TechTalks Transcript
The Future of the Web
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Greg Marks [GM] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
March 10, 1998
Audio
• Streaming
MP3
• Download
MP3 (Download
Tips)
JB: Welcome to the CREN Virtual Seminar Expert Series for Spring of 1998 on Untangling the Web. Whether you're joining us by phone or by Internet audio, you are here because it's time to discuss one of the leading core technologies in our future, the World Wide Web.
This is Judith Boettcher of CREN, one of your hosts for today's session. Greg Marks of MERIT at the University of Michigan is back as our regular co-host. Welcome back, Greg.
GM: Thanks, Judith. And I'm also pleased that we have several other folks on the phone line and quite a few folks listening in over RealAudio already.
JB: Great. As you all know, our guest expert today is World Wide Web expert Howard Strauss from Princeton University. Howard is the manager of advanced applications at Princeton, and a well-know presenter on Web issues and futures -- particularly our topic today. Howard, thanks for being here today.
HS: Thank you, Judith. I'm glad to be here. I'm also glad to see that we've got people coming in real early. I'd like to really encourage them to ask questions, to hop in if they're on the line, to join in the discussion -- because it really ought to be a discussion, not just somebody out here telling them about the future, since nobody can really tell anybody about the future.
JB: We can only help predict and invent, right?
HS: We can make some guesses that I hope are based on some reasonable assumptions, but I think that the people who are on the line or listening in ought to challenge those assumptions. We shouldn't take any of this stuff for granted.
GM: We should make clear right off the bat how people can communicate. You can either be, as many of you are, connected via RealAudio (and RealAudio is reached through the website, www.cren.net). Or you can dial in and join us live here. When you dial up, you'll be right on the air with the rest of us. That number is area 734-647-2801.
In either case, you can also send us e-mail at utw@cren.net. The website has that same information. We'd love to have questions, either via e-mail or by your calling in and just asking them live.
JB: Thanks very much, Greg. I'd also like to remind everyone that this is our second series of expert events, and if they missed the live events and would like to refer it to someone else, they can pick up selected portions of the session from the website afterwards.
Well, Howard, let's go ahead. We've got just an awful lot to talk about today, and lots of opportunities for questions here. So let's talk about the future of the Web and particularly which capabilities we ought to be planning for.
Interestingly enough, while I'm in Washington this week, the Washington Post has been having a series on the issue of data privacy this week. And it appears that a few states have started already selling entire databases of drivers' license data to marketers or to basically whoever's got the money to do that. What do you think about how we should be planning on our Web access to protect some of our data, and are there tools and practices out there to help insure that the right people can, in fact, get to our data in the future?
HS: Well, Judith, there's really a couple issues here. One issue I'm just going to push aside here. You folks in Washington can worry about this. And that's a lot of the administrative, organizational, legislative kind of issues. That is, somebody's got to decide if people like the Motor Vehicle Department has the right to take this data that they collected from people about drivers' licenses and make it available to advertisers or whoever. But that's kind of a legislative process.
But I think of real concern to people within universities and within companies is taking data that you'd like to protect and having that compromised. Today on the Web, more and more, there's a lot of commerce being done and a lot of private things being done where we do have a lot of data that needs protection. And fortunately, I think that today the Web's able to handle that. There's lots of things you can do on the Web -- lots of private things that you can do -- and there's lots of tools around so that you can feel pretty secure that if, for example, you're doing some transaction with a bank, that nobody else can look at the transaction, and that the bank is really the bank. And the bank knows that you're really you.
JB: So what we're doing right now, what might you suggest people do in planning for their Websites? Are there some simple things that can be done right off the bat?
HS: For people who've used the Web a bit, you've probably noticed that now and again you get a little dialogue box that suggests you're going into a secure server. And if you're at a college or university or company doing anything that you think ought to be protected or private, what you ought to be doing is you ought to be running a secure Web server. There's lots of secure Web servers made by every company under the sun. Microsoft has secure Web servers and so does Netscape and so does Sonet. So it's not a case of just one company doing this kind of thing. But that's your first level of defense is to be running a secure Web server.
Secure Web servers run something called SSL -- Secure Sockets Layer -- and it doesn't matter if you know what that means, or care what it means or whatever. The fact is that there are Web servers out there that send the data across the line encrypted so that if somebody is listening on the line -- and by the way, that is easier to do than you would ever believe. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to listen on the line. If you don't know how to do that, you can go out on the Web and you can find little programs that will do it for you. That kind of stuff's very available. But at any rate, SSL or Secure Socket Layer, these secure Web servers make it so that if you listen on the line, you get what looks like gibberish to you. You get stuff that's very, very difficult to decode.
In addition to that, there are things called digital certificates which make it certain that when I talk to a bank, for example, that I can be pretty sure that the bank is really the bank, and when the bank talks to me, the bank can be pretty sure that I'm really me.
So we can [blank spot on tape]. That kind of thing just opens up a whole sea of problems and things, because students, for example, no matter how private the data is, will bring up a screen full of data and walk away, will abandon the machine. The next student comes in and that machine has been authenticated for that student, so anything that the previous student could do, this new student walking in can do. I think you know, you can put letters that are a quarter of a mile high saying PLEASE TURN OFF THE MACHINE. IT'S GOING TO CAUSE A SECURITY PROBLEM and people won't notice them. JB: Why don't we go ahead and leave the security topic for a little bit more detail later, Howard, and go back to looking at just how fast is the Web and Internet growing? The last time we were online here about four months or so ago, you had some numbers. What do the numbers tell us today?
HS: I went back and looked at the numbers, as I do from time to time -- and the place I'm getting the numbers from, by the way, is a place called Network Wizards, and it's at URL www.nw.com. Network Wizards is a really good source for this kind of information, and I would urge people listening if they want Web statistics to go out and take a peek.
Unfortunately, in September, they revised their survey techniques and so the numbers are not really completely comparable. That is, if I give you numbers from July '97, which I have, those numbers are available using their old survey techniques, and the new survey techniques are a little bit different. So we should be just a little cautious.
At any rate, the numbers are so big anyway, whether they're the old technique or the new technique, but it gives you some sense of what's going on. For example, Network Wizards says that in January of '98, not too long ago, there were over 29,000,000 hosts on the Web. They said that there were approximately 120,000,000 users on the Web, and their claim is that the user count is doubling approximately every year. So 120,000,000.
And if you go up to AltaVista, AltaVista said a couple months ago that they had just indexed their 110,000,000th URL. I look at a lot of URL's in the course of a week or whatever, and probably in the course of my life, I may have looked at 10,000 of them, but there's 110,000,000 out there. I've looked at a tiny little corner of the URL's that are out there. And AltaVista says about 110 an hour are being added. So during this talk, there's going to be 100 new URL's that we should have looked at. We're going to fall further behind.
JB: You know what, Howard, one of the thoughts that I've had on this, too, is that as the URL's keep multiplying, it's a little bit like books in the library. We finally had to recognize the fact that we couldn't possibly read every book in the library. We're obviously at a point where we can't potentially really know very much about the full comprehensive look at all of the URL's.
HS: Yeah, but I think the library's an interesting analogy, because a library actually has some kind of card catalog, whether it's an electronic card catalog or whatever. The fact that the books are catalogued and there's librarians wandering around and there's research librarians and there's reference librarians and we have this whole infrastructure that helps you find something out there.
JB: That's a good point.
HS: And what we have on the Internet with the World Wide Web is we have a library bigger than any library you can imagine. I mean, there's no library with 110,000,000 books -- none that I've seen -- with no card catalog, no librarians. GM: Even though Yahoo and other search engines are trying like crazy to catch up, it still is a huge problem. In terms of the size of the net, does that relate to what we see as some of the emerging uses?
HS: Well, I think one of the things -- and we might get some disagreement among universities here -- that is really moving the Web ahead is the commercial use of the Web. The Web, before all the commercial companies decided to hop in, was this interesting little tool that was used by universities and some government organizations and things like that. And [now] the .com domains really dominate the Web. More than half of everything out on the Web today is .com, and .com is the faster-growing portion of the Web. So I think it's these companies going out and pouring lots of money into this and deciding that you almost don't exist as a company if you're not on the Web.
JB: Are the companies finding really useful things to do now on the Web? It used to be, I think, that they would just take their brochures or their materials and just kind of put them out there like a bulletin board or something, Howard. Is that changing?
HS: Dramatically in lots of ways. For example, a recent issue of Business Week reports that Dell Computer is doing $3,000,000 worth of business a day. This is not like a year or a week. Three million dollars worth of business a day on the Web. They report that people are buying about $2,000,000 a week of travel services, airline tickets, that kind of thing, and that in '97, people did about $3,000,000,000 worth of buying stuff on the Web. So there's a huge amount of stuff being bought on the Web.
In fact, companies as big as General Motors have been so affected by people buying things on the Web -- in the case of General Motors, people buying cars -- that GM is cutting back on their dealership by about 10% because the little local dealers are getting killed by people buying cars on the Web and then traveling 20 or 30 miles to pick up their car -- just totally bypassing the local little dealers. So it's really changing the way people buy things.
I do a lot of traveling, and I don't know of the last six, eight months whatever, I haven't bought an airline ticket from a travel agent. I buy them on the Web. It's more convenient, it's better. Better service, etc. So lots and lots of commerce is being done on the Web.
GM: I find myself so busy that amazon.com is enormously convenient for getting books, even though bookstores are only maybe 15 minutes away. That 15 minutes is very precious, so amazon.com gets the business.
HS: Even stranger, Greg, we have a Barnes and Noble right near Princeton University, about ten minutes away. It's the biggest bookstore I've ever seen. And there's a Barnes and Noble, of course, on the Web and I can buy books, including shipping, cheaper from Barnes and Noble on the Web than I can driving the ten minutes down the road and picking them up from a bookstore. It's true, in the bookstore I can sit around and have some coffee and I can browse through books and things like that, things I can't do on the Web. But boy, if I know the book I want, the Web is more convenient, and again, cheaper than buying the same book at the same company just by going down the road. Kind of amazing. <JB: A link to that -- when we think about some of the basic change that we're talking about, the change from the bulletin board view of the Web -- if we can go into amazon.com or Barnes and Noble and some of those bookstores, they really provide additional services. We can't get coffee, but we can easily search and get reviews of books and things.
So translating that into the university, Howard, what kinds of interactive services do you think we're going to really see -- hopefully soon -- that we're providing for our students on the Web?
HS: One of the things that we see, and one of the easiest things for universities to do and I think a lot of universities have done it, are online applications, where you can just pop up a form on the Web and have the students just fill the form out. Internally, inside a university, the number of forms that move around for administrative purposes is enormous, and more and more of those forms are electronic. Here at Princeton, our Dean of the Faculty's office no longer will send forms out to you. [Inaudible] say, "Some faculty member has requested they take a leave. What form do I fill out?" You fill out on the form on the Web. So they've totally gotten out of this business. And in many universities, the human resources department now lets you do forms on the Web and things, so a lot less paper is moving around the university.
But even more important is that as soon as you fill one of these forms out, all the information is captured on the spot and it's in a form that you want it. Nobody takes some piece of paper that you send somewhere, takes the information off of it and keys it into the computer. It's keyed in once by the person who's actually filling this thing out, so that's kind of interesting.
And of course, there's all kind of student systems and things like that. Our students here at Princeton can not only see their grades online, on the Web, which means they can see them online everywhere in the world, but we have a complete degree audit. Students can find out what requirements they've met, which ones they haven't, what courses they would have to take to change their major and things like that. That's all available on the Web, so we don't have to worry about whether students have Macs or PC's or UNIX boxes or whether they're in London or just down the road here. People have this available all over the world.
GM: I'd like to do a quick check if there's anybody who is online on the telephone who'd like to ask you a question, Howard.
HS: Sure. P: This is Paul, from Washington. I'm working with a nonprofit society, and one thing that we've noticed -- we recently added on online change of address form. Just very simple: you can type in the information there, and hit a button and it comes directly to us via e-mail, as opposed to the old method, which was sending in a paper form. And we noticed that we were receiving maybe three or four of these paper forms a month previously, indicating that people had moved and they wanted us to have their correct address information. Soon as this online form went up, we started getting 15, 20 a day from people who wanted us to have their current correct addresses, as opposed to those, I assume, who were just being lackadaisical and letting the post office handle it for them. So it was really a dramatic increase.
HS: And people are just doing an e-mail kind of thing to you?
P: Yeah. Very simple little protocol.
HS: You realize your next step here is instead of just having them do that, it's a tiny additional step to have them take that form and have that form update a database for you.
P: That's true.
HS: And I think that what happens is that first people start putting stuff on the Web that they want people to read. Then they start doing the kind of thing that you're doing, Paul, where they say, "Gee! People can actually fill in this little thing to do the e-mail and then we'll move it to the database." That's followed pretty quickly by people deciding they can update the database directly.
In fact, on many campuses, here included, there's lots of people who want to do surveys for one thing or another. Our food services group here is always wondering what the students think about the food, so they'll just put a survey up here on the Web. Students here vote on the Web for all the student elections. That, of course, requires some security and it requires authentication. We don't want students to vote twice or more than twice, but all that stuff's quite possible with the Web. The moment the polls close, we have the results for the election. That's quite a secure kind of thing and very convenient for students. Students don't have to go anywhere to vote. Nobody has to count paper ballots. The possibilities for fraud are really quite limited. JB: Thanks for the question, Paul. Anyone have any other questions at this point? Okay.
Howard, given all the changes that are occurring and the new services that are available on the Web, what about access? Even though the numbers are growing so rapidly, having access to the Web when and where I need it is not as easy as it might be. What new developments do you see in terms of our future? Where and when is it going to be easier to have access to the Web than it is now?
HS: Are you talking about the problems of speed or the problems of mobility?
JB: Actually, at this point I was thinking about the problem of mobility, the fact that if, in fact, everything I have to do is on the Web and I'm not necessarily always connected, how am I going to solve that problem? What kinds of hardware developments might we see in the future that would make mobility and mobile access to the Web easier?
HS: Actually, just like you couldn't have walked around the face of the earth for the last couple of years and not seen that cell phones have grown in popularity unbelievable -- and not only have grown in popularity, but the service has gotten a lot better -- but there's starting to appear a bunch of services for the Web that are wireless services.
AT&T has a thing called Pocket Net, for example, where you actually have Web access through your cell phone. And on some campuses now, people are starting to use wireless laptops. We're sort of experimenting with them a bit here, but it's quite feasible to have a laptop that has a wireless antenna or transmitter on the thing, and you can wander around and you're always connected to the net.
I think that in the future, maybe not next year or maybe not the year after, but very soon, this wireless technology that exists, this whole cell phone kind of thing is going to be combined with these teeny tiny laptops and palmtops so that people will be connected to the Web all the time.
Almost an extreme example of that is a watch made by Seiko. It is a thing called the Seiko Message Watch, and you can go off to Seiko's Website at www.seikousa.com and find out all about it. But what it is, it's a watch that actually can receive information from the Web. For example, you can tell the folks at Seiko that you'd like to get certain stock prices, certain sports scores, weather, whatever, from some website. And what Seiko does is they peel the stuff off the website and transmit it to this watch. See, this watch has an IP address. It also has a telephone number. It also has an e-mail address on the thing. And it really is a watch! Something on your hand that's no bigger than a regular watch and you can glance at it and see what Boeing is doing right now or Disney or whatever stock you own, and you can check the latest sports scores and people can send you e-mail on this thing.
So there are devices that are starting to appear that are Web-connected that are very, very portable. There's not too many things more portable than a watch. GM: The description of the watch is one kind of hardware innovation. Have you been watching any other hardware or systems innovations that you think are going to impact how the Web's used?
HS: There's a bunch of things happening, I think, with hardware and with software. On the hardware side, the cost of memory -- both rotating memory and non-rotating memory chips -- is dropping precipitously. Right now, the cost of hard disk storage is about four cents a megabyte, and the predictions are that in just two to four years, that's going to go to a penny a megabyte. I mean, a penny a megabyte disk storage gets very close to free. Similar things are happening with storage on chips, that is, RAM. So devices having lots and lots of memory are going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and as a result, common, ordinary devices are going to have lots of memory in them.
On the disk storage side, IBM has just announced they have a little laboratory disk, a thing about the size of a poker chip, that has 11,000,000,000 bytes on it. They're able to store 11,000,000,000 bytes per square inch. IBM seems to think that this is going to make wonderful digital film. They'll take one of these little disks, they'll put it inside a camera. You'll be able to take lots of high resolution color pictures with the thing. One of the things that has prevented, I think, digital photography from really taking off is that the pictures are sort of iffy resolution. You can't store many of them. It's really inconvenient. But if you could have a teeny-tiny disk powered by an AA battery that would last for months and you could hold 50 or 100 high resolution color pictures on the thing, that might change things dramatically.
JB: Maybe we'll do that and then download them to our Seiko watch.
HS: The Seiko watch has a fairly low resolution screen that unfortunately only has nine characters on it, so you don't want people sending you wordy e-mail messages either, because looking at them nine characters at a time is kind of laborious.
GM: They'll soon learn how to scroll it.
HS: Right. And again, you would not want to use a Seiko watch to get long messages and things. In fact, the people who make the watches realize that, and so if you call the thing up -- if you dial a Seiko watch's telephone number (which it has), typically what you'll do is after you dial the phone number, you'll just dial two digits. It has these little two-digit codes stored in it, so somebody will look at the thing, and on the little nine-character screen, they'll see a 33 and they'll know that 33 means CALL HOME or whatever that means, rather than you sending long messages. But you could actually send the thing e-mail and you could say CALL HOME, and the watch would receive it and you could see it.
JB: Or PHONE HOME, as in our famous friend, right? GM: I could make a leap of inference from what you've been saying, Howard, that you're not a fan of Net PCs. That you think the cost of memory and disk and so on is dropping fast enough that even though connectivity is important and wonderful, there's no reason to cripple that desktop machine.
HS: Absolutely. That's exactly how I feel. And in fact, it's kind of interesting, Greg. If you look at some of the Sun Net PC's -- Sun makes these Net PC's that are diskless, diskless Net PC's. We've had some Sun people over here, we've talked about these machines, because we try to stay on top of whatever's out there. They quietly said to us, "Oh, by the way, if you really want, we can put disks on those diskless PC's." So these Net PC's are suddenly growing appendages like disks and lots of memory and things that make them sort of not Net PC's, and yet they still have all the disadvantages of Net PC's in that they're totally dependent upon the network for all their software. They don't run a standard operating system like one of Microsoft's or Apple's or anybody's, so you need special browsers, you need special plug-ins, you need special everything. It's a silly idea. If you look at the sales of these things, they're just being sold in little tiny markets as very special purpose devices. They're not having the wide acceptance I think that the manufacturers kind of hoped. JB: What about another appliance that's working on coming in and providing access to the Web but not being a full-fledged PC -- and that's the WebTV. Howard, what are your thoughts on that one?
HS: Well, I think that's a wonderful device. Probably different people have different views on the thing, but I think that thing is the precursor to lots of interesting devices that are going to pop up.
For the folks who don't know what the WebTV is, it's a little box. It's smaller than a VCR, and you sit it next to your TV. One end of it plugs into your TV, the other end plugs into a telephone line. Now, that telephone line one day might be DSL or it might be a cable modem or whatever. But at any rate, it's connected to your TV and it's connected some way to get to the Internet.
And what it does, it's a full-fledged browser, except it displays its output on your TV. So it's a little computer. Well, it's not a computer because you can't do word processing on it and you can't do spreadsheets on it and you can't do general computer stuff, which I think is real positive. I think the idea of the special purpose device that does this one thing extraordinarily well is a wonderful idea. And it does do Web browsing extraordinarily well.
Oh, it also does e-mail as well. The thing has a 1.1 gigabyte hard disk in it. It has lots of memory. All its software is stored on its internal flash memory, and in the middle of the night, what it does, it dials up the WebTV homesite and it checks to see if you have the latest software. And if you don't, it downloads the latest software for you, so you always have the latest browser, you always have the latest e-mail program. You never load them. You never even think about the thing.
So it's a little device that stays up-to-date on its own. And by the way, it costs about $200, maybe $250, if you don't really bargain very hard with the people in the electronics store. So it's a very cheap device that leverages its computing ability without being a computer.
JB: Then in order to run the WebTV, I do need to have a subscription like I have for my cable machine?
HS: Right, you do, Judith, but again, this thing does something very, very cute. Normally, if you get a subscription to anything, any electronic thing, the first thing you do is you take it home. Then you've got to figure out what number to dial. You have a lot of setup. You take this thing home, you plug it into your phone, you plug it into your TV and you turn it on. It dials an 800 number, and then using Caller ID, it figures out where you are. It figures out the cheapest place to call, so they never even tell you what number to dial. You just turn it on. The next thing you know, on your screen is WebTV. That's it. And if that number changes, if they get a place closer or cheaper or they want to download a thing, it dials the number that it thinks is best. It's complete -- plug it in, turn it on. It works, keeps its software up to date, does all the stuff it's supposed to. I think that's the way we'd like gadgets to be.
JB: It sounds like it's really great for a segment of the population that doesn't have any access to technical support of any kind.
HS: Absolutely. It does another nice thing, I think, and this is kind of on a social side. Probably shouldn't get too far into social issues, but a lot of folks who talk to me about the Web are concerned about what their children are doing. They say, "Oh, my children will go off and look at bad things on the Web!" But WebTV, by using your TV as a Web browser, TV's are usually located in very public areas of your house, like your living room or den or whatever. They tend to be less likely to be off in some child's room or something like that. It turns the Web, I think, into a family activity. A child's less likely to look at some sleazy sites if it's in the middle of the living room with people wandering by. I think it does just the right thing for the Web. GM: When you talk about WebTV, lots of people get excited when they first think about it because they say, "Oh, I'll get all the speed I get with my television!" But that doesn't work. What other ways are there that might give you more bandwidth to the home so that we can get to the Websites faster and faster?
HS: That's certainly, true, Greg. If you plug the thing in today, you're probably going to run at 33.3 thousand bits per second. That's sort of the speed of the best modems today. And they're slow, there's no question about that.
But there's a couple things that are happening. The cable companies are offering cable modems that take the speed and push it up to a million and a half bits per second.
And there's another service called DSL, which is Digital Subscriber Line, that a lot of phone companies are just starting to offer. US West is going to be offering this thing in 46 cities this June, so this is going to be spreading around. It's a little more expensive than phone service. It's typically $40 to $70 a month -- somewhere in there -- but the speed of DSL is one and a half megabits all the way up to about eight or nine megabits. So it's very, very fast. The service looks as fast as anything that you'll see sitting in your office connected to Ethernet. The stuff begins to look very nice. Pictures paint in a couple seconds rather than in several minutes on the thing.
(And another neat thing about WebTV is WebTV doesn't really care what you plug it into. If you have DSL or cable modem or whatever, just plug the thing into that and it works like a charm.)
GM: I've got a Media One cable modem. I find there's an added extra feature in that they have a proxy server, and if I am -- as I am in Ann Arbor -- in a community that gets a lot of academic sites, those are by and large on the proxy server and come very quickly because I don't have to access the rest of the Internet.
HS: That's another neat thing that WebTV has considered. They can't count on there being a proxy server out there. I guess they could build one for you. But what they do is that WebTV comes with a 1.1 gigabyte disk and it uses a lot of that disk for cache, so if you keep going back to the same site, you don't have to wait for the thing to reload. It just grabs the images and things out of cache. That 1.1 gig disk also gives you room to store all your e-mail and things like that.
If you think about the fact that you're getting a high-speed computer with a 1.1 gigabyte disk, lots and lots of memory, communication to the Web, browser software, all this kind of junk for about $250, it's kind of amazing. I think it really shows what's happening to the cost of intelligent devices, processors and memory and things like that. This stuff is getting very, very cheap. GM: Which goes back to your earlier comments about the growth of the net. This brings in a whole additional potential audience for commerce and potentially for education.
HS: Absolutely. In the area of education, I think that we've just really scratched the surface here. I don't think we've gone too much, in most places, beyond what was being done in the fifties or sixties here, where in the fifties they brought television sets into schools thinking this was going to revolutionize everything. I think today they're bringing the Web in the classrooms and saying, "This is going to revolutionize everything." I think they've missed the point that we can now build intelligent devices with lots and lots of memory. We can really do incredible stuff with these little silicon chips. We can do a lot more than have students sit around and look at Websites.
JB: Howard, we may want to check our listeners and participants on the conference, if there's anyone with another question for you.
HS: Yes.
JB: Is there anyone online who has a question for Howard?
HS: Not yet. JB: All right, we'll hold on. Howard, let's go on. Given all these new capabilities, what are some of the things that you see in the Web future? If we're going to have much wider bandwidth access and the access anywhere, anytime, what types of these things do you really see happening out there?
HS: For one, I see computers as we know them disappearing, and I think if you look at a gadget like the WebTV, the WebTV is not a computer. It doesn't try to do every possible thing. It doesn't try to be a word processor and a financial planner and all this kind of stuff. It does this one little thing.
We couldn't afford to do that before. In the past, with memory and processors so expensive, if we built one of these things, we had to use it for 27 different things. Otherwise, economically, it wasn't feasible. But today, if you wander into a place and you want to buy a birthday card for somebody, you might discover that you can get some of these cards that when you open them, they play music or something like that. You couldn't have done that 20 years ago. That would have been impossibly expensive. You couldn't have afforded -- you couldn't even have built the thing. But today, somebody can think of putting in a card that costs a couple dollars a couple memory chips, something that produces sound, that kind of thing.
So I think what we're going to do is we're going to see computers kind of disappear into the woodwork. They're sort of doing that already. Anybody who drives around in a car today realizes (or should realize) that your car's completely controlled by a bunch of computers. You're really not in control of your car anymore. If anybody has an automatic transmission kind of car, as I do, you've probably noticed there's those little extra gears on the thing, those little things that say 1-2-3 or 1 and 2. You're probably told in your manual, don't shift into the 1 and 2 things if you're going too fast because your whole transmission will grind itself to smithereens. In my car, I get no such warning. It says, "Do whatever you want." What happens is when I move that little shift lever around, it's not connected to the transmission, it's connected to a computer. That's probably the way it is in your car, too, Judith. I can be driving at 90 and I can shift into 2 and nothing will happen because the little computer is going to sit there and say, "Howard's driving too fast. I don't think I'll do this."
GM: Someone on the telephone has got music playing in the background and we're picking it up on the broadcast.
HS: Sounds like somebody's got us on hold.
JB: Goodness, that might be the problem. GM: We might just have to bear with it for a few minutes.
Howard, I'm curious. Some of the technical advances that we've seen recently, what percentage would you say is vital to the growth of the American public as a society and what percentage would you say is frivolous use of a very valuable tool?
HS: What do you mean by a very valuable tool?
GM: Well, we talk about these are the Internet and there are several sites on the Internet that you can go to and find very important information very quickly that can really make a difference in your day-to-day routine. Then there's about 100,000,000 sites out there that are the various fan clubs and picture pages and that type of thing. It upsets me if I see a lot of people using a very valuable resource and kind of wasting it, and that having kind of an impact on society in general. I was wondering what your comment on that would be.
HS: I guess I don't think I can figure out which things are good and bad and wasted and useful. I think of that when I walk into a bookstore or a large library. Here at Princeton, we have about 6,000,000 in the library. Probably 90% of that stuff is stuff I would never read. It's to me dry as dust, not interesting, dull, if it disappeared, I wouldn't notice, that kind of thing. But somebody down the hall would probably have a different 10% of the library that they would think is interesting. I guess I think that stuff out there on the Web or in the libraries that's just entertaining -- I mean, I don't read People magazine because it's just not the kind of thing I read, but I think that people who want to read that, that's just fine. It serves a purpose for them.
So I don't think that there is stuff on the Web that is useless or that is trivial or that is silly. I just think that there is stuff on the Web that I don't have any interest in. But I'm happy to have it all out there. GM: Howard, we're getting a series of folks sending us questions via e-mail. Let me just take them in order.
The first one is from Bob Naples, and he says, How can the Internet assist university departments that counsel individual students, aside from FAQs and scheduling software? What are multimedia and Internet programs that improve services such as psychological services, student programming advisement, dean of students and so on?
HS: Well, probably the best example of that is something that's being carried on the Web at Cornell University, something called Uncle Ezra. If there are folks on the line that don't know about Uncle Ezra, it's something really worthwhile to go out and look at.
What it is, it uses the Web technology to offer counseling services (even though human beings are really the people that offer the counseling services). Basically, what happens is that students anywhere anonymously can go off and ask questions on a number of topics related to problems they're having. It might be related to personal relationships or feelings of helpless or depression or whatever. And they ask these questions anonymously online, and then a very nice thing that happens is their answers and their questions are published online on the Web.
This has a hundred neat effects. We could actually do a whole hour on how neat this kind of thing is and all the benefits of this kind of thing. But in a couple sentences, a lot of people who would never go to a counselor are willing to sit there and type their questions in. Lots and lots of folks get to see questions and answers that relate to problems that they're having, even though they never would have taken the trouble to ask those questions.
So there's some nice things that are going on out there. I think that if Bob Naples is looking for some kind of software that does counseling -- I don't know. I think that's something that probably ought to be done by a human being. But here, it's getting, I think, a real big assist from the technology, even though the technology doesn't do the whole job. GM: Another question, from Kevin Loughey: "I visit a lot of Web pages now where the images are designed for a minimum 800 x 600 resolution. How well do these sites work with the limited size television screens using WebTV, which cannot show even standard 640 x 480? I see the lack of screen resolution for text as a main WebTV limitation."
HS: Actually, it's not a real problem at all because Websites are built using primarily HTML and it's the Web browser that decides what that's going to look like. So you put a bunch of text up, and if you have a good Web browser and the Web browser realizes it's displaying on a TV -- as WebTV does -- it does a beautiful job on text. It was one of the things I was most concerned about when I first looked at the thing. I knew it was going to look awful. It looks beautiful! Kevin ought to go into one of the stores that's selling WebTV and look at a TV screen, even the little 19 inch TV screen. I think he'll be pleasantly surprised. GM: And next question is from Jay Wadley: "What do you think the impact of high speed hardware such as fiber optics and fast Ethernet will be on the Internet's interactivity?"
HS: There's already a lot of interactivity on the thing, and I think it's going to actually have a bigger impact on people downloading pictures and downloading things like Java applets and things like that, which take a long, long time to download. Perhaps Jay's thinking about these Java applets which take forever to download. I think it's just going to encourage people to do this more and more.
But anybody designing a webpage unfortunately has to be aware of the fact that there's a mixed bag in terms of hardware out there. When we design a website, we know that there are people using a previous version of the browser. There's people at home who have relatively slow speed. There's people who have color screens, not color screens, big screens, small screens, every different resolution. It's a real challenge for a Web designer, the fact that the hardware's not homogeneous. JB: Howard, maybe this might be a time for commenting on the speech recognition software development. Will that be impacted by this high speed hardware?
HS: I think that certainly the fact that processing speeds are getting much, much faster. Today, you can buy a machine that goes about 300 megaHerz, and a year from now, you'll be able to buy things that go at 500 megaHerz, and IBM's demonstrated things that go twice as fast as that. That is, 1,000 megaHerz. And there's faster things on the drawing boards here. That does make real-time speech recognition possible and quite useful. It also potentially makes real time translation possible, so folks who speak French may actually someday be able to speak to folks who speak English. JB: Howard, I think our time is almost up. It has gone so fast today. Do you want to have any final comment, perhaps, about the future of the Web or a comment on what's going to happen to what browser people might be using in the future?
HS: I don't think people are going to be using any browser in the future, Judith. I think that browsers are going to disappear. They're going to be buried inside applications so you're not going to see them.
The browsers and going to disappear first. Then a little bit later, computers are going to disappear, too. They're going to be buried in other things. I would just like to remind users once more that there's a URL related to this thing at www.princeton.edu/~howard/slides/future.htm, where you can pick up some of the topics that we failed to cover over here. And I believe that URL is on the CREN Website. JB: Okay. Howard, perhaps we can close with one final question that we got online from Terry Calhoun, and it says, "When Howard looks out three to five years in the future, what kind of broad changes do you see in the current makeup of who provides higher education? Do you really see a serious challenge to current institutions by folks in the corporate world?"
HS: Absolutely, and it's starting to happen right now. I think that universities are really challenged. If you want to look at somebody who does a really fine job of this, you ought to go off to Disney and look at the Disney Institute and look at some of the wonderful things they're doing down there. And they're certainly not the only company that's doing that kind of thing.
JB: Greg, do you have any other questions on your end?
GM: I'm happy where we are. If we had another hour, we could just keep moving.
HS: I think that we have about three different topics that we could spend another hour on.
JB: That's right. Let me thank everyone for being here today, and particularly all of our call-in guests as well as all of our questions. If you do have other follow-up questions, you can in fact send them to utw@cren.net.
This is the last of our series of the UTW for this spring, but tomorrow, I'd like to invite you to a session on network security featuring Mark Bruhn from the University of Indiana. That session is a half hour later than today's session, at 3:00 PM EST.
I'd like to thank everyone for making this possible today: the board of CREN, Corporation for Research in Educational Networking; our guest expert, Howard Strauss from Princeton; Greg Marks at MERIT; C.L. Phillips at UM Online for the audio encoding; and all of you with us again on the phone and on the Web. You were here because it's time.
'Bye, Howard.
HS: 'Bye, Judith.
JB: 'Bye, Greg.
GM: 'Bye-bye.
JB: Take care, all. Thank you.
