The Greatest Lover In the World and I were talking the other night about how crap the www really is. Don't flame me yet, read on...
I'd just spent time time at work using a spreadsheet, and I'd forgotten what a fantastic thing the spreadsheet is. You can put stuff wherever you want, and generally run riot, the inventors of Visi Calc gave us the ultimately usable playground for arithmetic. If you're into IT archeology you can download visicalc from here.
What has happened since? Well the "C" was added to IT to make it ICT, and the internet was invented, bringing us the delights of clumsyness, crappinness and crooks.
From a people perspective communication is a fine thing. As a programmer I like the internet because it joins computers up and I can have fun with that. But from the "useful-computer for people to do stuff with" point of view HTML and the www has made us take one step forward and a big lurching stagger back.
I know a lot of people are working hard to make up the lost gound, but really, should it be so hard?
Right you can flame me now.
Is Verisign a monopoly? Does it matter?
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Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler recently wrote a latter
complaining that VeriSign overcharges for for .com domains due to its
market power...
4 weeks ago
Comments:
ICT is a term used by politicians, overpaid high-level (as in concepts, not talent) consultants and economists. It's a placeholder term to make vague generalities about what are some relatively weakly aligned industries. In short; if it's not bullshit, it's a bullshit aid.
But the web, and much less the internet, is not crap. The invention of packet switched networks is nothing less than one of the most revolutionary and important developments of the 20th century. The concept of being able to pervasively share information near-instantly is an insanely powerful one.
That application technology has staggered backwards, due mostly to ignorance and immaturity being rife in the development industry, is a relatively seperate event - and not one restricted to the web.
I wasn't suggesting that the internet is crap, I owe the good bits of my career to it, its what we're doing with it and all the lovely things that we've abandoned in our headlong rush that annoys me.
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