Hello everybody, I’m back from my 5 day jungle trek and I’m just catching up on what I’ve missed throughout the week. I was initially going to award you all with a post about the trek itself, but it turns out Jonathan Williamson from Montage Studio (the very same who does the Blender screencasts and gave some good tips for ThoughtScore) has got himself a Blender build for Windows 7 and has recorded a short screencast demo-ing the development.
I am truly amazed with what has been going on and I will definitely throw myself back into Blender this holiday and its stuff like this that really shows what open-source is capable of. Blender is one serious threat to the huge commercial monopoly in the 3D industry. Here is a short list of the features he describes:
New design/look
Panel splitting/deleting/management
Not limited to one window only
Massive reorganisation of features that make it more intuitive
The ThoughtScore project is another gypsy on my to-do list along with the BMR. It seems as though the world of 3D graphics and I are drifting slowly apart. It’ll be such a pity to let it go, so I want to make a serious effort and continue the amazing progress I once had on ThoughtScore.
You can see the pitiful post I made after scrolling through history on this page:
Revive ThoughtScore! I need a plan, a design, something huge! Grab me some pencil and paper, and let’s bring my vision into a reality! I have a holiday coming up, and I hope I can approach this through another angle which should allow me to continue production.
The next post will be in a week’s time because I am going to be stuck in a jungle throughout next week. You will then receive posts in this order: 1) The Trek, 2) New Perspective Magazine Released, and 3) What is becoming of Eadrax.
…and here I am for yesterday’s blog post with a quick new preview on the Perspective magazine: the centerspread. Lots of things going on, progress on Eadrax being made, my cousin, his wife and baby were staying over for a while, and I’m going on a monday-friday camp/trek/survival next week, so this’ll likely be one of my last posts for a while. Here it is in all its picture-speaks-a-thousand-words glory:
Oh, by the way I don’t take any credit for the photography.
I had skipped my last scheduled blog post because things have been busy. One of those busy things involves the Perspective magazine, which I last touched way back in February. The last time I mentioned it, I also shared my feelings about the workflow. Between that time and now, there has been one Perspective issue, which was not actually designed by me but instead by another who did a green overlay on everything and redid the issue. This was because I had refused to do it – I had less than a week, about 4 week days if I remember correctly. This is of course with other activities going on, and completely out of the blue.
This time it seems as though on the design side of things people have been listening. I have been alloted 2 whole weeks (including an extended weekend!) to work on the design. I’m a happy person, and happy people make happy things. I wish I could say the same for the article-writers, but that’s another story I will share later.
Meanwhile, as dedicated observers of my blog you are all treated to a preview of the work-in-progress magazine. The inside pages have a distinct new feel of polish, modern and clean. I will also be releasing under PDF format all of the magazines once this issue is published. There have been great leaps in design after each issue, and this is just another stepping stone.
Without blabbering too much, here are two screenshots of what I’ve been working on:
…and another!
…as usual, just click on them to see it large-scale.
Of course, majority of the work is all done with open-source tools, just a bit at the end to slot in the articles with Adobe InDesign. This will really show what is possible with free software.
Today I felt like letting my mind run free and vomiting my thoughts onto the keyboard. Enjoy. Sorry if the post seems a little unstructured, but that’s how my mind works.
An interesting discussion cropped up the other day concerning Economics. One of the fundamental rules in economics that (most) goods have an inverse price-quantity relationship of demand. In other words, if the price is lower, you demand more because it is cheaper.
If you drew a graph of quantity on the x-axis and price on the y-axis, you would therefore get a downward sloping curve.
However, how can we justify why it slopes downward?
One of the theories used to explain it is marginal utility theory. Utility is a fancy economics term for “satisfaction gained from consumption”. Marginal utility theory is associated with how much satisfaction you gain from consuming one more of the good. In general, your utility will decrease. For example, if you eat a chocolate bar, it tastes great and you are very satisfied. However the more chocolate bars you eat, the less amount of satisfaction you gain from eating the next bar of chocolate.
One of the assumptions to allow marginal utility theory to justify why the price-quantity demanded relationship is negative is that we make rational decisions.
The challenge comes when you try to identify when we don’t make rational decisions. Go on, have a go. However there is a catch: making rational decisions does not imply we have perfect knowledge of the situation. In simpler words, it doesn’t matter if we do not have all the facts or the understand completely the mechanics behind a situation – rational decision making is based on what we perceive.
Here’s one attempt to identify an irrational situation: laziness. Suppose you can get a coffee here which costs $2, or a coffee that tastes better, and is cheaper that costs $1. However, the one that costs $1 is a 10 minute walk away. The rational person would pick the $1 coffee, however, some might argue that if we are lazy, we will just take the $2 coffee: hence an irrational decision. This is obviously flawed, as any economist would state that the cost of walking 10 minutes away outweighs the extra utility you would gain from paying half the price, hence the net utility gained would maximised in buying the $2 coffee. Therefore still a rational decision.
Another attempt was an interesting one: love. Let’s consider lust before considering love. Lust is easily disproved: we gain satisfaction from the attraction. Now let’s look at love. Love by my definition is “wanting the best for another despite any sacrifice“. The economic man would not give up 5 minutes of labour to please his wife – where is the rationality in self-sacrifice? Try to compare the actions of love to the satisfaction gained from self-sacrifice when performing charity. This is simply a different “form” of utility, but still utility nonetheless from making the decision we believe is right, best, bound to and is your duty. Therefore decisions made in love are still rational.
The final attempt was that of drugs. However the flaw is that drugs allow decisions to be made subconsciously, or without full consciousness. This means that decisions are therefore involuntary and not part of us. To an outsider, yes, this will be an irrational decision. However internally it remains rational.
The thing is to realise that there is a difference between externally-realised rationality and internally-realised rationality. It seems that internally-realised rationality is always rational. There is no irrationality internally. We always, without exception, make a decision because we believe it is the right and best decision to make at the point of time. Even if you pursuade yourself to make a “bad” decision, the persuasion in itself will act as a justification to your new “worse” decision actually being “better”. (Try read that again if it was confusing) It seems that this is the only unified aim between everybody.
Let’s consider this other form of utility that love (not to be confused with lust) introduces. What makes this “form” of utility interesting is that to an economic system, this utility would be considered irrational. As humans, there is no arguing that this utility plays a very significant role in our lives, if not the majority of roles. This poses an interesting question: why, then, have we created a system with such massive influence on many of our lives that chooses to disregard this form of utility? The quick-witted debator would immediately retort with the concept of legislations, ethical regulations, and other similar restrictions. However there is no doubt that we know little about these two forms of utility – and such systems were obviously made by following the “easy” rather than the “right”. This branches off nicely into the grey areas of morality – something I shall save for another day.
What makes the situation nicely contradicting is an interesting experiment done around the 1970s. A man was put into a room with his head connected up to brain wave measuring instruments. He was then told that he would press a button on a table in front of him whenever he wanted. The results of the experiment, quite predictably, were that about a split second (1/10th of a second approximately) before he moved his hand to hit the button, the brain neurons were fired up.
The experiment was then changed so that the man could report as to when exactly he was actually aware that he was about to make the decision to hit the button. The results were direct, conclusive, and of course: highly controversial. What happened was that the brain neurons had fired up before the man was conciously or even subconciously aware that he was going to make a decision. In fact, the actual timeline of events was: time 0: brain neurons fire up, time 0.1: man is subconsciously aware that he has made a decision, time 0.12: man makes decision and begins to move his hand.
The experiment was repeated with slight variations all with the same conclusion: a decision is made before we are even slightly aware of it. This, of course, was thrown quite rudely in the faces of believers of free will – all who predictably reacted with anger and disbelief.
The professor who carried out the experiment was too insulted by the results of the experiment and was afraid of the religious implications of his discovery. He has recently been building up a case against his results – suggesting that in the 0.02 seconds before the awareness and the action, you have the chance to rebuke the decision and thus go against it. Of course, there is the issue that the brain neurons have to fire up a good 0.1 seconds before that rebuking.
Getting back on subject, this suggests that all decisions are in fact irrational – as rationality suggests a conscious entity to make a decision. The effects of any situation are not determined by how much satisfaction we expect to gleam from a decision, but simply from the natural consequences of previous conditions.
Allow me to use an analogy to explain this. Gravity is a physical and naturally occuring phenomenon. It exists and functions unquestionably as a feature of life. It also provides a condition for any object – it creates a force that pulls a mass from infinity to a point. The object will always experience this force and can therefore act in a predictable manner.
However, gravity is not the only condition acting on the object, there are many others: air resistance, wind, friction, surface area – and even the mass itself of the object. All of these variables determine the outcome of how the object will react to gravity. Each – to use an economics term – ceteris paribus will have predictable outcomes, but the mechanics behind the situation are so complex that we are currently unable to account for all of them – and hence decide what company we should buy shares in next week.
Then, you argue, “then why is there variance in our decision making? What is the root cause that would start off all the deviations in conditions around the universe?”. Like gravity – questioning what began the existence of it is non-beneficial: it gets us nowhere – however understanding and appreciating its existence is what is useful.
Drifting slightly off economics, this brings up to the concept of the mind and free will. The question remains that if our decisions cannot be controlled – what is the purpose? The idea that decision are made before we realise it as a result of past conditions does not mean that decisions are not made. What it does do is provde the concept that the mind is simply yet another naturally occuring phenonenom that reacts in such a way to conditions. There are decisions, but no decision-making entity. There is a mind, but no “self”. We are not in control – so to speak.
Ignoring the dramatic last sentence, let me give another analogy. Imagine a puppy. Even if you house and feed the puppy, you do not “own” the puppy. You cannot control what the puppy is going to do. You can predict what the puppy will be likely to do, you can understand why the puppy reacts in certain ways, but not control. However, what you can do is train the puppy. You can train the puppy to react in a certain ways to certain conditions.
Let’s say you put a rock on a top of a hill filled with gravel – it rolls down a path. If you put it on that exact spot again, it will again roll down the path. The more you put that rock such that it rolls along the path, it will create a groove along the path, and thus make it more and more likely to follow that very same path.
Similarly, the mind, though a naturally occuring phenonemon, can be trained. It is this understanding that prevents us from a unfufilling struggle to try and control every single thought that occurs throughout our mind. Instead of controlling the thought – simply realise the thought as what it is, and nothing more.
Let’s leave the “everything is irrational” to interpretation.
Meanwhile, let’s return to the subject of utility. I might be going out on an arm and a leg here, but I am willing to suggest that these two forms of utility each have externalities. An externality may be defined as the spillover effects incurred by society due to the consumption of a good – or in this case, a form of utility. They come in two sunny and not so sunny packages: positive and negative externalities – both of which names are pretty self-explanatory.
I propose that utility gained from conditions such as “lust” have negative externalities, and that utility gained from conditions such as “love” have positive externalities. Before continuing, let’s consider the nature behind these two utilities.
The lust-based utility has an interesting characteristic that it stems from “attachment“. The utility is gained from the satisfaction of an attachment, a greed, a craving, whatever you want to call it. Another characteristic is that consumption will also create more “attachment” – an attachment that will ultimately lead to dissatisfaction, or dis-utility, when it can no longer be consumed.
The love-based utility also has an interesting characteristic: it is derived from, and results in contentedness. It is an understanding of interdependency, of duty, of a natural flow and responsibility. Even more interesting is that this corresponds with our definition of “maturity”’s characteristics. For example, when we are very young, we are completely dependent. Becoming adolescents, we have a phase where we strive to be completely independent. Through experience we soon develop an attitude that most recognise as a sure-sign of maturity – the understanding of interdependence. Perhaps that’s why most old people are like what they are – especially nearing death.
Now that the characteristics are identified, let’s consider the externalities. This, like most of the grey areas of ethics is not something that I can easily persuade through a couple sentences on a blog post. Instead, simple observance and experience is enough to convince anyone that that which is rooted in attachment is actually a cause of dissatisfaction (think long term, where impermanence applies to all situations), whereas that rooted in understanding would cause a lot of morally responsible activities to take place, as well as solving all of the negative reactions one would otherwise experience when a craving is not satisfied.
So what sort of economic system is that which feeds on its own negative externalities? Masochistic and deluded to be sure.
If the implications of the last sentence didn’t hit you hard – here is it rephrased. If we understand and simply see things as a situation and not a provocation, we have eliminated a great deal of suffering. Imagine seeing a rose, but instead of thinking “this is a rose. It smells nice. It looks beautiful. I like how it looks. Who might I give this rose to? Do I have a rose? Is my garden doing well?…etc” we can instead just think “this is a rose”.
This elimination of suffering includes … well, the basic economic problem. Welcome to my wonderful new economic system – one which through the training of people mind’s can eliminate the unlimited needs that people experience, and thus make resource allocation theoretically completely sustainable.
In fact, one huge multinational has been moving towards sustainability throughout the entire lifetime of its business activity. Their statistics don’t lie. With every breakthrough in sustainability – their profits have risen, their costs have fallen, employees are more motivated, and the company vision is increasingly clearly conceptualised in every employee’s minds. Their CEO recently gave a talk on TED explaining this and provides financial proof to persuade others to join in with their movement.
Imagine a world where contentedness is the norm. Where our industries are based to satisfy our needs and wants which are not fueled by craving. A completely sutainable way of living. Somebody once said, remove all the beetles in the world and life would perish within 50 years – remove all the humans in the world and life would flourish within 50 years.
Even though me blabbering about project Eadrax doesn’t seem to interest most people (see: 0 comments on previous 2 posts) and it seems as though nobody has responded (yet) on the mailing list, I do not consider it a total failure.
I’ve decided to share just how much data you can actually gather from taking a peek at the logs behind Eadrax.
For those unfamiliar with version control, think of it has a log of every single change that was made. Like a save file. Each dot over there represents an edit.
Those subscribed to the mailing list and that have read the Eadrax Space will have known that I have restarted Eadrax as an open-source project. The graph up there shows two people, ukd1 and Moult (me). ukd1 (Russel) is another developer I met in the #kohana IRC room, willing to join in the project. Before continuing, you cannot see this from the image, but just as a note, every single update done up there was done by me. The little tags represent “branches”, essentially different features/sections of the site that are broken down so that people don’t get confused what belongs where (and also so somebody doesn’t screw up everybody elses work). The master branch is the overall project (well, sort of).
From this you can garner some very interesting information:
1) Only Moult has done anything on the project so far.
This is not a bad thing–at early stages of the project getting so many people to create the underlying structure of the web application can lead to some very confusing situations. I also know that the other developers have been extremely busy with other things, but hopefully this will change in the near future.
2) Russel (ukd1) apparently decided to work on the project a while back, but then just stopped. His line is quite left behind with the recent changes.
Obviously he has some catching up to do.
3) When Russel last updated his project, only two branches existed, “master” and “users”, now there are many more.
This shows that the application structure is probably mature enough to start introducing new sections of the site and thus more branches. This is a very good sign for progress.
4) The latest branch is no longer the “users” branch – in fact, it has been left behind.
Well, the users branch obviously has to do with the user system – logging in, registration, etc. This is very good proof that there is already a clear structure behind the system and now we can just build up upon it.
5) Recently the code has been splitting up and merging together.
Obviously I’ve been developing some things here, some things there, and it’s now good to start pulling things back together into a simple structure so other coders can know exactly where the code currently stands.
Summary: Well, nothing much interesting to be seen on the front end of things yet, but just a very good sign that things are moving along, and moving along quick. Expect by next week to have most of the code ported over from the previous Eadrax version.
…and we’ve begun (officially) the pre-alpha testing for Project Eadrax. All testers should have received several emails with relevant information. Actually, due to a slight muckup in the setup, you got spammed a little with one too many emails. Sorry, won’t happen again.
To give this post a bit more depth, I would also like to announce that I have upgraded to WordPress 2.8. Tada.
Might seem like nothing big has happened, but this is a significant benchmark that cannot be done justice by a blog post. What a lame excuse for today’s post
Hello–sorry for the rather short post today but exams are very nearly done with (Will be finished by Thursday afternoon!) and then Project Eadrax will start moving along full speed, and ThoughtScore will too be seeing some appearances. Yeah so as I’m quite busy no big post for today.
However, this is the final call for anybody who wants to join in on Eadrax testing. There are no prerequisites, just your own willingness, curiosity, and hopefully active involvement is wanted. You don’t need to know programming, design, or anything- though it would help if you did. This is for anybody and everybody.
In sharp contrast to the “anybody and everybody”, because of the early stage it’s at we don’t want to open it publicly. If you’re interested in joining, send me an email or leave a comment on this post with an email that you regularly check. You will then be notified with all the details later on
What is Eadrax? Well, it’s a website I’m working on. That’s enough for now!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’d have heard about Bing. Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt at a search engine to challenge Google – and last Monday, they released it for public use. They did MSN search, Live! search, and now Bing. Let’s see if I can actually make a ’search engine review’ interesting and informative. I hope I did- but that’s for you to decide.
Now, I might not like Windows, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft can only create crappy products. I’ve played Halo, and it’s fun too So I decided to try out Bing – this means only using it for all of my web searches throughout the week- and here I am with my review.
Bing is stressed as a “decision engine”, not a “search engine”. It’s meant to be able to provide useful information to help you solve tough decisions, instead of only being able to give you information on a subject – or at least that’s how their little beta introduction portrayed it to me.
I started with some basic searches – those searches that are meant to find out information. Google normally does pretty darn well on these by throwing me right at Wikipedia – you can’t go wrong there, but Bing apparently did. Searching up simple economics terminology (I had an economics exam) would throw me at past year economic sources, news articles, everything – except for “what it means“. A quick poke through some keywords proved that Bing didn’t use their search as a command line – in other words you could do fancy thing like `define: foo` or `"foo" -bar`. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you probably aren’t using Google effectively for your searches. Horrible first impression.
However, certain things did jump out, such as little tooltips that extend on the description, as well as more relevant searches and “links on results page”, oh, and a bunch of new fancy options on the Image search, as well as a load-on-demand thing that’s really nifty that you’ll just have to see for yourself. However, it’s no use saying how good the tech is, it’s better to see how useful the tech is.
So I then decided to see how good Bing was at being a “decision engine”. I threw a couple difficult questions I had floating around:
What career/university path would be suitable for me?
I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?
How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?
How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?
What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.
As you can see, the questions were varied from being hypothetical, technical, specific, broad-knowledge, and finally image-based … respectively.
What career/university path would be suitable for me?
The first question was initially answered by a collection of “buy our free careers advice” websites. Little scams they were, that wasn’t too good. However some deeper poking found some good personality tests and career questionnaires.
Did it answer the question in the end? No.
Was I expecting it to? No.
I have a hand condition called `hyperhidrosis`, how do I solve it?
This was a pretty technical question. Hyperhidrosis is a condition where you sweat profusely in certain areas of your body – mine being hands and feet. It is normally triggered by certain materials, foods, sounds, etc. It was medical advice I was looking for. Bing fared pretty well on this one. Apparently I found quite a lot of cures, everything from botox injections, surgical lasers burning off my nerves, 30 minute soaks in baking soda to giving yourself a mild electrocution with a 12 volt battery. Needless to say I decided to leave the electrocution to a last resort.
Unfortunately it also enjoyed giving a bunch of scam websites too – but nevertheless those were inevitable to pop up, and after discarding those I did find some really good websites on the subject. So good that I actually did try soaking my hands for 30 minutes in a concentrated mixture of water and … uh, toothpaste – no baking soda. With a quick air-dry I managed to witnes instantaneous crystallisation on the back of my hand, and enjoyed a good 12 minutes of sweat free life.
Did it answer the question in the end? Yes.
Am I going to try out the cures? Maybe later.
How should I fix the exceptions “claims_sig_not_found” that a random guy’s OpenID library kept throwing at me?
This was an interesting one. I had used an OpenID library somebody else had coded for a PHP framework. However no matter how much I inserted traceback calls and tried to debug it- it kept on failing spectacularly. A quick test on my remote server showed it wasn’t a “it’s just you” problem, and several fresh installs failed the same way. The problem was, I didn’t know the name of the guy who coded it, it was somewhat outdated, and not exactly the most popular library in the world.
It did decently- up to the stage where I actually found out the guy’s name, actual email, and…well – it seems as though either Bing is living under a rock or nobody else except me and the creator uses this library. I’ve fallen back to using janrain’s OpenID PHP library, and that works flawlessly.
Did it answer the question? If the answer is “don’t ask the question”, then yes.
Am I happy with the answer? Yes.
How can I sync my Windows Mobile phone with Kontact on Linux?
I have a Windows Mobile phone, and I want to sync my PIM (personal information management – like calendar, todo, contacts, notes, alarms etc) with my computer. Turns out that the only thing Bing can say is that whatever exists is either outdated or non compatible with KDE4 and Kontact.
Did it answer the question? Failed horrendously. Stupid Bing. Not even a glimmer of hope.
Am I happy with the answer? What answer?
What is the best picture to use for “Bing” on my blog post, seeing as the image keeps on changing on Bing.com.
I’ll let the picture it chose speak for itself. The rest were even worse.
Summary:
Is Bing comparable to Google? No. Realistically speaking, in a tie, Google will win.
What’s my idea on what would make a search engine so much more useful? An option to allow people to say “I am willing to spend money” or “I am not willing to spend money”.
Google is, actually, one of my top three disliked companies. The other two are Microsoft and Adobe. Why I dislike Microsoft and Adobe is a post for another day, but today I would like to talk about Google. Believe it or not, I will explain this without ONCE saying any personal bad experiences with Google’s services.
Google has recently unveiled at a developer preview their new product “Google Wave”. If you have not yet read about this, or watched the introduction video available on their webpage, I suggest you click here to go there now, and watch it.
If you have heard of it, and if you’ve watched the demo, you will be amazed. Not only have Google come up with a killer product, they’re going to open-source it, and developers will have access to the most amazing resources to produce the most amazing web applications possible. If you’re still reading and you haven’t watched the video, please go watch the video first.
Right – so the question is, why, especially if it’s open-sourced, are you against Google?
Try to look at it from this perspective. At this moment, we have three main operating systems, Linux, Mac and Windows, each with desktop applications built to cater for the underlying system. You might prefer one more than the other, and thus the more popular ones get more applications built, developers move to develop on the platform, and when the developers move, most users don’t realise this, but it’s where the developers like to go that determines what will progress and ultimately be used by you regular folks.
Right. So it’s a bit stupid to have a lot of competing technologies, and it’s obviously better to have one uniform system that just works ™ for all. That’s why we start to depreciate older technologies, merge together technologies, define standards, etc to make desktop systems more integrated, etc. This is well seen in stuff like KDE, GNOME, etc.
However, Google’s seen something a lot of others have been blinded about. The web is the only cross-platform, standardised system that exists. So whilst Microsoft, Linux and Apple go and fight their differences, Google, armed with its existing monopoly in the search engine system (yeah, indexes the internet, nice one) decides to take over the internet.
Here’s where you roll your eyes. But I’m not joking. Allow me to explain.
Since nobody can actually own the internet, Google has managed to think up another way of doing it. The plan starts with creating a lot of “uncanny” web applications. The uncanny valley was a concept used to describe the point at which one’s appreciation of technology due to its advancement changed to disgust because the technology became too “humanoid”. Eg: a humanoid robot only gets so awesome until it starts look identical to you, and better too, and with a hidden flamethrower. When used in the context of web apps, this is where the website’s interface mimics that of a desktop application. Like, for example: Google Docs.
This impresses a lot of users really quickly, as it allows them to do what was only previously possible if the software was installed on the system instead anywhere around the world with an internet connection and with a decent browser.
…and then Google starts releasing web APIs and toolkits to allow developers to take advantages of the systems it has created. This sounds really good, until you think about what else Google is doing.
Google releases their web browser, Google Chrome. Google Chrome is a breakthrough in certain technologies, allowing separate processes per tab, and support for some seriously cool javascript, ajax, whatever. Google’s aim in Chrome is “to show what the web is capable of”, pushing the limits, etc. With this browser, users can experience the best in uncanny websites, hence all functionality of your average desktop application can now, actually be done right in your browser. Again, Google Docs is a perfect example of this. Don’t believe me? Why don’t you try Photoshop in your browser, right now.
Once Google has a place in the browser market, they have every right to start sticking in their own ideas into the new HTML 5 standards. Now Google has their arsenal to define exactly what the browser is capable of. Together with their existing web toolkits and demos on the amazing stuff that is capable, who wouldn’t be happy to oblige?
Well, nobody. Google has made it so easy for the average person to access all of these great features. Even though Google Sites is a complete joke for web developers, for Joe down the street who can’t spell out HTML to save his life, Google Sites is amazing.
So people start switching. Because the technology behind it, too, is so impressive, developers start switching. In the end, what we now have is in effect “an operating system right in your browser“. Or as one person in IRC put it, another layer to depreciate the coding layers below it. Soon we will not need desktop applications any more, and everything will be done on the web. (of course there are also technical implications about this, like what will happen to the rest of the programming languages)
No, the web is still just through one browser you say, it’s not at all useful like that.
Actually, what about Chrome running as separate processes? What’s the difference between that and different applications? All that means is that instead of running KMail, your notetaking application, Pidgin, IRC client, OpenOffice and feed reader, now you’ll be running 6 or 7 Chrome separated tabs (so they’re just like individual applications) connected to GMail, Google Notepad, GTalk, Google Docs and Google Reader. In fact, you can have *deep breath*
GMail, Google Notepad, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Contacts, Google Desktop, Google Gears, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sites, Google Books, Google Translate, Google Scholar, Google Medical Records, Google Directory, Google Groups, iGoogle, Google Adsense, Google Streeview, Google Sync, Google Android, Google Youtube, Google Analytics, Google Feedburner, Google Shopping, Google Checkout, Google Apps, Google News, Google Video, Google Blogspot, Google Finance, Google Sketchup, Google Orkut, Google Trends, Google Code, Google Picasa … and now Google Wave.
Every single thing to replace every single desktop application you’ll ever need save for some development tools. I swear I could actually live a year with only using Google Products.
So once people try to compete with the huge massive framework Google has created for itself, the only way to create competitive products is to either rebuild your own framework (which is likely to be extremely time consuming and impractical) or …. Use Google Toolkit and Google API and Google Code.
So even though Google doesn’t own the web, Google has taken over the web. It doesn’t matter if it’s open-sourced, if you have to use Google Toolkit to make anything decent, that’s “Google is here to define what can be done” for you. The ultimate czar of the Internet.
Welcome to the future, where nobody knows what “desktop application” means.
thinkMoult is a blog. Updated every two days. I love programming, animation, art, music, etc - and once in a while I like to squirt my creative juices up on the web. Browse around, and you'd probably find something you like. If you do, check back often!
We mainly focus on tech-related articles, though personal posts do creep in once a while.
Hello everybody, I’m back from my 5 day jungle trek and I’m just catching up on what I’ve missed throughout the week. I was initially going to award you all with a post about the trek itself, but it turns out Jonathan Williamson from Montage Studio (the very same who does the Blender screencasts and gave some good tips for ThoughtScore) has got himself a Blender build for Windows 7 and has recorded a short screencast demo-ing the development.
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Google releases their web browser, Google Chrome. Google Chrome is a breakthrough in certain technologies, allowing separate processes per tab, and support for some seriously cool javascript, ajax, whatever. Google’s aim in Chrome is “to show what the web is capable of”, pushing the limits, etc. With this browser, users can experience the best in uncanny websites, hence all functionality of your average desktop application can now, actually be done right in your browser. Again, Google Docs is a perfect example of this. Don’t believe me? Why don’t you 
