Re: the next frontier of 'privatization'

[ravi <gadfly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eubulides wrote:
>
> Computers do wondrous things, but computer science itself is largely
> a discipline of step-by-step progress as a steady stream of
> innovations in hardware, software and networking pile up. It is an
> engineering science whose frontiers are pushed ahead by people
> building new tools rendered in silicon and programming code rather
> than the breathtaking epiphanies and grand unifying theories of
> mathematics or physics.
>

funny, that the article starts out on the right note (by pointing out
that computer science is not much of a science) and then flip flops
between acknowledging the accidental, incrimental and non-academic
nature of computer technology (at least software/network part of it) and
the urge to make grand pronouncements about the future.

i am snipping all the amazing stuff about grid computing, to which my
response is this: in the 80s and early 90s, all the hype surrounding
computer science was "artificial intelligence". impressive systems were
demonstrated (expert systems were just the tip of the iceberg, a mere
rough implementation) and various gurus of the future were proclaimed.
the govt of japan, one is told, gambled its technological future to a
"fifth generation project". in the meantime, a mundane technology, the
internet, based on the notion of the "stupid network"
(http://www.isen.com/stupid.html), founded on pragmatic fairly
non-theoretical principles, proved to be the revolution in computer
technology in the 90s.

of course computer "science" was above such mundane things (which
perhaps explains the sparse contribution of bell labs, with its closed
ivory tower attitude, to the emerging technology, despite sowing the
seeds with unix back in the 60s). the hot topic in computer science
during the 90s was "quantum computing". it was going to revolutionize
the science.

the we had the replacement of technology with terminology: B2B, P2P,
enterprise computing, extranet, web services, data mining, data
warehousing, etc.

somehow in the midst of all of this, actual progress is achieved! ;-)
whether "grid computing" is fancy technology, fancy terminology, or
something that will actually be a valuable new service on the net, i
hope will be decided through its adoption, not through its proclamation!


> Computer scientists say the contribution of Dr. Foster and Dr. Kesselman
> to grid computing is roughly similar to that made by Tim Berners-Lee to
> the development of the Web. Mr. Berners-Lee, who is now the director of
> the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology, came up with the software standards for addressing, linking
> and sharing documents over the Web: U.R.L.'s (uniform resource locators),
> HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and HTML (hypertext mark-up language).


and one must remember that berners-lee was no computer scientist and
should really be remembered mostly for being at the right place at the
right time. the good thing about the evolution of the internet is that
unless you are a techie, you see very few names associated with the
evolution of the technology. the notion of hyperlinked distributed
information predates berners-lee. even in his own time systems such as
gopher and WAIS provided similar services. and nobody in the general
public knows the names of the authors of these technologies (or might
recognize, outside of marc andressen, names such as eric bina, people
who actually wrote the code for mosaic, the browser that was key to the
success of the web), leave alone the authors of such devices as the
berkeley socket library that led to these applications.

        --ravi