William Friedman
and less understanding of code and the move off the desktop makes the devices less and less powerful I wonder if there will be fewer and fewer folks who know how to look under the hood."
It's certainly true that the automobile has become much less of a target of tinkering than it was in previous generations. When cars get complex, there is a loss of opportunity, but the news is not all bad. Today's autos have gotten a lot more robust, lasting longer and going further with much less maintenance than the cars my father had when I was growing up. It would be nice if software became equally reliable. You know the joke, if your car were run by Windows, every hundred miles it would stop suddenly for no reason and you'd have to start the car again to get it to go (to be fair, less true with Win XP, than Win 95, which is when I think I first heard this).
At the same time, software or aspects of it are likely to remain tinkerable. For one thing, you can put a programming interface to almost anything in software, so as software evolves in functionality one can continue to invent new API's on it to let people fool around with the code. On the one hand, there are already large parts of open source code which tinkerers are not advised to fool with, e.g., the Linux kernel. But there are much larger territories where almost anything goes.
Large parts of Chandler will be written in Python, which is an accessible high-level scripting language. This will encourage participation and experimentation, which is one of our goals. We are architecting the product to be highly modular so that many, many kinds of components (rule sets, spam filters, new views, smart parsers, import/export filters, indexers, etc.) can simply be plugged-in. We will certainly maintain a version aimed at the vast majority of everyday users, but we hope the adventurous will have a field day.
Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at November 09, 2002 02:58 PMcar tinkering is alive and well. I'd characterize what happened more as a gap between generations. the muscle car crowd typically didn't make the jump to modern, efficient, electronicly managed engines. however, there are plenty of people out there who got started with cars, trying to figure out how to make their honda beat the next guy at the stoplight drag.
today there's a market of specialized pseudo-professionals and businesses that manage the complex work, and then bundle it up as bolt on kits for the larger audience.
I fully expect the same to happen in software, and I don't see the appeal of coding disappearing just as technology changes.
Posted by: jason_watkins at November 11, 2002 01:22 PM
Tinkering for Teleology
The dependent co-arising of hardware and software ('progress' notoriously favoring the former, which now extends to the wireless broadband infrastructure), should eventually result in an information utility that will be integrated as a packaged consumer hw+sw+? service offered by the usual suspects, while being built on open protocols.
Such an information utility (both as applied physics and as a personal interface to an information based way of life ) would be the standard 'vision of the future', combining commodified wearable hardware ergonomics with the development of all manner of plug-compatible personalized web services.
It seems to me that the key contribution of a new (o.k., future) PIM will be as the primary and habitual interface to the resources of such an utility and interaction with the environment generally. Will the PIM become a PERP (Personal Enterprise Resource Planner, or maybe the conflation, PIMP, emphasizing it's active networked agency ...)
So long as tinkerablity can get you to these higher functional levels, let the 'Python power' uncoil ...
Posted by: Marc Laventurier at November 14, 2002 08:02 AM
Just noticed in this entry a mention of "spam filters". You may want to look into Bayesian filtering (look at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/03/155255&mode=nested&tid=111 ). It is best used from within a mail program (so that mail can be deleted as "spam" or as "good mail"). It seems to be the most accurate anti-spam system I've come across, and the hardest to get around.
Posted by: Greg Schwartz at November 25, 2002 07:07 PM
Steve Gillmor has an opinion piece up at InfoWorld entitled 'The Big Bang' in which (stating with the sixth paragraph) he describes the MS Office add-on 'OneNote', an advanced tablet-based 'idea processor'. See http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/11/25/021125opcurve.xml
He suggests that the design principle for this system reflects Steve Ballmer's directive to focus "not on product groups but on scenarios."
As above in Tinkering for Teleology, to be interesting, let alone competative and useful in a couple of years, a new PIM probably should target the future wireless/multimodal/semantic environment, and craft it's own 'scenario'.
Posted by: Marc Laventurier at November 26, 2002 05:15 PM
OneNote - is an interesting technology and points out an interesting aside that Balmers interest in scenario's echoes Alan Cooper's user personae modelling or user centered design approach to problem solving. So the question that a next generation PIM addresses perhaps needs considired in such a light - given, an increasingly wireless connected environement - what personal information am i looking to manage, share and exchange and in what context and how?
Can i take my personal thought notes that i make my sometimes inside in the PIM, perhaps in OneNote, more likely as email to myself, drag then to the BLOG button and publish them as a blog?
I'm heading out for two weeks on holiday with my kids down to south cost of France, I have the trip info, family contacts, bookings etc all in Chandler. I had intended synching it all to my handheld but it got forgotten about since i was up all night with the littlest who is teathing, we are leaving in 45 minutes, my one year old needs a nappy change and the eldest helped pack the hand held in one of the bags and she doesn't remember which one - can i drag the info I need onto the web icon - which serialises it to a Zope server and later securely access it from the web via the 8.02 connection at the hotel? -
OK two admittedly contrived examples, but scenario modelling and the use of user personae's can add a lot of strength to the end usefullness of a tool and is perhaps a better approach (in addition to experience) to develop useful tools than a feature list of cool technologies.
That said, Vista looks like making great strides in investigating the tech and inteface mix and a a a result Chandler has serious promise, its going to be interesting to see how it evolves and wether or not the scenario approach has a role in that evolution.
Posted by: Phillip Trotter at November 28, 2002 05:08 AM
I'm hearing the word "semantic" used, but you don't seem to be planning to incorporate any component that would actually have anything to do with semantics. RDF is a structure that attempts to provide a home for semantics; but, as with previous technologies, it avoids actual content that would assist in semantically defining anything. It lacks an ontology, rather relying on users/developers to create one from scratch with each new application.
What's needed is something like OpenCyc (http://www.opencyc.org). (Full disclosure: I'm the product manager for OpenCyc.) An early beta is out already on Linux, and a Windows version will be out next week. I'll also be providing a Python API to OpenCyc (I wrote an early version of one a few weeks ago). I'm excited by the potential of something like Chandler combined with the semantic power of OpenCyc. As time permits, I hope to write more about how these could combine and to attract some others to investigate this with me.
As stated elsewhere on this site, Agenda allowed entry of unstructured text that could be massaged into a structured form. That notion could be carried further by sending unstructured text down a "knowledge stream", the end (or "delta") of which consists of fully computer-usable knowledge (like the kind in a Cyc knowledge base). Data would be usable at any point, but it would become more usable the more semantic (akin to "the more structured") it became.
P.S. While OpenCyc operates as a "server", it can run on every workstation, and we believe it will work best when it is deployed using a P2P architecture.
Posted by: John De Oliveira at December 12, 2002 11:30 PM