Miscellaneous musings in beta

Just saw: Google is leaving O3D for WebGL. Or more precisely building O3D on top of WebGL. This is really, really great news. Maybe now, with a lot more weight behind WebGL, 3D apps using WebGL built into in your browser will be near future. Ever since Flash sorely disappointed in this area I’ve waited for another 3D browser API to mature.

Uh. Can’t wait for that one to happen. Or just an another awesome beach demo like the one for O3D.

Nature, the international weekly journal of science, has a very nice webpage covering the latest discoveries about the 2.000 year old Antikythera Mechanism. This out of time tablet device never ceases to amaze me.

Two days ago Forrester Research Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote a blog post called “Curated computing: what’s next for devices in a post-iPad world“. With the blog post she seems to have coined a fitting term for the next big thing. Accordingly to the post the essence of Curated Computing is: less choice; more relevance.

When I read the post, I couldn’t help but think of Richard Stallmans words: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.” Of course the Curated Computing concept runs completely contrary to the Open Source idea, but what is the main issue here?

I get the fact that not everyone is a hacker (in the  MIT sense of the word) or wants to be one. Not everyone wants to tinker endlessly with their computer. Some people are just computer consumers. They only want their favorite application to work – and they see a computer as a tool to get some work done. That’s all right. It’s their choice.

But this also points at the dilemma: What if their application doesn’t work? What if something fails? Do they just sit and wait for a fix? Yes, they do. And that is also all right. It’s their choice.

But do they have any other choice in a world of curated computing? No. And this is where I have an issue. I don’t mind technology with a friendly face. I don’t mind advanced user-interfaces that helps people getting the task done. In fact that is a crucial part of modern technology. Technology shouldn’t be difficult to use.

But I do mind if the curating takes the choice away. If you completely take away the very possibility of tinkering then you raise the next generation as passive consumers and not computer tinkerers. And we need tinkerers. Bill Gates was a tinkerer, Steve Wozniak was a tinkerer, Microsoft and Apple were built by serious hackers and tinkerers. And in a world where we desperately need innovators and entrepreneurs, I seriously don’t think that we need any more computer curating. Do you?

And the really frightening scenario is this: Apple and their AppStore has had a lot of success. This didn’t really matter when we were only talking iPods or iPhones – but the iPad is different. The iPad is a real computing device that’ll compete with – and probably replace some laptops or netbooks. I’m afraid that if the iPad succeeds, the curated business model will become too profitable for other companies to resist…