Apples actual response to the Flash issue

[Randall Reetz]

OK, Ian, I promised I would respond and here goes.  Sorry I didn't before, I had assumed your questions were rhetorical.

When I say that software hasn't changed I mean to say that it hasn't jumped qualitative categories.  We are still living in a world where computing exists as pre-written and compiled software that is blindly executed by machines and stacked foundational code that has no idea what it is processing, can only process linearly, all semantics have been stripped, it doesn't learn from experience or react to context unless this too has been pre-codified and frozen in binary or byte code, etc. etc etc.  Hardware has been souped up.  So our little wrote tricks can be made more elaborate within the substantial confines mentioned.  These same in-paradigm restrictions apply to both the software users slog through and the software we use to write software.

As a result, these very plastic machines with mercurial potential are reduced to simple players that react to user interrupts.  They are sequencing systems, not unlike the lead type setting racks of Guttenburg-era printing presses.  Sure we have taught them some interesting seeming tricks – if you can represent something as digital media, be it sound, video, multi-dimentional graph space, markup – our sequencer doesn't know enough to care.

Current processors are capable of 6.5 million instructions per second but are used less than a billionth of available cycles by the standard users running standard software.    The current paradigm absolutely abhors processor access not initiated by user input.  But even if it had the inclination to get some work down on its own… what would it do?  It doesn't know anything about anything so deciding what to do as the day progresses is impossible.

As regards photo editing software, anyone aware of the history of image processing will recognize that most of the stuff seen in photoshop and other programs was proposed and executed on systems long before some guys in france democratized these algorithms for consumer use and had their code acquired by adobe.  It used to be called array arithmetic and applied smoothly to images divided up into a grid of pixels.  None of these systems "see" an image for its content except as an array of numbers that can be crunched sequentially like a spread sheet.

It was only when object recognition concepts were applied to photos that any kind of compositional grammar could be extracted from an image and compared as parts to other images similarly decomposed.  This is a form of semantic processing and has its parallels in other media like text parsers and sound analysis software.

Semantics opens the door to the building of systems that "understand" the content they process.  That is the promised second revolution in computation that really hasn't seen any practical light of day as of yet.  Data mining really isn't semantically mindful, simply uses statistical reduction mechanisms to guess at the existence of the location of pattern ( a good first step but missing the grammatical hierarchy necessary to work towards a self optimized and domain independent ability to detect and represent salience in the stacked grammar that makes up any complex system.

Such systems will need to work all of the time.  ALL OF THE TIME!  Only pausing momentarily to pay attention to our interactions as needed.  Once they are running, these systems will subsume all of the manual activity we have been made to perform to this day.  Think "fly by wire" for processing.  Gone is the need to discreetly encode every single bit in exactly the only possible sequence.  We simply wont be able to know what bits are being processed, who or what made them, and more importantly, we won't have to care.

What it means is the difference between writing a letter and our computer interceding by understanding the meta-intent of the wrote and inefficient processes we engage in today – what are letters for?  What resources is this user or entity after and why?  Who has those resources?  Whom of those who have the desired resources need something that we might have in exchange?  How are the vectors of intent among all entities entangled and grouped and how can our systems work towards the optimization of this global intent matrix?

So, when I use the word "revisionist" I am calling attention to the old sheep dressed up in new clothing but still being sheep.  Software feature creep is not really evolving software.  As the good programmers at REV know, most of the work to maintain a product is incurred just keeping current of changes in the OS substrate on which they run.  This rarely results in qualitative paradigm jumps.

That the jump is so long in coming is understandable.  It is easy to send a punch card through a machine and have it react accordingly every time.  The jump from wrote execution of static code to self aware semantically self optimized pattern engines is a big big big jump.  But it isn't as big as it might at first seem.  It is happening.  It will happen.  And computing will finally result in the kind of substantial increase in productivity that its expense requires.

Randall Reetz


On May 2, 2010, at 12:32 PM, Ian Wood wrote:

> 
> On 2 May 2010, at 20:13, Randall Lee Reetz wrote:
> 
>> So, how about some content?  A substantive rebuttal?  Putting your ideas out there for all to see?
> 
> How about replying to direct questions asked of you, for instance why facial recognition is revolutionary but content-aware fill isn't? Or why the examples of things facial recognition is being used for *now* in consumer products is 'Almost nothing'.
> 
> It would also be useful if you could explain what you mean by revisionist applications. I *assume* you are talking about apps that are evolutionary rather than revolutionary in how they change what people do with them, but it's not clear and 'revisionist' has some very specific connotations.
> 
> Ian
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