mahiwaga

A followup to the disjointed thoughts I set out in my elliptical comments on mass amateurisation, which was written after pondering Tom Coates’ entry “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amatuerisation of (Nearly) Everything” on plasticbag.org:

I started noticing how a lot of technology (specifically, software), instead of getting more and more complicated and esoteric and requiring an IQ greater than 120 to understand, is actually regressing to older, simpler, tried and true technologies.

I find it interesting that, for the most part, blogs are pretty much just plain text. Sure, it’s technically HTML (or XHTML), but thanks to CSS, it is less necessary to screw around with graphics files in order to implement neat little tricks like rollovers (and as Mozilla and its many offspring begin to catch on, mostly due to the fact that IE is becoming more and more obsolete, and there will be no upgrades to it without having to buy a new version of Windows that will probably cost as much as the computer that you will be running it on, deploying SVG to implement more complex graphical behavior will become more feasible….) Sure, there are pics blogs, and legendary cam sites, but these are more the exception than the rule. Mostly, this is probably because Blogger is the blog tool with the lowest barrier to entry—you don’t need your own webhost, and you don’t need to know how to code, but if you therefore host on Blogspot exclusively, then you pretty much can’t use graphics files.

While software technologies such as Flash have their definite place, they aren’t going to take over the Net anytime soon (as I used to see some developers claim.) Who knew? ASCII (in its new incarnation as UTF-8) still reigns.

The advantages of plain text (or at least of being able to degrade gracefully into plain text) are that your content is extraordinarily portable. Content can be browsed by a cell phone, or it can be stuffed onto your iPod. Hell, maybe even your watch can be used to browse content. More over, dealing with plain text is (usually) cheap, in terms of CPU cycles, and especially in terms of memory requirements. You can fit a hell of a lot more text files onto your PDA than PDF files or Word Documents.

Then take the advent of cell phones that support polyphonic ringtones. The most common format for polyphonic ringtones is the MIDI sequence. How ironic, that in 2003, I am all of the sudden once again searching the Net for MIDI files. Back in the day, before mp3s ever existed, when 56K modems were a fantasy, hell, when sound cards didn’t come standard with computers, this is how I got my music fix. Purely instrumental files that sounded really crappy unless you had a kick-ass sound card (which I didn’t.) But now MIDIs are back in style. Hilarious.

(And finally, the article that made my apophenia-seeking brain put it all together.) And now, get this, NASA is thinking about resurrecting the Apollo space capsule (link from Slashdot). (OK, not really, but sort of.)

More thoughts that just occurred to me. A follow up to retrograde consolidation:

Ironically, what makes regressing to older software technologies feasible is because hardware technology is advancing so rapidly. This is what makes it cheap (again, in terms of CPU cycles and memory capacity) to process markup that is otherwise plain text. So because computers are getting faster and faster, and have more and more memory and storage capacity, you don’t need precompiled binaries as much. The efficiency gained versus the pain-in-the-ass factor of writing supremely optimized code will become less and less worth it as long as Moore’s Law holds, except for some mission-critical applications that require realtime operation (like gaming, for example.) And because you don’t need precompiled binaries so much, completely cross-platform, interpreted languages such as Perl and Java can flourish. (Interpreted languages! And you thought BASIC was obsolete!) You can write config files in XML, in a plain text editor. (Much of Mac OS X’s configuration files are in plist files, that is, XML property lists.) And cross-platform APIs like XUL will become more and more practical as well.

Another reason is expanding bandwidth. If broadband continues to become more and more accessible, and wi-fi continues to become more ubiquitous, it becomes more feasible to transmit things in simpler but more inefficient (in terms of byte-count) formats. For example, perhaps there will come a day when it will be worth downloading WAVs instead of mp3s. (Though, except for the audiophile aspect of it, it may be unnecessary since processor speed will also continue to increase, making the additional load of decoding an mp3 minimal.)

But, I think, more importantly than simplicity (however you want to define it) is openness. A lot of these tools and formats that would’ve been prohibitive (again, in terms of CPU cycles and memory) in days gone by are somewhat transparent. (Sure, we don’t come out of the womb being able to parse XML, but it’s a lot easier to understand than straight up machine language.) More importantly, the specs are accessible. With a little effort, you too can write XML documents and write Perl scripts and develop Java applications. You don’t need to drop hard cash on some secretive software company to be able to do some rather remarkable things with your computer.

A script that translates a phrase through several different languages before retranslating it back into English: “Lost in Translation”

If you’re fortunate enough to be running Mac OS X, a standalone (well, not really, since you still need access to Babelfish) application is available: Babelizer for OSX. OK, it’s not exactly the same thing. This just translates a phrase back and forth between English and a language of your choice until the phrase stops mutating.