>I wonder how non-technical people not knowledgeable about crontab and scripting deal with such things?
I don't know without knowing the contents of his crontab. I can't honestly think how using cron could help you become more stream-centric. I suspect he's using the wrong tool for the job.
I think the problem with his theory is that he is thinking of the desktop as a single entity. He thinks the _desktop_ should evolve to support streams better. That's a mistake.
The desktop is just a bunch of applications co-existing. Some programs have a document-centric interface because they deal with documents. Others have evolved an interface suited to the streams they deal with. MSN, IRC, RSS aggregators come to mind. I don't think there's more to it.
I agree that people are using streams more than before but I'm not sure of the implications of this fact.
I think it's less about people using streams more (though I think that is true) and more a representation of what is happening to information.
In the document (or batch) mode of interaction, you have full knowledge of some set of content. In stream mode, you only know what's happening right now in the stream and what has happened in the past. You don't know what you don't know. Traditional web form submission seems very document/batch oriented. The RIAs being developed are more stream like.
I think there are some fundamental information concepts going on here. We've been treating information like it's a static set, but in reality it's more like a continuous movement of data. At any split second in time, there may be a static representation for some information. It's almost as though every transaction in a relational database is like a single frame in a 3D game. I think this will get more and more stream like and continuous as our systems develop with greater distributed concepts like the semantic web.
I thought it was insightful. Take documents. You start with editing a document. It's all about snapshots of a document. Then you want collaboration on the document. Then you want an audit trail showing who changed what. Then you want an RSS feed of ongoing changes to the document.
Pretty soon, you are more interested in the feed than the snapshot.
This is intriguing. There is clearly a slow paradigm shift happening that makes Windows/Office less relevant and UNIX-like environments more and more relevant for end users. His terminology wasn't very convincing to me though (documents vs. streams) but that's just details.
I'd rather call it socialization of desktop computers, because the stream of emails, chats, feeds etc that are becoming increasingly important to us is a result of various kinds of virtual social networks we build.
So, if there's a niche for a killer socialization application, what would it look like? I'd imagine, as a random thought, a nice desktop front-end for the syslog, that shows all interesting events happening in the system: new emails, feed updates, software updates, stock market alerts, calendar/todo events etc. The user presumably uses this applet even more often than the FS shell, as objects the user is interested in are mostly opened through the syslog.
It's always been faster to write (or modify slightly) an SQL query to give the necessary results than to export the data to comma delimited, import it into Excel, and create a pivot table just so you can click around on it.
When all you have is Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet (even databases).
I don't know without knowing the contents of his crontab. I can't honestly think how using cron could help you become more stream-centric. I suspect he's using the wrong tool for the job.