickets over the network, - WRONG
Baloney:make restaurant reservations - WRONG
Baloney:negotiate sales contracts. - HALF CREDIT (Mix of phone, text, email, and in person)
Baloney:Stores will become obselete. -CORRECT (stores are being built everyday)
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless it's been changed, yes.
When I wrote that, the title was "hilariously stupid predictions from 1995".
"1995 EPIC FAIL Internet predictions"... would be more appropriate.
Now is a good time to start collecting such web pages from bitcoin naysayers. ;-) ;-) ;-)
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#34A few people might not know that Clifford Stoll wrote "Cuckoo's Egg" which is an interesting account that he alludes to in the first paragraph of this article
> I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
It's a great book. Of the time, but still interesting.
EDIT:
> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Well, he's right that most people didn't bother with digital books and it took specialised e-book readers (and even then, a low cost device like the kindle) for them to really take off.
Reading this article is a bit like watching science fiction made in 1985. We have flying cars or human-simulation androids, but not flatscreen displays.
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#35Less than a decade later my father, a history professor, thought I was a fool for thinking Wikipedia could hold a candle to Britannica for many reasons similar to those in the article. Obviously I didn't know what editing meant, how quality came about in publishing, or what an encyclopedia was for. The value of the GPL was utterly lost on him.
Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight, as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat the relevant pages. The best part is that your message can be taken up well because even adults think they can rely on it (no adult relies on Britannica for anything, few own it anyway). Maybe you were wrong and your father was right.
> Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight, as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat the relevant pages.
Sounds a lot like academia to me (I'm biased, son of a prof here...). Seriously, it's unclear to me which the best form of editing there is, and unclear how you would know one is better than the other.
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#36Less than a decade later my father, a history professor, thought I was a fool for thinking Wikipedia could hold a candle to Britannica for many reasons similar to those in the article. Obviously I didn't know what editing meant, how quality came about in publishing, or what an encyclopedia was for. The value of the GPL was utterly lost on him.
Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight, as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat the relevant pages. The best part is that your message can be taken up well because even adults think they can rely on it (no adult relies on Britannica for anything, few own it anyway). Maybe you were wrong and your father was right.
I use Wikipedia nearly every day. I have learned a great many things that I am able to immediately apply in my work (recent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer_moore)... I guess its just a coincidence that this false information had the exact same running time complexity as the real thing (O(n+m))?
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#37So I used to work on the Newsweek web ops team. This article gets linked about once a year. Every year the comments are the same. Every year he has to admit he was wrong. LEAVE CLIFFORD STROLL ALONE!
Also, get his name right ;).
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#38> The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. Fascinating.
That's the one point that I find the most interesting.
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#39There are two things to take away from this. The first is Clifford Stoll's own comment when his essay resurfaced over in 2010. The whole thing is worth reading [1], and it ends with:
> Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…
Secondly, while Stoll is wrong on many points in this essay, what's amazing is that he hits on things that were definitely broken or deficient in 1995 and had to be fixed to get us to where we are today:
* difficulty of reading on CRT screens
* lack of online payments infrastructure
* difficulty in searching and filtering through Web pages (i.e., search)
These were all very tough problems, and stacks of money have been minted by Amazon, PayPal, and Google by tackling them. I'm impressed by Stoll's ability to identify these problems clearly as early as 1995.
[1]: http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#c...
Re: Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
#40I'm not sure what lambasting this guy for being wrong adds to discussion. Really, I want to see a sensible critique of the final paragraph. It is the most interesting one. I see the Internet as fostering community, but never replacing it. Most social sites today are atrocious, quality-wise, and suffer the exact same symptoms he ran into.
Likely someone posted this not to ridicule Cliff Stoll, who is a wonderful and charming writer, but to point out the similarity between his idea that the internet is a poor substitute for existing systems and will not hold up to its promises and the sea of incredulity about the idea of Amazon ever successfully delivering via drone, or even Amazon suggesting that they will try.
I'd extend that comparison to the reflexive outrage about self-driving cars, Google Glass, MOOCs, Soylent, Bitcoin, Wolfram|Alpha, Hyperloop, Tesla, and similar interesting projects that, for whatever reason, are described as doomed to failure or labeled as harbingers of the collapse of civilization.
Oh, and about that last paragraph. Cliff Stoll is almost entirely right--the internet is a terrible substitute for many kinds of human contact if there is a direct comparison between the two. That argument is still being made today. Google Hangouts does not beat a face to face meeting with a friend or business partner, following a live concert online is sad compared to being there, and few would prefer "cybersex" to the real thing.
But where Stoll is wrong is the exact reason why the internet succeeded when he thought it would fail. The internet succeeds where it can substitute real life where the real life version is not possible. It should be easy to come up with all sorts of those scenarios, including the ones Stoll mentioned.