Subject: Information Overload == Lack of Knowledge

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 07:44:14 +0200 (IST)

Information is growing at a dizzying rate. However, knowledge, which is
information that is of actual use is growing much more slowly. The
Internet is filled with useless pieces of information. Finding something
of there that could prove useful is much harder.

I remember I was looking for a nice image previewer, so I went over the
appropriate Freshmeat category one by one. I found several ones whose
architecture was not suitable, some that were badly designed or could not
be configured to suit my needs, and others that were completely
irrelevant. Than I found GImageView, which was a superior image viewer for
Gtk+, which was auto-confisicated, could be built as an RPM and could be
configured in just the way I wanted.

GImageView was the category killer and was the only piece of knowledge in
the entire Freshmeat category. I bet a lot of effort was placed into it.

You many time visit developers homepage and see a software section with
lots of small hacks they wrote. Usually, they are of no value except for
those that originated them. There are at least 30 presentation tools out
there, and  an experienced Perl hacker can write one to suit his particular
whims in a matter of days. (I know Shlomo Yona, Reuven Lerner, Gabor Szabo
and I wrote). Whether it may be of use to others is a different question.

ESR describes his work on fetchmail in CatB very vividly. He essentially
found a lot of tools that could roughly do what he needed, and then took
one and invested so much work on it that it became the "category killer".
Something that the other alternatives were automatically discarded. A
category killer is knowledge, while a simple perl script to fetch mail
using pop is a relatively useless piece of information.

My father is a bio-technologist and as such has to go over a lot of
patents to look for prior art and stuff like that. There are many patents
out there - most of them contain very little knowledge. The percentage of
patents that proved useful to their originators is very small.

He recently told me that one of the executives of his comapny goes over
the employees E-mails. I would not have done it if I were him. Not only
because I value their privacy (which I do), but because it would overload
me with information. Perfectly useless one.

Reading all the comments of a Slashdot article is something that I usually
consider to be getting a lot of useless information. Sometimes, when the
topic interest me I do that, to still get the little information there is
there. Otherwise, I go over the comments rated 4 or 5, and sometimes just
read the entry in the front page.

In my time, I strive to gain knowledge and create knowledge. I don't have
time for gaining a bootload of useless information.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

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From: guy keren <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 10:40:59 +0200 (IST)

out of memory - too many buzzwords.
stack overflow.
abort....