[emacsen]

A little context on the author is in order.

His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.

In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.

Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.

[jacquesm]

> Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website.

From a miniature robotic warehouse under his house, no less:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-k...

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Heh. Funny thing is I had absolutely no idea who he was until you mentioned the Klein bottle thing. Then a little light bulb went off in my head. I guess my brain filed him away as "Klein bottle guy" at some point in the past. Funny how the brain works sometimes.

[perlpimp]

Internet is dead, web with interface galore reigns supreme with multitude of interfaces all incomprehensible to single point of use of programs. Google news reader was killed, after google bought dejanews turned it into rarely visited place. having a low cost application that can talks over protocols promoted democracy among client selection and democracy of choice that you don't have to learn new as you move between infromation spaces. Web is a great expression medium but a terrible information aggregator and information consumtion source. So it has gotten quite a bit worse since Cliff wrote the article.