Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Fiondella who wrote (30097)	1/29/2000 9:31:00 PM
From: Spartex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Bill Joy on the 6Webs@Davos ft.com Think there's one worldwide web? Think again. If Bill Joy, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, is right, there are six emerging webs that we will all be dealing with in our personal and professional lives. He's been talking about them at Davos. Here they are: 1. The Near Web The one we live with today. It runs on personal computers, in browsers. You sit up at it, and you give it the sort of attention you give a book. It's big, and getting bigger. But it's no longer the only player in town. 2. The Pocket Web This is the technology offered by the next generation of data-enabled mobile phones - early examples are the Wap phone or the Palm 7. It offers a flow of continuously updated information in a new sort of micro-browsers. It will have lots of new content, most specially written for this environment. As well as the wide area radio net, there'll also be local connections - infra-red links, physical docking stations, and Bluetooth, the new standard for local radio connectivity. The Pocket Web will be very different from the Near Web, not least because it will be truly personal. And the mobile phone already has a high degree of security built in, and a working system of billing for micro-payments. So it will be a natural platform for transactions. 3. The Entertainment Web This is a sitting-back, go-with-the-flow sort of experience. The challenge here is to create new types of entertainment, for example interactive storytelling. Or Disney's version of Little Bo Peep singing a personalised Happy Birthday to your daughter. Or shared community entertainments - communal long-distance drumming? - we haven't even thought of yet. 4. The Voice Web A relationship in which we'll be able to talk to devices in a relatively effortless way. We'll say "I'd like some jazz", not "Turn on CD, select Dizzy Gillespie, adjust volume quieter." Voice recognition's already quite effective - especially if you use good microphones. 5. The Computer Web All the first four webs involve human intervention. That's good, because it allows for an easy recovery from error. If the URL is wrong when you're using Web 1, you just type in another one. But the Computer Web drops the human out of the loop - it's computer talking to computer. So when you're at the airport your pocket device knows which flight you're on, interrogates the airport systems to pick up a "final call" signal, and pages you to go the gate. The challenge for this web is building enough reliability into it to drop humans out of the loop. That may take a shift away from centralise computing that's probably at least a decade away. 6. The Pervasive Web Chips are getting really cheap, and really robust. So eventually everything will have chips attached. (Bill Joy is especially keen on the idea of a washable chip in your shirt, so you can ask it questions. I'm not sure I'm ready for a conversation with my shirt.) The Pervasive Web may come about simply from our desire to find things: your car in a crowded car park, the mislaid tool in your cluttered basement, yes, even the favourite shirt that's ended up in your daughter's cupboard. Initially these devices will be passive ones, interrogated by scanning for them; eventually they will be active ones, taking the initiative to tell you, for example, that a light-bulb is about to fail. This web is ultimately the biggest of all, because there are so many objects to link. What makes all these webs possible? The continuation of Moore's law, the rule of thumb that tells us that computer power doubles every 18 months. With current technology, this will continue till 2010, delivering computers 1,000 times more powerful than today's. With the next semiconductor technology, molecular electronics, Bill Joy reckons that Moore's law can keep going till 2030, at which point it will be delivering devices a million times more powerful than today. A million times anything is hard to imagine - for example, a jet plane is only 1,000 times faster than walking, but it has transformed our ability to travel. What will a factor of a million give us in computing? Possibly a nightmare, says Joy - and he wants us to think about the bad consequences if we make the wrong choices of what to do with all this computing power. The death of privacy, perhaps. A household filled with not-quite-compatible machines, not quite working together - the equivalent of a thousand VCRs all blinking 12:00 at us because we can't program them properly. The law of unintended consequences - which gave us the traffic jam and the TV commercial - is just as applicable to computing as to anything else. Still, whatever problems lie ahead, there's one consolation: Microsoft only dominates Web 1. The rest are up for grabs - and the grabbing is already starting.