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Neal Stephenson on Digital Village
Doran writes: "We interviewed Neal Stephenson this Wednesday morning for Digital Village and will be playing Part One of the tape this Saturday and Part Two on April 29th. We discussed his recent talk at CFP2000, his thoughts on Open Source vs. Everything Else, and how the cypherpunks have received latest effort. It starts a little slow (it was 6 a.m. for us, 9 a.m. for him) but once we got going, it was pretty interesting. For those of you not in Southern California, we'll be posting the program in RealAudio by Sunday evening.
"
On a day that sees comment regarding RealAudio for their spammer and desktop advertising habits...
Could we have something other than RealAudio as default please?
Does that mean.....
Y M C A! Y M C A!
TOGETHER!
Y M C A! Y M C A!
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Why do they have to do this? Why do they have to call it 'Digital Village'? There are other words besides village, you know. Digital city, town, suburbs, country, municipality, region, province, state, continent, planet, solar system, galaxy, universe...
Ok, Digital villagers, we are starting our program, the topic of the program is "how to milk a cow without taking your hands of the keyboard" or "Man, it ain't easy being a cow in a digital village"
You can't handle the truth.
_____________ used the following buzzwords (check all that apply):
[ ] paradigm shift
[x] digital (used in a non-technical context)
[ ] "think outside the box"
[ ] e-commerce
[ ] geek/nerd/hacker (by a non-technical person)
[ ] Other (specify) __________________
Shame on you. To rectify this situation you will:
[ ] Take a 1 day sabbatical from your job
[ ] Take a 1 week sabbatical from your job
[x] Watch a barney and friends telemarathon
[ ] Be locked in a closet with Market Droids.
[ ] Guest star on MTV
And don't do it again. Lastly,
[ ] Good luck
[x] Get help
[ ] Get bent
Sincerely,
Signal 11
If I remember right, Neil's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" is available free download as well as for sale.
Neil's a good example of opensource publishing done right.
And more to the point the book is ENTIRELY his own content.
I'd like to see more authors like him around.
what really sucks is bothering to post the interview later as a realaudio file, what about streaming mp3???
Q: Which reminds me. Why do you guys talk about politics so much? Isn't this a show about computers?
A: Digital Village is actually a program about communication and technology. When we started the program, we found there were a number of other computer programs on radio (Gina Smith, etc.) and TV (Computer Chronicles, etc.) that talked about the hardware. And that's good, because people wanted and needed to know more about how a computer worked.
But there weren't any programs on the air that focused on the social and cultural ramifications of computers and the Internet (and the whole telecommunications revolution). We decided that we'd be that program. We agreed to focus on this impact until we ran out of topics. That agreement still stands.
Don't get me wrong. Ric and I enjoy the toys and want to talk about the goodies too. But the core of the show is how these technologies are *fundamentally* changing the way we communicate. I can't overstate that point. Because of this, we'll never in good conscience be able to ignore the politics of a digital society.
I'm glad that this is being discussed on traditional media rather than just on the Internet alone. If enough people listen to that station and if we can put "The Slashdot Show" or something on it, we can get our message about freedom out. I personally haven't listened to the station or the show, though the show looks interesting with or without Neal Stephenson.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Can someone please tell me why this is only availible in realaudio? MP3 is just as good for streaming, and availible in non-proprietary decoders.
I'm trying to _REDUCE_ my proprietary software usage. Sites that provide only realaudio downloads don't help any.
If this continues, we'll have to rename all our habitat to correspond with the new convention into something like the following:
Silicon Valley - Digital Hell
Berkley - Digital Heaven
Xerox - Digital Gods
IBM - Digital Goliath
Microsoft - Digital Terrorists
DEC - ? Analog company ?
Cisco - Digits Commute
AT&T - Digital Washroom
Apple - Digital Fruits
etc
You can't handle the truth.
Realaudio is a defacto standard. You can't argue with that. If you're only going to have one audio file, it'd better be RealAudio. That's the way to reach the broadest audience.
A better question: Why just one file? The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing uses MP3, RealAudio and ToolVox, in addition to the web and email versions.
Finally, MP3 is not a completely open format. If you want to use it, you must license patents. So while it's less proprietary than RealAudio, it's still proprietary.
Is there some reason that this has to be a video? Could they not also put up a transcript in ASCII, enabling it to be searchable and also read from Lynx?
Personally, if this thing was broadcast by Navajo Code Talkers I'd be happy. Neal Stephenson is an amazing author; one of the true visionaries of sci-fi. Rather than endlessly complain about the format of the talk, just accept it and be happy that we get to listen to him speak. Yeah, Real Player is proprietary and NON-OPEN SOURCED. But you know something...its not that terrible of a player.
I suppose it could've been broadcast in a Windows Media Player format.
Don't let quibbles over the format ruin what sounds like a great interview!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Is this still going to be up tonight since the station had a power outage saturday and part one won't be broadcast until the 29th? I didn't see it in the archive.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Take the average John Q Public with a Win9x system, what should we make him d/l?
Realplayer:
Largest d/l: 9.3MB
Smallest d/l: 3.6MB
Winamp:
Largest d/l: 2MB
Smallest d/l: 560KB
Also note that the winamp site has a big flashy "Get Winamp Now" link, while the realaudio site has the download link hidden off to the side under "Top Free Downloads", and even after following that, you're presented with an add for "Realplayer Plus", with a diminutive link to "Realplayer Basic". Even after that, they force you to enter demographic (read: spam) info before they let you at the download page.
Now which should you send John Q Public, who probably isn't that net savvy, to?
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Let's also remember that recent versions of Netscape Communicator include the Winamp MP3 player, and that recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer include the Windows Media Player, which has MP3 playback capability. If you use Realaudio streams, there's a much higher chance that customers will have to make a rather large download versus no download at all.
Who is neil stephenson and why should I be excited? I'm going to assume this a joke, but on the off chance it's not..."have you heard the good word, my brother?" Neil Stephenson is one of the two (IMHO) best cyberpunk authors existant. (The other being, obviously, Wm. Gibson) Cyberpunk is a fairly new (emergant in the early 80s) genre of hard science fiction. It deals (mainly) with the socio-cultural impact of emergent technologies, particularly machine-learning and the internet. (try here for a bio by his publisher or here for a bio apparently aelf-authored.) Stephenson's main works are: _Snow Crash_ (his first big hit) which is eerily on-target in predicitons of balkanization and marginalization ten minutes in the future. After that comes _The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_. This is my favorite story-wise, but the ending kind of sucks. (Hats off to Stephenson as an author, but his endings have a tendancy to be sort of weird and unsatisfyingly anti-climactic) _The Diamond Age_ focuses on the further balkanization of society, set far enough in the future that nano-tech has become cheap and ubiquitous. His newer two offerings are _Cryptonomicon_ (This book is incredible. Admittedly, I'm a number theorist, so I might be biased, but still...) This one is set dually in the present day (or 30 seconds in the future) and during WWII. It focuses on the role of cryptography and data-security in the world. Again, the ending could be better. He has also recently published, both in both tree-medi and available online here an essay about the history of personal computing called _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_. I've gotten mixed reviews on it, but havn't read it yet, so can't really comment. I'd highly recommend you read some of his stuff...I mean, really, what kind of self-resoecting geek doesn't read Stephenson... abszero (sorry I'm AC, I just now noticed)
And may I suggest we replace 133T spelling of Windows as "windoze" by the suggestion of the poster of this insightful message? (not even going to bother to look up the codes for those funny symbols?).
Quite obviously you didn't read my previous post as carefully as you should have. It was my suggestion to replace "Windows" with "WINBLOZEW" (note the caps).
By the by, the code for the first funny symbol "æ" is 230; the second funny symbol "ß" is 223. Good day to you all.
HI!!!!!!!!
I wke up this morning at the defacto standard hour of 6:30am. I don't have to wake up this early for anything, but since everyone else wakes up this early, it must be a defacto standard. Who am I to disagree? After my defacto standard Nescafe, which I drank despite the presence in my kitchen of better, more fulfilling, coffees, I browsed the web using Internet Explorer. It's the defacto standard web browser. I have Linux on my computer, but I never use it, because Windows 98 is the defacto standard...
...and I could probably go on like this. But I'll spare you.
A defacto standard music format is ridiculous. There's no defacto standard. Network standards are needed so that computers can talk to each other and not get confused. What on Earth would you want a defacto standard audio format for? So Joe sixpack don't gotta download two music players? What about open standards? Patent or no, MP3 is far more open than RealAudio.
Why does anyone pay attention to this guy? He, like Bill Gibson, is basically a computer illiterate that writes fiction w/o any understanding of the technology they're writing about.
People complain when they hear "hacker" used in a negative light...but it's guys like Neal that _revel_ in the dark side of criminal computer cracking. It's the butter on their bread, and they know it.
Someone pointed me to some baloney that he wrote on command line OSes -- and it was just rife with errors. Written clearly by someone who wasnt there and didnt live through those times.
Give me a Steven Levy or Cliff Stoll portrayal of computer hackers over what these buffoons write any day.
his thoughts on Open Source vs. Everything Else,
Broadcast, of course, with an end-to-end proprietary player whose manufacturer has aggresively attacked anyone attempting to reverse engineer players or servers.
V.20, eh? Seems to me you're still in alpha... i hope they iron out these First Post bugs before the 1.0 release. Well, at least no one can say you're vapour...
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Digital Village's website clarifies it a bit, explaining that:
I hope you get something more creative. Maybe write a story about how Jon Katz...
Maybe JonKatz is actually Susan P. Coach, the lobster is actually the Columbine School Shootings, and the thousands of mud shrimp were JonKatz's stories. Really, he already integrated concepts that you are just thinking of now.
At the same time, that post is an insightful look into the entire Digital Villiage paradigm. You see, Slashdot is Susan P. Coach, the entire Digital Villiage thing is the lobster, and a bunch of idiot posters are the mud shrimp. Your post looks kind of like a mud shrimp anyhow.
While you're right about Gibson (the man admits to never having seen a computer before writing Neuromancer), this is completely inaccurate regarding Stephenson. The man is clearly literate in a couple of programming languages and systems, and admits to using Emacs as his editor of choice for writing English text.
Sorry, I just don't see that. Now, I haven't read every Stephenson novel there is, but in both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon the "hackers" are people who build things. YT's question to Hiro ("if you're such a great hacker, how come you're delivering pizza?") is a valid one, and part of the answer is that Hiro is not a criminal. Randy Waterhouse and the Epiphyte(2) "hackers" are also engaged in creation, not destruction. The only character who is clearly a "cracker" is Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and since he's a WWII codebreaker, he's wearing a white hat anyway.
You mean "In the Beginning was the Command Line?" Funny, I thought it was spot-on. But I guess I must not have "lived through those times" -- I've only been programming for 20 years, and using Unix for 13 years.
I find that Stephenson's novels have enough correct technical details to give me the feeling of "yeah, he's either been there or knows somebody who has." Now, if you don't like his prose style, or his philosophy about operating systems and editors, then fine. But he's not a Gibson, making stuff up out of whole cloth.
Listen, i don't mind the man's stories and I can even get into his non-fiction to a point. However, I guess I am just getting burned out on the whole techno-visionary political privacy commentator role.
:->
I realize that the political privacy ramifications of living in a digital world is a very important topic but it seems that everyone from Slashdot to reporter types like Katz to fiction writers like Stephenson are getting obsessive about this. Listen, the Open Source community and the FSF folks and all the other people who have clued into this site for years need to focus on taking the OSes they code for -- Linux, BSD varient GNUhurd whatever to the next level and creating the next generation in OS/human interface design instead of focusing so intensely on politics.
It is not that I think we should not worry at all. However, it seems that a lot of folks are so focused on the politics it is hard to see the focus on the future, at least from here.
ACK
The last 50 years of = 1% of history's 5000 years.
The 20 Democratic countries of western Europe and the US = about 1% of the 200 or so in the UN.
This is much too un-representative a sample t oconclude that gov is benign.
Remember: Germany was one of the 3 (maybe 4 or 5) highest civilizations on earth in 1925. Science, art, technology, business, military. 25% of Jews were marrying outside of their faith in Berlin in 1925. They were completely integrated society. At the turn of the century, Mark Twain wrote an essay saying that anti-semitism was no longer an important force in German society.
By the early 1940s, Germans were killing their neighbors/relatives/friends with equanamity.
Never believe it can't happen in your home town. Never believe it can't be your group which is demonized, then rounded up and killed.
As one worrying trend, govs of the Western world are using demonization as a political/propaganda tool to an increasing extent : terrorists, smokers, gun-owners, 'religious nuts', immigrants,
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Simply put, we use RealAudio because I only have time to encode each program in one format and we've chosen to use the most widely used format. In the future we may have multiple formats, but for now it's just RA.
You're wrong. We don't pay for any of the software. We use the free (beer) version.
But what I want to see are the Digital Village PEOPLE!
KPFK is a unique and wonderful station, supported by listeners only. It takes no money from corporations or government agencies. The upside of this is that it doesn't have to worry about biting the hand that feeds it, which can result in some very fine journalism. The downside is that there is no money to pay people to do all this stuff. So, if you'd like to see the show transcripts on the net, why don't you volunteer to do it?
"Anonymous Coward" says it all.