CEO, Author, Podcaster, and Geek
I know that this has been posted many times else where, but every time I saw it I couldn’t help but think, “Yeah, and the CIA haven’t already got plans to Cyberattack China if needed.”. Seems fairly obvious to me.
This article at Washtech.com is fascinating. It discusses what we have already seen in technology that has completely changed the way we live. From PCs, to laser surgery for the eye, the things we take for granted today, yesterday didn’t seem possible. It then goes on to explore current science, and how close we are to leaps in technology that are likely to completely change the way we live. Perhaps even extending human life significantly.
Imagine the ethical, cultural, and societal issues from the following :
“What will parents do when offered something that will increase their child’s SAT scores by 200 points?
What will athletes do when they are encouraged by extreme big-buck leagues to have medical pit crews?
What will fat people do when offered an implant that will monitor and alter their metabolism?
What will the military do when it can overcome the need to sleep?
What will the aging do when offered memory enhancers?”
If you read the above article and it scares you, and especialy if it doesn’t, have a read of Bill Joy’s Manifesto at Wired from a couple of years ago.
For those bloggers that want to know how to increase traffic, Dethe Elza has this article in his blog. I wouldn’t suggest that the only way to have a successful weblog is to increase hits, it depends on your motivation, but its interesting reading for all Bloggers.
If any web page deserves a link, this one does.
Cringely, a well known tech industry commentator, must be going through hell. This week his baby boy, Chase, died on his lap from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He was only 74 days old. His article describes the tragedy, as well as details of the condition. More bravely, he has made a call for people to assist him in finding a way of avoiding this horrible killer.
“That’s my plan, but I can’t do it by myself. I need your help. I need hardware engineers, software engineers, I need people experienced with biomedical sensors and sifting mountains of data. I need folks who make tiny processors and RAM chips. I need people who know more about this stuff than I do. Yet they must also be people who are willing to believe that there is an answer, since the medical establishment seems to have given up.”
If you fit one of the profiles, please follow the link and get in touch with Robert.
So tonight I gave Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417) a good test drive. I was inspired by the fact that you can open windows within the same browser, and move between them with tabs. Very similar to one of my favourate features of Opera. I even added a bit to my Blog (the BlogSnob link on the left to be precise). However, in doing so, my blog template at Blogger got completely mangled. It took me a while to notice, but my Blog’s format was so chewed that the table did not work at all. Over an hour later I managed to re-work all the re-work that I had just completed.
Lets just say I won’t be trying Moz again for a while. When I do I’ll be backing up my template. Which reminds me….better go do that now.
In what appears to be the cheapest way for Microsoft to side-step the fact they have just announced a further delay in the shipping of their .NET Server until next year, they are blaiming the rest of the industry for the over-hyping of Web Services.
Microsoft are by far the biggest offender. For example, take their adverts found in many many magazines (for those really interested one can be found in the two page add on the third and fourth page of the April 8th Information Week). “Introducing Visual Studio .NET”, “The world takes a little step into the future.”, written on an Airport flight times billboard highlighting a trip to Mars. It goes on to say, “the first toolset built from the ground up for XML Web services development. Just one keyword-WebMethod-turns your existing application into a Web service”. Wow, all I need is this tool and I can create a Web service. Wrong.
They fail to mention that most of the industry standards are not mature yet, that some of the other standards are not yet standards, and that the whole concept is so immature that no single company has deployed a true Web Service application in its much hyped end state.
They blaim Sun Microsystems for a large part of the hype. However, Sun (who I currently work for), state from the outset that its Sun ONE strategy will start slowly and integrate your current applications into a state that makes it easy for you at a later date (when standards are more stable and mature) to migrate to a true “Smart” Web Service. This approach is agreed upon by most, if not all, Web Service consultancy firms.
See this article at Webservices.org for a couple of links to media reports and a web poll.
I just finished David Weinberger’s book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a unified theory of the web. Here is my review .
Small Pieces is about the Web. Not the technology behind it, but the humanness. David explains that like the brain is nothing without the soul, the web is nothing without the people creating it. He offers an insight that is obviously created only after careful thought that is gained by looking beyond the Web’s face value. He hasn’t got caught up in the hype of the business potential, or the extrodinary scale of the network, but has delved into the social impact on us all.
The book is sometimes like a thoughtful lecture, but quite often closer to an educated monologue over dinner, because it feels more personal. He covers the subject by breaking down the Web’s impact into seven concepts, and looks at how the world has seen them change with the introduction of the Internet. He cleverly uses some examples of people and businesses and how they have changed the way we live our lives.
His topics cover Space, Time, Perfection, Togetherness, Knowledge, Matter and Hope. In what seem to be a collection of only loosely joined conversations, they are all tied neatly together by the underlying theme of humanity and the way in which the web is shaping us.
He points out that the web is not the Messiah, it won’t fix the world. He does make it obvious that it has effected us more than we give it credit for, or have thought. This I believe is the main impact of the book. That because the web is more than the technology that holds it together, its impact has been greater than we perhaps realise, and its greatest impact will come when we let go of the notion that it is a tool, and realise that it is us.
Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the pinnacle of Infocom’s Text Based Adventures. I’m rapped to see that its now available Online as a Java Web Page here.
While reading this article at Business 2.0 I began to wonder if Google were actually preparing themselves to eventually be a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Intergration) search directory. A UDDI directory will allow web services to be searched for. The only requirement for Google would be to collect the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) data. The Google API Beta currently uses XML and SOAP, the other two standards currently required to serve this data. See uddi.org for more information on the protocol.
Wouldn’t you know it. All weekend I struggled to find interesting snippets of info to read. I’d have to rate it as the least interesting days, technology news wise, for some time. Then today I get the latest Wired magazine delivered (it takes a while to get to Oz, Paper Lag if you like), and David Weinberger’s lastest book comes from Amazon. Now I don’t have enough time to dig into them.
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