Quote:
Originally Posted by DougAxford  There's a lot of problems in getting the internet up to 21st century standards. |
BING! You are a winnah!
As a backbone, the Internet itself is what it is. As you point out, the real issue here is computer literacy. What's killing us all on an epic scale are poor computer literacy and poor tools.
There's no solution to computer literacy other than education. Marketing companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe have been pimping the idea for years that their latest crappy software will make everything so easy that real computer literacy will be
optional, but that's all wishful thinking.
Most computer users learn a small set of behaviors: elementary web browsing and searching (for porn) with whichever web browser came with their computer (IE for the majority), running Microsoft Orifice (which should have been taken out back and shot over ten years ago but is as ubiquitous today as ever and wasting incalculable man hours daily), checking their email (increasingly through their web browser), vacuously installing viruses on their computer, and loading pirated music onto their iPods. The scale of dysfunction simply cannot be overestimated, and it defies imagination. Nearly anything that deviates from the above leads to utter paralysis (dial-the-nerd-closest-to-you-for-a-walkthrough-to-be-followed-and-immediately-forgotten).
As for tools, we're mainly crippled by our own momentum. Our email network is a spam-clogged joke, and email software stopped evolving in any meaningful way over a decade ago. The email network could be fixed, but the perceived inertia has so far been perceived as too overwhelming to overcome. So instead we all suffer with what we've got.
The web—as defined by the one universal media component—HTML—is intractably broken: the only actual solution is to rip it up and start over, but so far, nobody has exhibited the vision to lead us out of that mess. (Adobe has sort of tried to do so in a slimy way with their Flash-based platform, but that will never be anything more than a niche player because it's too proprietary and, ultimately, too retrograde.)
Interestingly, the
one thing that the web is turning out to be quite good at is web services, which boils down to passing little chunks (and sometimes big chunks) of information around, but the broken front-end—the HTML disaster, the decrepit Windows platform, the anarchic Linux platform and the obscure Mac platform—is crippling web services from getting good. The end result is that the most interesting web services are only used by relatively sophisticated users. For example, the PDF I linked to a couple posts above is hosted on a very cool web service called Dropbox, but it's the sort of thing only nerds know about. At the moment, my educated guess is that mobile platforms like the iPhone are what are going to drive the evolution of web services for the next few years, specifically because they're better at delivering a transparent user experience than personal computers and—tah dah—their operating systems and development tools are
new and not loaded down with old baggage.
I apologize for subjecting you all to that rant.
Linear Mode
