Re: compiling a Lisp source to exe

J Kenneth King schrieb:
André Thieme <address.good.until.2008.oct.24@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

You and Kurzweil have some amazing predictions about the
future. Kurzweil is a very smart man and you both may be much smarter
than I for me to heap any real criticism upon you. However, I would
like to point out that such predictions have been made in the past and
have missed their mark. According to some in the past, every home
would have a cheap fiber optic connection handling all of our
communication needs. We know that very few predictions made by
futurists have ever come true.

I listed Kurzweil explicitly, because he is in my opinion a very special
futurist.
I say this not because he is an authority, but because he gives reasons
for his claims, on hunreds of pages. It is not certain that future will
develop as Kurzweil says, although I think that several parts of what
he says will come true.
And we are not talking here about immortality or highly advanced nano-
technology, but merely about improvements in computational power,
memory and internet connection speeds. All of these areas have proven
exponential growth in the past and today it seems this can continue long
enough to allow hosting Photoshop, Excel, Word and Powerpoint online.

Kurzweil is not only just one futurist, but one who has proven since
decades that he made accurate predictions. So if we want to compare him
with futurists of the past, we should look for those who also got 14
honorary doctor titles, who were awarded by 3 american presidents, for
example with the medal of technology, which is the highst award the US
offers in that area. They should also have a proven record of predicting
technologies 10-20 years ahead.

I think most predictions came from some scientists who were experts in
their fields, but not always the most competent to predict technological
progress.


There is one thing however that we can agree on: that progress is
inevitable. Technology will continue to be developed at ever
increasing speeds. New technology will eventually supplant older
technology enabling access to higher levels of technology for more
people.

I think also that there is enough room that will allow technology to
progress a few more years. I don’t think 2020 will be the year of the
last invention of mankind.


However, there are other factors which affect the adoption of all of
this technology: cost, policy, resources, consumer trends, culture,
economy, crisis, and so forth. Factoring in all of these into current
prediction models is still out of our reach. Perhaps before running
amok with new predictions we should look to the past and reason why I
still don't have a cheap high-bandwidth fiber-optic connection to my
home.

Yes, you are right. These factors exist and definitly influence the
progress.
Kurzweil however argues that although these factors have an influence
technological progress works on a higher level. He explains it as a
self-reorginazation process of the universe. For example he says that
although a catastrophy killed most life about 65 million years ago and
that was indeed a step back for the evolution of intelligence, it only
slowed down the process for a while, but then humans evolved.
He showed that since 1900 until today the computation power per price
grew hyperexponentially. And this although there were a world financial
crises and two world wars.


(We should also consider that the greater part of the world's
population still does not have access to clean running water and
abundant access to electricity)

Right, but also they have much more access to modern medicine than
they had in the past 250.000 years, and also their life expectancy
grew, and new devices for cleaning water already exist and computers
for 100-400 dollars were build for Africa (for example).
I agree, it could be much better *sigh*


Anyway, this all has little to do with my main concern: what's the
point?

The point of all this is that I think, that the original poster,
cartercc, can probably run all his applications against a web interface,
and that there is no real need to compile an .exe file.


I'm still not buying into the "Browser is the new OS" idea.

Maybe it will never happen, even though google will try hard and invest
many billions to manipulate young people to like that idea.
And everyone may have his/her opinion, and you can give very good arguments
to defend your position, and I understand and accept them.


It's a bad idea.

I think this is right, but I also see that it has advantages, and believe
that this method will win in the end, at least for lots of applications.


André
--
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