Early in the next millenium your right and left cuff links or ear rings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone wont ring indiscriminately; it will recieve, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. (p.6)
While we are undoubtedly kin an information age, most information is delivered to us in the form of atoms: newspapers, magazines, and books. (p.11)
The answer lies in creating computiers to filter, sort, prioritize, and manage multimedia on our belhalf -- computers that read newspapers and look at television for us, and act as editors when we ask them to. (P.20)
Recent research results indicate that we are close to being able to delivber 1,000 billion bits per second. This means that a fiber the size of a human hair can deliver every issue ever made of the Wall Street Journal in less than one second. Transmitting data at that speed, a fiber can deliver a million channles of televisioin concurrently -- roughly two hundred thousand times faster than twisted pair. That is a big jump. And mind you, I am talking of a single fiber, so if you want more, you just make more. It is, after all just sand. (p.23)
...the information currently coming through the ground (read, wires) will come in the future through the ether, and the reverse. (p.24)
Copyright laws say that if you summarize material, that summary is your intellectual property. I dougt that lawmakers ever considerted the idea of abstracting being done by an inanimate entity or robo-pirates. (p.60)
The information industry will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway. The customers will be peopel and their computer agents. Is the digital marketplace real? Yes, but only if the interface between people and their computers imporves to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being. (p.85)
At home I used to have a very intelligent VR with near perfect voice recognition and knowledge of me. I could ask it to record programs by name, and in some cases, even assume it would do so automatically, without my asking. Then, all of a sudden, my son went to college. (p.91)
The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages. A computer should know the difference between your saying "Kissinger" and "kissing her," not because it can find the small acoustice difference, but because it can understand the meaning. That's good interface design. (p.92)
I am constantly asked why I wear my reading glasses when I eat, because I obiviously do not need glasses to see my food or fork. My answer is simply that the food tastes better when I wear glasses. Seeing the food clearly is part of a meal's quality. Looking and feeling add to each other. (p.125)