Welcome to Talk About the Technology Industry

This discussion area will be devoted to talk and debate about the rapid changes in the technology business.

We're very pleased to have as our host Elizabeth Corcoran, one of the technology reporters for The Washington Post's business desk. Elizabeth joined The Post in June 1994 and has spent more than a decade writing about issues in the high-tech world. Among other things she was a member of the board of editors for Scientific American magazine and also was an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum magazines.

At the Post, she primarily covers the computer and other high-tech industries with a special focus on companies located on the West Coast. She says that in this discussion area she's particularly interested in talking about how technology is shaping the way we live, work and play.

Attached below is the URL of Elizabeth's story on the Microsoft/Netscape battle for the lion's share of the next generation of computing software.

She poses this question, and will be visiting here soon to respond to your postings:

"What do you want from the next generation of software? In particular -- how much of your computer time do you wind up spending on-line in some way, both at work and at home? Is that shaping what you'd like to see in the next generation of software? Do you have different expectations for the software you'd like to use at home and at the office?"

I have been surfing the net for a little over a year now and correct me if I am wrong I still not convinced I am making the best use of it.Maybe it has something to do with the fact I am a student and still learning to weave and thread my way aroung the net. Apart from reading volumes of books put out by the socalled "net experts" what can I really do to take advantage of this huge technology? I will candidly appreciate your advice.

Well, let's see. First, I'd like to mention that I do not often use any software that has cost me anything.

I am not a software pirate, though, I run Linux. If anyone is interested, I also write science fiction, and one of my prime concerns is with the impacts of computing in general, and the sudden availability of an amazingly vast wealth of information resource via the WWW.

But back to the question: - but first a digression to the Ms. Corcoran's article. She notes towards the end of the article that there is considerable concern about the initail cost of the software; since generic software may well ahve to be somewhat hacked by in-house software specialists to enable full functionality for the end user, with the increasing demand that all applications on all machines must talk to all other applications on all other machine, and _all_ must talk to the Internet, the initial cost of the software must be low indeed, or it will have to be added to the costs of your software engineers.

But do you really want to be stuck running only costly Windows95 applications to ensure net-transport and data portability?

I don't think it's required. If you take a look at http://www.X.org, or at http://www.opengroup.org , you can see that there is vast momentum towards open standards.

Real computer users tend to use one or another variety of Unix. Silicon Graphics is pretty popular, but Linux is taking the computer world by storm.

And it's free. So, here's what I want in a computer, five years from now, and I am doing my best to do what I can to make it so.

Note that I maintain hyperlinks to online resources describing all of the following, and that you should visit this page to track down more information:

http://earthops.org/beltcom.html

I want a "beltcom". A beltcom should be what the Personal Digital Assistant should be in five years.

It will run some Open-Standards version of Java or Unix, will have X windows, and will be highly modularized. It will have real-time fast data-transport to the 'Net (probably by the proposed high-bandwidth low-power 2-5gigahertz SuperNet technology, which is expected to be ubiquitous by 2008), will cost less than 500 dollars in today's money, and it will operate almost exclusively on applets. Most of the operating system will be written to EPROM, with almost no harddrive of any sort. I predict that the magnetic-bubble memory will make a sudden resurgence (it's got no moving parts, and is non-volatile). Applications could be called in off of the net at anytime, do their thing, and then be disposed of, or written to an EPROM for later use.

Open Standards and the popularity of Linux will ensure that instead of software companies making mints of of a lock on a proprietary operating system, more money will be plowed into productivity enhancements. Instead of paying for software, people will be paying software engineers to write NetCode (tm), specialized applets that can be continually sold over the internet for perhaps a penny for each use, with copying allowed. Constant upgrades and enhancements will ensure not only the highest state of the art, but will continue revenue generation.

The beltcom can do anything. It is your telephone, your television, it is your FM radio and your cellular phone. It is your accounts book, your checkbook, your credit card, your ATM card. It is completely modularized so that the base unit, about the size of today's PDAs, can be jacked into a keyboard, a monitor, or any other peripheral via the ubiquitous high-bandpass Supernet transievers, with military-class encryption not only available but required.

A touch screen, voice recognition and speech output, highly-iconic programming and operation interfaces will practically idiotproof the devices. As nanotechnology and extreme-scale integration are deployed, I expect the devices to become solar-powered and waterproof.

I predict that increasingly the business will revolve around hardware, and less on software, and that as a new generation grows up in the technology, more people will have more memory outside of their heads than they do inside of their heads. As a science ficiton writer, I of course have to wonder what this will do to education, and to the heavy industries.

As far as software goes, I want a decent simple text editor, spreadsheet/calculator and mozilla. each device has to come equipped with a firmware next-generation IP address, and of course it has to have firmwired TCP/IP stacks sockets and commwares. If I need fancy formatting, I will open the mozilla to the net, pay a penny for a formatting macro or applet, transmit my data to a mainframe which will format it, and send me the formatted/listmerged document for approval. Or I could hack the HTML myself, and simply upload the document to the hardconnected mainframes for httpd-service/webmounting, e-mail listserving or (for a hopefully-reasonable fee) live broadcast if audio/video. If I want information, I suspect that it will be available through the nets through a service such as the LDGO Climate Group's DataCatalog ( http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/datacatalog.html ), which will not only process and display huge datasets, but will allow you to mount _your_ datasets to the web, and (for now it's free) will process your data and massage it for HTML display. For data manipulation, I expect to see Process-Providers emerge, who will for a small fee based upon clock cycles expended and memory resources used, allow people to write iconic flowgrams on their beltcoms and the Open Standard netCDF databases that will be mounted will be run against the processes generated by the iconic flowgrams, and the results can be accessed by any beltcom in graphic form, or as chunks of the result-set displayed on their beltcom's screen through the resident spreadsheet.

Except for the actual beltcom devices, the software, the operating system, and everything else you need _is here and available now_ and for now it's _free_.

All you have to do is switch over the Linux... and hit my website and follow the Real Links to Real Things, and the Beltcom Page, and the links cited herein, and you can see the revolution against Microsoft speeding ahead on silent cat feet.

Websearch also the following terms...

'khoros' 'open standards' 'X' 'open X' 'open group' 'LDGO' 'netCDF'

And that will get you started.

I hope I haven't baffled or confused any of you, or used so much unfamiliar jargon that you think I'm just nuts.

Sincerely,