The internet has filled my head with more crap than I care to admit, but it has also been a great source for useful information as well as a great source for entertainment.  While I get traditional entertainment like most folks from Netflix or other providers, it also provides non-traditional (dare I say new?) forms of entertainment, such as the “I can’t believe what people do” type of entertainment.  This is one of those moments…

While reading an article about the future of education and it’s technological improvements and how investors were looking at new ways for our kids to learn, one thoughtful commentor felt it necessary to talk about his own experience in education:

Another reason to hate facebook...

If we could just get over this fundamental problem of not being able to get rich off of educating our children, this business would really take off…

While I applaud your openness in being a “for profit guy” and declaring that “people are not willing to pay a subscription for internet content” I don’t think these are the main reasons you aren’t rich yet.  Certain levels of education have no place to accommodate a for-profit-person and I shudder to think of a business initiative to stake a claim in this space involving our children.  How would you feel if all of the teachers at your kid’s schools (assuming you have them) were “for profit” people?  You are hardly hobbling along like a teacher, you appear to be trying to get rich doing what teachers are doing but not actually interested in the teaching part (you make no mention of being a teacher, so I am only left with your self description as a for profit guy).  You want to get rich doing something that everyone is generally expected to participate in, and somehow feel you are doing the same thing that teachers are doing.  You, as an entrepreneur and potential exploiter of information, are hardly the same undervalued resource that our teachers and faculty are in primary education.  In fact I am quite certain the value of your contribution to education is made apparent by the amount of money you have made from said contribution to date, and to associate yourself with those folks (assuming you are not a teacher yourself) is kind of an insult to teachers.  It is not prudent to try and monetize the education of our children, and hasn’t been for hundreds of years.  Education does not “struggle” or even aspire to being a “for profit business opportunity” except at a certain level, which I will explain now.

Since you’ve wasted 15 years on this “problem” let me help you understand.  This fundamental problem of people not wishing to pay for knowledge has nothing to do with you or your desire to profit from information that is free and that you are trying to sell, it has everything to do with the age of your target demographic and the level of education you are attempting to peddle.  Society at large has determined that in order for said society to improve, it must give a certain amount of information away for free to ensure progress.  Education itself is not valuable, but educated people are, so it is fruitful for society to create as many educated people as possible.  There are costs associated with teachers, public schools, and facilities to educate children, and those don’t generally get over funded, because as a society we aspire to make a certain level of education as accessible as possible and in most cases this means that the closer it costs to free, the more likely we will have educated people.  That’s why most endeavors for educating children don’t involve profitable business models, but people who actually care about making as many of our children as smart and educated as possible and getting paid and making a living doing so is just an added benefit of someone’s passion for helping to create a better society.  The day people stop caring about educating our children, is the day that you can swoop in and make your millions.

There is an age and level of information that we have established thresholds for charging for information and that age is adult hood and that level of information is at colleges or universities.  There are so many private and public institutions of higher learning, operating as businesses, making dollars hand over fist, that I could write about them non-stop.  It literally includes every institution by name that ends in College, University, or Institute.  They make millions every year and has even become a topic of conversation as of this writing (the rising costs of student loans) that might even prove that this threshold is rising still.

All that being said, I was thoroughly entertained by your commentary, and I recognize that people are certainly “ambitious” enough to try and profit off of anything, so in your endeavor, I wish you good luck and offer these helpful tips:

1. Target the demographic that is actually willing and able to pay for education.  Start an online university, don’t target kids who literally don’t want to learn in the first place.  Imagine if cigarettes made you puke and were not addictive at all.  You are basically selling the same thing, so I suggest a new target market.
2. Hire a web designer.  I assume that there is a certain amount of cost to building an education website… SME’s, instructors, course content, server hosting, payment processing, and so on, but honestly that doesn’t add up to $500,000 even over 15 years.  And by looking at your website, it is stuck with the same 1997 design brainstormed during the beta days.  Someone is walking around with $400,000 in their pocket and you are clearly not getting your money’s worth.

Kidport.com... the same since 1997. No seriously, get a web designer.

The point of this story is two fold:

One, people are still trying to get rich any way they can, but have the balls to actually complain about why they are not able to monetize fundamental pieces of our evolving society.  And two, it is good to see technology advancements in education (from the article, not the commentor) that will ensure that we are still thinking of each other and that for the most part, most people want to make the world a better place.

~jookyone

Most Apple consumers are just regular folk who are just happy to be able to use technology without knowing how to actually use technology.  Apple is ahead of everyone in user experience and ease of use, hands down.  The dumbest person I know can pick up an iOS device and do something with it.  I am talking about dumb-as-a-rock, knuckle-dragging, ate-paint-as-a-kid, dropped-on-their-head dumb people… who can pick up an iOS device and just use it.   There is no floor as to how dumb you can be and still use an iOS device… It’s amazing!

This is not a knock on the device or Apple’s approach, I happen to think it is fantastic and changed mobile device development rapidly for the better (their skinning of Unix only moderately on laptops and desktops), but what it also did was lower the bar for anyone who can apparently consider themselves “technical.”  This new breed of “technical” people, can be found buying gadgets by the droves, texting, tweeting, media sharing, social networking, and computing, apparently also having a stranglehold on the blogosphere, and the majority of media outlets, because the perception of HTML5 as the savior of the web and our gadgets is now in full force.

According to indeed.com, the trend of the word “HTML5″ in job postings has risen over 250,000% since approximately April 2010 when Steve Jobs wrote his now infamous “Thoughts on Flash” and I have to at least stop in the middle of this rant to laugh… all this talk on open standards prompts me to want a new open standard for defining who is even allowed to speak, write, blog, or otherwise even mention technology.  People with no technical skill whatsoever are attempting to drive what technology should be used on my wonderful gadgets and computers (languages, platforms, OSs) and it needs to come to a halt.  There should be a license or something that must be acquired to speak on such topics… if I started a blog giving medical advice, I’d be thrown in jail, so given the not-so-dire consequences of poor technical blogs, there is at least grounds for community service and a gag order.

So what’s so magical about HTML5?  HTML5  has added barely a handful of tags on top of the HTML4 specification… but the most important features at the center of the hype are the Video and Canvas tags… two. new. tags. It only took them 15 years to create these, and still no two browsers can render the old ones the same.  The majority of the rest of the hype really lies in CSS3 which is it’s own completely separate specification and its own set of standards.   The primary scripting language (JavaScript) for marrying these two technologies together REMAINS UNCHANGED.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, there has been a big battle for the last 5 years between two camps, on whether JavaScript should evolve or not according to the ECMAScript standards.  It’s these types of battles, with the constituents not working on behalf of users, but merely to capture more of the market (within their own interests), that make HTML and the open web a nightmare for developers.  And it is a farce that these standards are being driven by concerned constituents working on behalf of developers and users, who are expecting to both create and consume brilliant and timely content.

The “new JavaScript” (ECMAScript Harmony, formerly ECMAScript 4) was planned for the following upgrades as early as 2007:

• Classes
• A module system
• Optional type annotations and static typing, probably using a structural type system
• Generators and iterators
• Destructuring assignment
• Algebraic data types

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft among others are actively lobbying against this progression, stating that an incompatible upgrade to the scripting standards would effectively “break the web” as we know it.  When the single application platform commonly known as “The Browser” becomes too powerful, then Microsoft and larger traditional software manufacturers certainly stand to lose something, but I can only surmise that Google and Yahoo fear either a significant infrastructure cost to upgrade their services or some other sinister money making pool that I cannot imagine.  Whatever it is, it revolves around money.  Even Microsoft with their MetroUI landing in Windows 8 is now plugin free and “HTML5 only.”  What they don’t tell you is that you will also have to use HTML5 tags that will only be compatible with Microsoft IE based renderers to make it work there.  Apple does the same thing on their HTML5 showcase, only using webkit versions of standards based tags that have yet to be solidified in the HTML5 standard… which won’t be “final” until 2022, so don’t hold your breath, even if Apple tells you to.

Be that as it may, I am a scientist, and as a developer, I had to dive back in to the magical world of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 that Steve Jobs described, because last I checked, HTML4, JavaScript, and CSS were a pathetic nightmare of browser inconsistencies, massive text downloads from the crap-ton of AJAX/JavaScript/CSS files required to make simple things happen.  It does keep many people gainfully employed though, so in these times it is hard to argue for efficiency in employment and labor.

I chose to start my exploration at www.chromeexperiments.com which mostly explores Canvas, since this is the “Flash Killer” that Steve Jobs was emphatically steering us towards.  Low and behold, most of the stuff there doesn’t work in any of my latest browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE).  After an hour or so finding settings to tweak my browser to even display this wonderful content, I am greeted with simple visualizations that Flash has been doing for a decade, only now this visualization is using 200 to 600 megabytes of RAM and 50% to 80% of my CPU.  This on a state of the art QuadCore CPU, Nvidia 570GTX (new as of July 2011), with 8GB of RAM.  My father would have made a fortune with this kind of computing power using better old school programming practices.  All to get rid of a plugin that I can choose to download or not.  Even when plugin technology was obnoxious to deal with (jumping around to websites to get Flash, Real Player, Java for Applets, Quicktime, Google Earth Plugin, and a few others) content made it worth the trip in most cases, and of those plugin technologies, Flash content seems to be the most compelling based on its success.  Why would anyone have even installed it, if what they wanted to view wasn’t compelling enough to get thru the hoops?  Flash would have died years ago, but games, video, and applications kept people going to the plugin page.  Speaking of which, no mention of the useless Quicktime plugin by Apple… though if you visit the HTML5 showcase on a Windows machine, it prompts you to install the Quicktime Plugin.  What a joke.

So now the real joke is on me as a developer of rich content, since  I will likely get the opportunity to devolve to a lower and less powerful programming language to stay “current” and the hope of things conforming to OOP practices will be lost in a sea of browser incompatibilities, massive amounts of non-standard text file collections (without classes and packages, JavaScript and CSS is pretty much a clusterfunk), and horrible programming practices.  And the even bigger joke is on users who for the next 3-5 years can sit around and wait or use current and superior plugin technology (which ultimately will likely stick around), and waste the web as a giant text document with pictures, or suffer through painfully inefficient entertainment and rich experiences where they can finally experience resource hogging unilaterally on all of their new devices at tremendous new levels without ever installing a plugin.  And the final joke is on the people of the IT world, who will, without any thanks or gratitude, support this giant pile of “beta testing” as large companies and groups of mega-corporations jockey for something that gives them the lions share of monopolizing our use of the web.

~jookyone