Firefox security icon as it appears on their homepage. (08.04.09)
Firefox security icon on the security page. (08.04.09)
Vatican’s coat of Arms.
Browsing with Firefox now I’m not only feeling safe, but I’m certain that I’m doing the The Right Thing.
Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, published by O’Reilly Media in 2004, gives insight on earning money in the Cloud (though the term is not used), on computer languages and software design. Probably its most known for the first chapter “Why Nerds are unpopular” which explains very good why teenagers (not only nerds) are unhappy.
As the title suggests, it is full of analogies. Indeed, he compares Stalin with Hitler, Cobol with Neanderthal language, Porsche 911 with Roman Pantheon (both are funny), Florence of the 15th century with New York of the 20th. Good hackers with Leonardo and Jane Austen, and bad hackers, who are too lazy to start a startup, with cows who still believe in current running through fence. And of course hacking with painting and architecture.
My attention was attracted by the following metaphor:
“Computer Science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.” (p.18)
Graham hates the idea to throw mathematitians financed by DARPA, algorithm historians and hackers into the same department, because its intellectually confusing. And most of all because hackers shouldn’t be doing science and research, but “designing beautiful software.” It’s an interesting idea to educate hackers as painters, and probably Graham means that as soon as hackers are independent from computer science they will get rid of research and become artists.
“Perhaps one day “computer science” will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. It might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.” (p.19)
Let’s hope that when the Federal Republic of Computer Science will break up, Hacking will manage to come out like Slovenia, not like Kosovo or Bosnia.
In Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design Jacob Nielsen mentions Opening New Browser Windows. It’s mistake number 9. In my eyes it would have to be number One. Or number Two if Nielsen would have mentioned Zombie Links, links that lead to the same page that is already displayed. They are in fact The Mistake number One. But for some strange reason Nielsen is ignoring them already for 12 years.
To explain what is so evil about New Browser Windows, Nielsen says:
“Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet.”
Terrible sales people, who come without invitation and difficult to get rid of; New Browser Windows are terrible in the same way. And now think about Zombie Links, they are like the same Vacuum Cleaner Sales Person appearing every time you open a door or a window or a closet.
When will Nielsen finally pillory them?
I think there is no other person writing about computers and interfaces who would make as many car analogies in their life as Don Norman did. But this is a thing of the past; since automobiles are totally computerized, there is hardly any chance to compare one to another.
Norman’s latest book The Design of Future Things introduces the state of today’s relations in between smart vehicles and their once smart drivers. And though he almost exclusively writes about automobiles, it reads like an outline for HCI in general. After all the automobile is a computers on wheels, and quite in front of other environments awaiting total augmentation. “What is in the automobile today will be in the kitchen, bathroom and living room tomorrow.” (p.157)
In Future Things Norman mentions the H-Metaphor. Here is a paper The H-Metaphor as a Guideline for Vehicle Automation and Interaction, delivered by the German Frank O. Flemisch during his research at NASA, that introduces and explains the new term. The H-metaphor stands for a new approach in user-vehicle interaction and vehicle automation, where the automobile instead of being computer on wheels is seen as a well trained horse, a horse on wheels — intelligent, aware, responsive constructions, that are more safe and more fun to drive.
That’s a very reasonable and promising concept. But a sad one as well. There are two things that are not right.
First: the Upper Case H, that for 50 years belonged to Human in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction, is going to be given to the Horse.
Second: Flemisch specifies: “It would be premature to think that we will be able to build something so wonderful and intelligent as a horse.” (p.11)
I think it’s really bitter. While we are still in hope that AI scientists will build a computer that will be as wonderful and intelligent as Human, they confess that they are not able to build a Horse.
Lawrence Lessig:
Found via Infotopia by Cass R. Sunstein. On page 165 he mentions this comparison as “illuminating”. In my eyes it’s only offensive if anything.
Sunstein himself uses a better example of proprietary product: Coca Cola and and its open source embodiment — Open Cola.
Open Cola is a proper product of the Open Source Age. But there is more — Free Beer — a true gift for those who followed free and open source discourses for the last 15 years and know by heart Richard Stallman’s glorious analogy When we speak of “free software”, we’re talking about freedom, not price. (Think of “free speech”, not “free beer”.)
Lessig writes about it in his blog:
However the Free Software Community is still waiting for a GNU tent on Oktoberfest.
Since the beginning of time, in a typical network diagram the Internet is shown as a cloud. in 2008 this fact was brought to our attention to explain the new trend — The Cloud.
The Cloud came to replace the ugly Web 2.0. But not only. It’s happily used as a new name for the Internet and shows a new understanding of what the networks of networks should be.
The new buzzword is indeed beautiful, you can’t compare it with the techy sounding Web 2.0, though this time we actually deal with a quite good defined technical term, meaning “computing provided as online utility”. But The Cloud — is charming and, I’d even say, sedative.
Cloud gained its positive image with Internet users in times when they were the person of the year. It stands for an Internet of peers. Cloud is the Internet that belongs to us, because we build the network with our good enough content, powerful enough computers and valuable enough data. It is programmed by us and that’s why “it’s even more personal than the PC on your Desk” as Nicholas Carr writes it in his great book The Big Switch.
Tag clouds stay for folkxonomy, Infoclouds for distributed knowledge, and so on. In their 2006 paper Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not, Geert Lovink and Anna Munster brought the positive meaning of the cloud to its extreme suggesting
In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr is very aware about The Cloud’s (or World Wide Computer’s) potential of control, alienation and exploitation, but at the same time he, quoting Google’s CEO, gives the following description of what The Cloud is:
Back in the 90es Sun Microsystems coined the Marketing slogan “The Network is a Computer” […] Today Sun’s slogan suddenly makes sense. It describes what computing has become, or is becoming, for all of us. […]
Eric Schmidt, who was still employed by Sun back when it came up with its prophetic slogan, has a different term for the World Wide Computer. He calls it “the computer in the cloud”. What he means is that computing, as we experience it today, no longer takes a fixed, concrete form. It occurs in the internet’s ever-shifting “cloud” of data, software and devices. Our personal computer, not to mention our BlackBerry, our mobile phone, our gaming console, and any other networked gadgets we use, is just another molecule of the cloud, another node in the vast computer network. Fulfilling Napster’s promise, our PC have merged with all the other devices on the Internet…. ( p.113)
This scenarios can be translated back to a network diagram like this (we are the cloud):
But, paradoxically, The Cloud means exactly the opposite. The best sign of this paradox is Chris Anderson’s flaming speech: In the editorial of July’s Wired issue he stated that we live in the Petabyte Age, that Petabytes don’t fit on hard disks and disks arrays and that we ran out of organizational analogies. Two years ago his solution was to use the power of users and their computers (in the book The Long Tail), now the answer is The Cloud. And The Cloud is not YOU or your tail, but the cluster of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including IBM’s Tivoli and open source versions of Google File System and MapReduce.
Translated back to a network diagram:
What we witness now is a shift in the interests of IT giants towards providing IT capabilities online as an utility, and their intention to put equal signs in between Internet and their service. Internet = Google’s Cloud, Internet = Apple’s Cloud, Internet = Facebook’s cloud. Amazon allows customers to rent virtual computers on which to run their own applications with their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Apple draws their collection of online services and software as a Cloud.
Erick Schmid is quoted in Business Week saying that “Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day.” Nicholas Carr thinks about Google’s browser project that Chrome is the first cloud browser.
With Web 2.0 the question was what is it. With The Cloud, who will it be.
What a pity that now, when we are so close to Time Sharing again, Wikipedia announces that Watson’s statemant “I think there is a world market for about five computers” is a myth!
In his contribution for Encyclopédie Française World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia, H.G. Wells states: “Our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane.” This text was written in 1937 and is compared with Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” due to its influence on the bright minds working on information storage, retrieval and processing optimization, augmentation and hypertext.
Computer-Aeroplane/Airplane analogies were never common. There are cars to make comparisons from the everyday life of computer users and rockets if it comes to futuristic visions and ultimate capacities.
There was a funny episode early this year though. Donald Norman, author of billions of analogies, compared web services provided by 37 signals with Southwest Airlines’ business model. Actually he didn’t compare but opposed. Because of some strange reason he argued that a budget airline providing reduced services is a good thing and meets customers’ needs and a web service that “keeps it simple” displays arrogance towards its users.
Probably, if Norman would have been in a better mood that day, or wouldn’t dislike simplicity that much, he’d redirect that metaphor to support 37 signals’ model. That’s what Basecamp authors said as well in their why-we-disagree-with-don-norman post.
Google’s App Engine Logo contributed to the airplane analogies with a toy plane. In fact it’s not a plane, but an engine with wings and tail. A cutie. Reminds a merchandise toy kids get during a flight.
Civil air transport is not a source of inspiration for people thinking about computers. Once a symbol for progress and futuristic ideas, today airplanes are mostly appear as a background for mobile technologies ads.
However, now, when Web2.0 hype is giving place to the Cloud, airplanes got their second chance.
Watch the video below: IT trendmakers and trendy IT people are answering the very actual question “What is Cloud Computing?”
On the 6th minute (5:05) Bubblicious’ representative states: “[Cloud computing is] me on the airplane with my notebook, 30 000 feet, working in a cloud”.
More on the Cloud coming soon.
Some time ago Google’s product manager in Russia and Eastern Europe was writing about Google’s unlimited functions in the Google.ru blog and quoted Marissa Mayer’s words: Google is like a Swiss Army Knife.
Looking for the source I was not precise enough with my search query and found many many pages where developers of applications, operating systems, frameworks are comparing their products with Offiziersmesser, meaning that they can do so many things so good without occupying a lot of space. I don’t know if Marissa Mayer was the first one in IT business who came up with this comparison, but for sure only she, as Google’s product manager, has the right to bring this analogy to the ultimate level, saying “like the Swiss Army knife closed”, meaning Google’s distinct minimalistic interface.
She said it in 2002. In 2007 it is not true anymore. iGoogle looks not any different from many other services. You can switch back to Google classic. But you are encouraged not to. Even classic is not as “closed” as it was. And it’s a pity. Because, I’m sure that already now for us (people with connected computers) Google is a more familiar tool than a swiss army knife. It would be already time for Google to become a metaphor itself, to be the the first analogy that comes to mind when describing something simple and multi functional. But it won’t happen without the “closed” look.
I need digital culture heroes, Internet symbols and software metaphors. Why Google is not serious about its appearance anymore? For how long knifes and spoons will be metaphors for digital matters?
Being trained as a journalist at Moscow State University I went through hundreds of hours analyzing the comparisons and figures of speech used in contemporary journalistic practice. Usually before the class we had to buy the newest issue of the newspaper “Soviet Sport.” It was a safe shot for our teachers, because sport observers dealing over and over again with monotonous body movements are really shameless in introducing metaphors and packing their texts with loads of them.
But i think computer scientist are much better than sport reporters.
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, describes something to replace the WWW. It will be called “Worldbeam.” To justify the name, stimulate our imagination and evoke positive feelings he writes:
Another computer, John Maeda, recalls in his book The Laws of Simplicity that computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte advised to him
to become a light bulb instead of a laser beam […] His point was that you can either brighten a single point with laser precision, or else use the same light to illuminate everything around you. (p.53)
He took Negroponte’s advice seriously and, as the book shows, is indeed very skillful in illuminating not only things around him, but the obscure corners of his memory as well, finding there more and more unexpected evidence for the greatness of the iPod’s design.
Maeda’s text is an interesting case of talking about interface design, usability and information architecture while avoiding these terms. Instead he makes connections to raising and educating kids, learning to swim and to drive a car, cooking and serving food, being young and getting older.
On one hand, It is a noble task to make people see their relations with computers in a row of non-binary experiences.
On another, light beams and light bulbs and everything that has to do with light (except glow sticks) usually serve to produce positive, overly sweet allusions, and some of the most opaque and daft systems have been characterized with words like transparency (translucency) and light.
