The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
Tim Berners-LeeRead
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the transformative impact of technology, particularly how we've evolved in accessing information quickly and the potential future changes.
Tim Berners-Lee reflects on the profound changes brought about by the advent of powerful web search engines, illustrating how they revolutionized the way we access information. He suggests that while the future advancements will differ, they will also have a similarly significant impact on our lives, encouraging us to anticipate and adapt to new technological shifts.
In practice
During a presentation on the impact of technology in education, this quote can highlight the importance of adapting to new tools.
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.
The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.
Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.
Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?
Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.
There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.
There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.
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