On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, you wrote:
I didn't want to get into this, but I think I might have to get my hands on this, finally. I think someone mentioned what I'm going to say earlier, but I will mention it again. The question, in my opinion, should be "Is the Web a medium for advertising, cheap graphics-filled magazine, or is it for information distribution/sharing?" My answer for that question is the latter -- for information sharing. I do realize that many people will disagree with me on this, and I am certainly not looking for a flame war here. Just an educated discussion. The site must be designed for its purpose. One just can't simply add audio to a site for something like parallel computing theory unless the audio is a real demonstration of parallel computing application, which I think is not common. To design a web site well, requirements analysis and all other software engineering techniques should be applied, either consciously or not.
There is no doubt that technology changes everyday. Maybe even every second! And we do have to upgrade our hardware from time to time. But that is just human. Once we can solve a small problem, we want to be able to solve a big problem, then we want to tackle on even larger problems. That's what drives the advancement of many technologies, including computing technology. The older hardware can still do the task for which they are designed for. Or they can be ingeniously engineered to take on larger tasks. One such example would be to put together a pile of obsolete machines, for example the 486 machines, for parallel computing work, using them as just an NOW or run them as a Beowulf cluster.
This is just my personal opinion, and I am really open to discussions.
Regards, Kenneth Tan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ C. J. Kenneth Tan E-mail: cjtan@acm.org Telephone: 1-403-220-8038 cjtan@ieee.org 1-403-606-4257 URL: <A HREF="http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~tanc"><A HREF="http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~tanc</A">http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~tanc</A</A>> Facsimile: 1-403-284-1980
"An engineer made programmer is one who attempts to solve a problem, A programmer made engineer is one who knows how to solve a problem." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An interesting exchange, no doubt about the web and its influence throughout technology, science, art, studies, etc. In many different avenues, evolution has proceeded not in just one direction but in many. An anthropologist friend of mine has noted, "that there is nothing so constant as change". This was about studying the effects of dietary change on arid prehistoric cultures or perhaps cultural change at the macro level in europe at some prehistoric point. I think that the web does not offer an "either-or" swap of techology or mass media or information management. The exchange of information and exchange of energy has always been important to understanding the dynamics of change. I mention this because the web is changing, evolving, adapting. Perhaps down the road 10 years it will not be anything like it is now and perhaps we are at that point of punctuated equilibrium where the web suddenly manifests itself in several distinct directions. I think that the internet itself will adjust to demands of culture, science, art, and ideology. What we perhaps will see are different "webs" for different lifestyle offerings. Perhaps inteliigent agents will soon take the place of content browsing and engineers will concentrate on producing robots that deliver a certain type of data in a certain format at a certain time. My belief is that almost at any moment technology, cultural, social dynamics are at some critical mass. Perhaps this socio-cultural theory extended to the web would demonstrate a web which would attach itself to belief and ideological systems, give a certain data structure... Then another scientific or artistic or technological group would need a web derivative. These are just my slightly anarchistic viewpoints. -- Michael E. Perry mperry@basin.com - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e