I had this idea of trains connecting through moving platforms a few years back as well, but quickly dismissed it as impossible in practice. Nice to see someone else working on the concept. Maybe it is indeed possible?!
I had this idea of trains connecting through moving platforms a few years back as well, but quickly dismissed it as impossible in practice. Nice to see someone else working on the concept. Maybe it is indeed possible?!
I’ve come across the presentation “Das Internet als Gesellschaftsbetriebssystem” (English: The Internet as Society Operating System), held by Gunter Dueck at the re:publica 2011 in Berlin. If you know German, you should watch the video, it’s a great piece in both content and presentation style!
While Dueck talks about different topics to show that the Internet is the lifeline of society, there’s one point that was of particular interest to me: how the Internet changes work, and what this means for education.
The Internet provides access to a lot of data. Information can be retrieved by anyone and anywhere. This means: Knowing something is what everybody can; knowledge is no longer giving us much advantage. Dueck asks: Who (e.g. a person behind a counter) can give you information that you couldn’t get by spending two hours researching on the Internet? The implication is that society is not divided between those who know and those who don’t but rather between professionals and unprofessionals. Professionals are those who have the (social) skills, for example a good teacher is the one who knows how to teach and guide their students, not the one with the most accurate factual knowledge. And talking about teachers: The education system should teach us how to be professionals, teach us the skills we require, not the knowledge.
While I do agree with Dueck that the ubiquity of information will render some jobs obsolete, I think that we need to define professionalism. It’s not just social skills or being able to lead. It’s true that general information is readily available, but we still need to be able to analyze, filter and interpret the information. From my experience, this, and mostly understanding the big picture and connecting the dots of your work is the most essential skill.
Thinking about coders, it means that e.g. by-hearting programming syntax and API specifications is not as important as being able to understand a problem and find a solution! And this indeed requires some background knowledge you can’t acquire with two hours and Google.
Predictions about the future are rarely true. We still don’t have the flying cars that science fiction told us we’d have soon. But predictions didn’t always imagine more than we actually got, sometimes they imagined less. For example nobody thought of the computing power that an average “smartphone” has today.
Today morning I found this picture, which is supposed to be from 1954 and shows how a “typical home computer could like like in 2004”:
It was posted by German Twitter user @ennomane, was retweeted and soon became part of the toptweets_de. When I wanted to blog it, I wanted to find out the identity of the original poster. Good! Research prevents from spreading false information! Because by now this person had found out that this is not actually a work from 1954 but a hoax. About.com Urban Legends explains the hoax. If you understand German, you could read ennomane’s post “Twitter, die Hoax-Maschine”.
By the way, if you’re generally interested in future predictions from the past, you should check out Paleo Future. The blogs deals with “a look into the future that never was”.
Recently I heard about W3C Widgets, a term I had not heard about before. As you may know, widgets are small-size applications, usually built using web technologies, that can run on our computer desktop, web browser, websites and of course mobile devices or TVs. These applications generally perform small tasks like displaying news, weather or a clock; but nothing prevents them from being more sophisticated. Some time back I had played around with the widget format of the Opera browser. Those widgets are basically just HTML, CSS and Javascript packed in a .zip file (renamed to .wgt) along with a configuration file, which is great if you already know how to develop with these technologies! If you’re interested, have a look at the specification. In the newest release, Opera widgets can run independent from the browser like a native Windows application! They also have a widget engine for mobile phones.
I’ve seen similar things (like Google Gadgets), so I thought there will be many proprietary, non-interoperable widget formats from different vendors. And now the W3C is trying to add one more on top?! I was skeptical at first, but after reading this article I felt excited. It seems the W3C specification is driven by Opera and Vodafone who want to extend and standardize what Opera is already doing. Let’s see who will adopt this format; maybe we’ll have a great open platform for lightweight applications soon.
This week, John Herlihy from Google made a statement that was cited by Mashable and stirred some controversy in the comments. Mashable made it though the Friday Poll. The statement in question was:
“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”
This has inspired me to write my own thoughts on the subject. Here we go:
What is your opinion about the future of computing?
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