91–100 of 202 posts
Regardless of one's opinions on microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, it's a very interesting but accessible talk for those interested in lower-level systems and fault-tolerant architectures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect. If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. Without going too much into detail, if he believes this,…
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of…
And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)
not to be cliché, but, Steve Jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of…
And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of…
And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web. Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse) will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in the long run.
Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating, before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way.
Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building before we rush off to pile up code.
Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
In a Boing Boing article[1] (which also, incidentally, calls her presentation a "tour-de-force"), her points were summarized in these quotes:
Hard-to-parse protocols require complex parsers. Complex, buggy
parsers become weird machines for exploits to run on. Help stop weird
machines today: Make your protocol context-free or regular!
Protocols and file formats that are Turing-complete input languages
are the worst offenders, because for them, recognizing valid or
expected inputs is UNDECIDABLE: no amount of programming or testing
will get it right.
A Turing-complete input language destroys security for generations of
users. Avoid Turing-complete input languages!
A more concise presentation containing just the important/interesting bits would have been less painful to watch and probably a lot easier to prepare for.
That said, the Q&A period at the end was good. She seemed a lot more comfortable there, and there was a lot more interesting and informative content there than in the presentation proper.
[1] - http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete...
Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Seem more like a series of really obvious ideas and some platitudes thrown in for good measure.