If you want something done, do it yourself...
For a sneak preview into the future, don't look to the corporate world. Look to computer whizz-kids instead, says Charles Arthur
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Your support makes all the difference.If you want to know what the exciting technologies a few years from now are going to be, don't ask the head honchos of big companies – ask an "alpha geek". So says Tim O'Reilly, the founder and president of the book (and net) publishers O'Reilly & Associates. The alpha geeks, says O'Reilly, are the super-advanced computer users who "have such mastery of their tools that they 'roll their own' when existing products don't give them what they need." You and I plug something in, it doesn't work – we sigh. The alpha geek rubs his (it's almost always his) hands, opens a terminal shell, and starts writing a device driver.
O'Reilly spoke at the Emerging Technologies conference in the US a week ago, but has already distilled his thoughts into a paper he posted on O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/), which picks out seven technologies that he says are going to become part of the warp and weft of the online world in a couple of years. They are:
¿ wireless networks, using 802.11b, Bluetooth and their successors: "If you watch the alpha geeks, they are already living in a future made up of ubiquitous wireless connectivity to a variety of devices."
¿ next-generation search engines, which rank their findings based on how "trusted" the data from pages is. "They are prototypes for functionality that we will all need," O'Reilly notes.
¿ weblogs, the off-the-cuff daily diaries of links and comments, which O'Reilly says are "the new medium of communication for the technical élite".
¿ instant messaging. "Not just between people but between programs."
¿ file sharing. "When everyone is connected, all that needs to be centralised is the knowledge of who has what."
¿ Grid computing. "The success of the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/)" – which now has 3.7 million users worldwide, hunting for aliens through a screensaver – "demonstrates that we can use the idle computing power of millions of interconnected PCs to work on problems that were previously intractable.A computing utility much like the power grid will have an enormous impact on science and business."
¿ Web spidering. The super-users are realising "they can build unauthorised interfaces" to the huge web-facing databases behind large sites, and give themselves and their friends a new and useful set of tools. For example, O'Reilly has knocked up a program that will query Amazon's site thousands of times a minute, strip out the useless HTML, and generate a list of what books are new, and what the rankings are. The extra HTML makes it wasteful – "we're downloading 24Mb when we need under 10kb of what's there" – but in time, he is sure companies like Amazon will offer proper back doors to their data.
That then raises the question of why any big company that has put so much time and effort into creating a database would allow such access. Once more, O'Reilly has the answers. Revenue: getting the Amazon book rank by brute force is costly for both Amazon and O'Reilly. "A simple programming interface that makes the operation faster and more efficient is worth money and opens up whole new markets."
Branding: "a company that provides data to remote programmers can request branding as a condition of the service."
Platform lock-in: "as Microsoft has demonstrated, once you become part of the platform that other applications rely on, you are a key part of the computing infrastructure." And that means people will try their best to see you survive.
Goodwill: "Especially in the fast-moving hi-tech industry, the 'coolness' factor can make a huge difference in attracting customers and in attracting the best staff."
For many of these technologies, O'Reilly thinks that we're already at the "pioneer" stage. But he's sure that the time is coming where all these will be integrated into applications that are used every day by non-technical people. So don't disturb the geeks. They're writing your future software.
A printable version of Tim O'Reilly's 'Inventing the Future' is at www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//network/2002/04/09/future.html
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