The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

Long ago and far away, but stunning in retrospect to consider what might have been.

I can recall a sales guy in 1976 saying "I can sell a mini for $25K or a micro for $2.5K. How many of these things do you think we can sell? With 30,000 machines in the field, we already have the second largest installed base in the world."

Intel has since shown us that:

• More than 30,000 CPUs can be sold, before breakfast, even.
• Architecture is not a strong predictor of success
• What almost all computer companies do efficiently is packaging, not fundamental design

Seven Haiku for a Departed Tooth

Tooth number thirty
Lost its filling, always hurt
Tooth and pain gone now

Bad tooth. What to do?
Root canal? I don't think so.
Extraction action

An "abridged" comment
Brush your teeth every day
Or gap in the back

Dentist was perplexed
Endodontist helps too late
Nothing left to save

Root canals are easy
Says young dentist to patient
Now both know better

Dentists need practice
Experience teaches them
But why me, O Lord?

Oral surgeon knows
Dentist's failure his success
"Mind the gap" he says

Information Utopia

There was a speech at RAND a while ago on the development of the Internet. The main points were that information utopia and a new era of personal freedom were almost here, because of the free flow of data along the many distributed networks of the Internet which are accessible to most everybody.

I disagree with this cheery assessment because I think there is a kind of funnel or information diode effect going on. Users logging onto a site are visible, searchable, and ultimately knowable, by both corporations and governments, for purposes ranging from the benign to the annoying to the truly frightening. The organizations doing the observing are not themselves so observable - all the visitor sees is what's on the Web site, while the Web site can get quite a bit of data on the visitor, more if spyware is used. The relative anonymity of organizations and their databases ensures that the information diode flows mainly from people to organizations, not the other way around.