Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn’t happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it’s quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display.
I admire Alan Kay for a lot of the things he did, but this video is one of the slowest, most meandering talks I’ve ever listened to. He is talking about incredibly important things that I’m genuinely interested in, but it’s really hard to plow through.
He is very obviously whip-smart and well-read. He cites academic papers and historical incidents with ease. He uses things like cystic fibrosis as metaphors. It all makes perfect sense, but the pacing and the delivery are so deadpan that my attention is wandering.
It does have some kickin’ quotes in it, though:
I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you that I did not have C++ in mind.
There is no idea so simple and powerfule that you can’t get zillions of people to misunderstand it.
At the very least, every object should have a URL.
It’s very easy to grow a baby six inches. They do it a couple dozen times in their life and you never have to take them down for maintenance.
One of the reasons why this meta stuff is going to be important… is this whole question of how do we really interop over the internet five and ten years from now?
Let’s not do it in Smalltalk; that’s too slow. Well let me tell you something: there’s nothing more inefficient than spending ten years on an Operating System that never works.
All told, it is a strong argument against “Worse is Better.” His point is similar to extreme programming, whereby you build a small thing (Smalltalk) that works, then use that to bootstrap the system and slingshot yourself forward. But he comes at it from a classic “MIT approach” of figuring out a good design for the bootstrap, and then using incremental development from there. That all sounds perfectly great– and indeed it seems to be what the web has ended up as (as Joe Gregorio was pointing out)– but it sure as heck didn’t work for the things Mr. Kay was trying to do it with. Why is that?
This makes the entire war seem like an endless loss by the south, where they were continually giving up territory. The Ken Burns documentary (which they borrowed the music from, smartly) shows the war as much more of a struggle, with the north continually losing battles and searching for a general to lead them to victory, while not speaking much of territory.
The focus here is on the map, so it’s natural that the loss of territory is obvious. The focus in the documentary is on the people, so it’s natural that the political situation is at the fore. But it’s interesting how, in two video presentations, the same war seems like such a different thing.
And this is what actually happened. Yeah, a little bit with the too-optimistic for me.
Things I got wrong:
I called the Mac Pro based on John Siracusa’s (who made the game, and the rules) assertion that it’d count “if and only if the new Mac Pros are mentioned in the keynote.” I figured they would be, and they were, but it’s not marked in this “official” what-happened version.
The displays haven’t been updated in forever. It seemed a shoe-in.
I was skeptical of the MacBook Thin, which turned out to be the MacBook Air, the major announcement of the keynote.
Having just got a new MacBook Pro, I figured Apple would announce a new version to spite me. It’s happened every other time I buy something, so it seemed a reasonable guess. I was happy to be proven incorrect.
Jobs didn’t use any of his catch-phrases. I think it was an intentional effort to spite Bingo players. He used the word “Zhoom” for crying out loud.
I expected a new iPhone, and SDK details. Mostly this was just hope on my part, since I want to buy an iPhone, and play with the SDK.
Schiller got a mention, but no appearance. I miss that guy.
Vista got by without any mockery. And really, I think that it came down to the fact that Jobs couldn’t come up with anything new; it’s all been said. Over and over.
So obviously, I’m not too great at this. When I posted my predictions before, I almost went back and updated my bingo chart (I had done it almost a week before my post), but decided to go with my first impressions. Big mistake; my second guesses (no iPhone, no Blu-ray, no One More Thing) were far closer to the truth.
So there’s this “cleaning tool” for the Mac that’s actually a scam and/or trojan horse. It always reports that you have something awry on your system, and offers to fix it if you cough up some dough.
This kind of stuff has been all the rage in the Windows world for years, now, but I can’t see this one taking off, because the app itself is ugly as sin and we Mac folk just don’t take too kindly to that.
For too long, our foreign policy has been “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” See, for example: the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq, and many petty dictators in the Cold War.
We should change that around to “The enemy of my enemy is just some guy, y’know?” Deal with them on their own merits. If we actually like them, great! But if the only thing we have in common is a shared enemy, it’s probably going to come back to bite us later.
Here are my predictions for MacWorld. Looking at the whole thing, it seems I’m being overly optimistic. But I can’t find any one square that I don’t think is going to happen–except maybe the iPhone, but I really want that one to be announced, so I can order one.
I should also add that this house of cards is built on top of itself; if I get one wrong, it’s tied to so many other that I’ll get many wrong (the Apple TV with built-in Blu-Ray and movie rental support, or the Blu-Ray stand-alone drive, each with obvious HD output).
In fact, if Blu-Ray fails to make an appearance, my batting average will plummet.
[Outside, Lunchtime. Two men in "San Juan Capistrano Police Volunteer" uniforms get out of a similarly-marked RAV-4. They are each in their sixties, maybe pushing seventy. They amble inside.]
Old Man 1: But I don’t think I can vote for John McCain. He’s too old.
Old Man 2: Plus, he’s a warmonger.
Yes, this really happened. I sat near them to try to listen to their subsequent banter during lunch, but they sat silently and ate, then left.
