DeLorean Ipsum
Back to the future
How generic it is to chose lorem ipsum to introduce the technology subject. This unflagging content generator able to fill the emptiness of any project at its beginning. It is also a nice way to put an end (at least temporarily) to the white page fear.
Only to experiment the anguish of not being able to substitute lorem ipsum with real content.
The time paradox
Lorem ipsum makes us flirt with time paradox. After the text was used by the printing industry from the 16th century to format pages, generators empowered them with lorem ipsum to produce infinite quantities template texts that give the modern Internet pages an antique look.
In order to prepare the future, we fill the emptiness of our starting projects with pages of a text that we, for the most of us, do not understand. And for those who read Latin in text, I bet they would rather chose authors like Terence from the archaic period, Salluste from the classic period or Saint Jerome for the late period.
This is how this blog web site begins its life with so many paragraphs in Latin and, probably, so many broken links... Not to speak about the promise of a multilingual web site, still a work in progress.
The road ahead
Another way of exploring time paradox is to chose an ancient book that was aimed, in the past, at speaking about the future, the things to come, the things to happen.
I had the chance to read Bill Gates' book by the time of its first publishing. I do not remember much of what I read, besides the nice explanation with light bulbs, of what it means to digitize and how it works.
I was expecting to find in the book a memory that I had about the initial vision that Uncle G would have had, that would have led him to do everything he could to make his grandmother use a computer.
How did I form this idea? Along my second reading of the book, even though I was driving slowly, I couldn't find William's Grandma on the side of the road.
Anyway, I was finding rather cool, that Uncle G had this vision of his grandmother mastering her personal computer. As a result I kept it for him because I needed this inspiration.
Enlightened by the digitally controlled bulbs in the book, I also reread his explanation about the arising of the PC, the personal computer.
And this is precisely where Gates accomplishment with the PC meets the Grandma vision: disconnecting computing power from the mainframe or mini servers was the way to have everybody on a computer, including Grandma.
The road ahead was the continuation of the road to computing freedom.
The longer you can look back
As Sir Winston Churchill said once:
“ The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward ”
So looking back to the road ahead as it started 30 years ago, really helps me to look forward to where I am heading for.
More or less, anything Uncle G had predicted has happened. To which extend is not the key, but it happened: more computers, more information highways, more connections and less personal computers…
The beginning of the road ahead is where I want to look back; where Bill Gates had provided the necessary tools for everyone to be free with their own and home computer.
During the last thirty years, the combination of several innovations have rebound the once free personal computer to the mainframe. And this is it, with the dream of freedom that once was bound with the personal computer.
We all became digitized; our lives have been slowly but surely digitized, starting with music, followed by images and videos. Nothing escapes.
And the bright future became cloudy: we handed over our personal lives to foreigners, giving up privacy and control over our data.
Bring the data home
All right! The PC has become a smartphone, even though we still use personal computers.
It is important to notice that the computers we hold in our pockets have become infinitely powerful, compared to the PC that I used to program when I started in software.
Also important to remember what we do with our smartphones: most of the time, we use them to watch videos. Nothing that requires much of the available computing power at our hands.
Once connected to the network the computer in your pocket loses its autonomy and privacy; and so do you.
And the bright future became cloudy: we handed over our personal lives to foreigners, giving up privacy and control over our data.
Sustainable power at our hands
While giga data centers are holding huge amounts of data, at the cost of high ecological impact, we can chose to hold our data by ourselves, to share them with our close relatives and friends.
Let's be our own data center.
The small server that will be it has a low power consumption while delivering enough computing capacity to share everything you want, peer to peer, without trace and the so called "legitimate interest" data harvest.
We're almost there, to the point where we will be able to chose to be humans using machines and not humans abused by the machines.
