cyberspace and time dot com is the future of computing

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Shame Boy: Mar 2, 2010

http://cyberspaceandtime.com/

what the hell is this

quote:

This by far is the most common question asked, and I have to say that the answer to that comes with a bit of a struggle for me. I find it a challenge even when I know my audience. I don't know whom will be reading this, and it is impossible for me to know what they / you already know, but I will do my best to be clear and as precise as possible.

In short, this website is an embed player to some, while it's a nostalgic operating system themed site to others. This place plays and organizes Youtube embeds for a large number of guests that land here, while at the same time, there has been a growing number of people that do click on things to explore, and they do find more.

As for me the creator of it, it is proof of concept, an experiment in interface building. The website serves to showcases a type of project that my custom built web server, editor and language can build. Look to appendix 1) to view some photos and a video demonstrating the editor and web server of which I'm speaking of.

Now I will attempt a more in-depth technical explanation; To start with, I would like to impress the fact that many of features found here are unique, not found anywhere else on the web. As an example of that; Thinking back to all the pages you visited, have you ever seen a window auto scrolling on its own? If so, then how about two windows auto scrolling at the same time while one is being dragged around? Perhaps that is not the most practical example to begin with, but it does serves to demonstrate something that easily performs well here, and yet, basically impossible to do on any other site. Another example of a unique feature is the screen capture button found in the "Ctrl Menu". I am certain that you never seen an option like that offered anywhere else, except maybe with the assistance of an installed browser plugin. As a final mention, how about resizable windows in general? I personally have only seen a few places that offer emulated windows at all, and those few exceptions were always limited, very rarely allowing them to resize. There is more that probably should be said, but I'll leave it at that.

One key difference between this site and others (and the reason why it's an experiment) is the fact that this website is not using HTML and CSS predominantly, but instead, it is using a newer technology called WebGL. This GL (graphic library) tech is normally used for video games, almost never for applications. I am using the Z coordinate in the 3D/XYZ as the z-Index order of the windows and apps. Rendering interfaces this way means I can take advantage of hardware acceleration coming from video cards. So in a real sense, this interface platform that I'm developing is a game engine which is emulating an event driven application layer.

The platform is a hybrid of two normally separated worlds. It is intertwining the graphical world of WebGL and games with the world of single threaded HTML and iframes. Allow me to unpack that with a little more specificity. Interface elements found in the "Web Portal" program (and pop-up menus) are CPU bound because they utilize regular HTML, but everything else on webpage is GPU bound video game graphics. When things are all working according to plan, the website interface should runs butter smooth. And again, that is because the site utilizes both (CPU & GPU) core computer parts simultaneously.

For performance reasons related to hosting for a massive audience from a single PC, I have limited the number of images used, and there's next to zero 3rd party scripts here. Short the video thumbnails which are coming from Youtube, what you're seeing is a website that doesn't rely on images to impress, but instead, custom drawings built with source code.

Look to appendix 2) to see this website tested for performance, and also what the chat server can do.

I hope that explains a few general things with also some added detail for those that might be technically inclined enough to understand it.