Joanna Goode
ED 253A
April 9, 2001

Notes on Chapters 4 & 5 of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead

Chapter 4: Information Appliances and Applications

• Human nature to convert synchronous information into asynchronous form

• Before invention of writing, people needed to be in presence of a speaker
• Gates anticipates television will remain synchronous for the original broadcast, but will be available for viewing anytime after then

• Discussion of "killer applications"

• Edison General Electric Company in 1878
• WordStar, VisiCalc, and dBase made the first PCs popular
• Macintosh’s killer applications were Word and Excel

• Future possibilities for technology

• High end telephones with yellow page advertising on a screen
• Cellular phones and pagers will become more powerful
• Set-top boxes to connect TV sets to networks
• Digital forms of HDTV
• Flat panel displays for TVs and PCs
• Phones will have screens and cameras and transmit live video
• Notebooks will decrease in size until they’re the size of a table of paper
• Wallet PC — email, faxes, Internet, games, digital money, with voiceprints or fingerprints for security, GPS, restaurant, campground information; precursors are PDAs (personal digital assistants)
• Kiosks accessing the Internet will be at malls, airports, office buildings
• Voice recognition software, lip reading software for videoconferencing
• Pen-based computers will recognize handwriting
• Able to listen to any song, anywhere, anytime
• Share centralized medical records
• Automatically pay routine bills

• Table of contents and indexes have become popular

• Yahoo offers table of contents as researchers catalog pages constantly
• AltaVista offers index of the Web’s contents, no order of categories

• Primary selection techniques

1. Queries — ask wide range of questions and get answers
2. Filters — standing queries, filters information that matches your interests
3. Spatial navigation — enables you to interact with a visual model of a real or make-believe world
4. Links (hyperlinks) — let users jump from one informational place to another
5. Agents — allows you to be in dialogue with a program that behaves to some degree like a person; "social user interface"

• Privacy and security measures

• Messages are encrypted so that only the intended recipient will be able to decipher it
• Allows secure financial transactions
• One-way functions & public key encryption - ex. Prime numbers

Chapter 5 — From Internet to Highway

• Information Highway doesn’t exist
  
  
• Internet is precursor to the ultimate global network
• Today’s Internet is primarily narrowband interactive network
• In the future, broadband interactive network will create this highway
• Nearly all residential connections are narrowband, using modems
• Except in business districts and other areas where there is a high density of people willing to pay for the broadband service, broadband networks won’t be widespread for a number of years
• Price of connecting a TV or PC in a US home is $1200
• After Internet, it became clear PCs would have the interactive network and then later TVs
• Industry finally realized people would pay for connectivity; making a future for midband connections
• The first hacker violated the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal offense
• "As bandwidth increases and computer processors get faster, network communications will include more video, which — unfortunately or not — will do always with the social, racial, and gender blindness that text-only exchanges permit
• Bulletin boards allow public conversation

 

• Payment for the Internet
  
  
  • To achieve full potential, Internet needs to reserve bandwidth with a quality of service guarantee
  • People will have to pay small price for any communication with a quality of service guarantee
  • Currently, flat monthly rate for internet service providers
  • Internet has damaged notion that communication is paid for by time and distance
  • May 1996 trade group representing small and medium sized telephone companies asked petitioned FCC to regulate and tax the sale of software and hardware products that enable the Internet to be used for long distance services
  • If congestion on the Internet becomes a problem one solution is to make everybody pay a higher flat rate, or pay by metering time or distance or number of bits transmitted
  • Information has become free, creating a large interactive content industry in which almost nobody makes any money
  • We’ll see great deal of content offered at low prices (3 cents an article)
  • Also be local, wireless networks which will be free as long as you are in a certain geographical area
  • ADSL — asymmetrical digital subscriber line — offers more bandwidth into the home
  • ISDN — integrated services digital network — primary phone company approach
  • Coaxial cables — much higher bandwidth potential than standard phone wires; though all cable modems in a neighborhood will compete for a share of the bandwidth
  • Unclear how long it will take for millions of people to have broadband connections to the Internet
  • Millions of homes must be connected to justify investment of array of interactive broadband content and applications aimed at home will be developed
  • Current demand encourages phone and cable companies to invest in midband access to the Internet for their residential customers

1. How accurate were Bill Gates’ predictions of future technology?
2. Will the Internet continue to be free or will Gates’ views of paying for content come true?
3. How does Bill Gates’ discussions of the possibilities of the Internet empower people rather than corporations? Does it?
4. Does Bill Gates’ vision of the future inhibit or promote democracy?
5. What are the social implications for this takeover by the Internet on Western Civilization?
6. How does Bill Gates’ deal with the Digital Divide? Does he?