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Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:
(And yeah, that's a real example.)
Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.
The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
In general, And still no expose on price fixing and monopoly abuse, still no coverage of fundamental research in both software and hardware, just the same copy and paste press release stories. No undercover journalism, no coverage of the spamming and malware writing "bad" parts of PC town. Still the same meaningless benchmarks and megahurts ads for articles. No coverage of the scary moves by the once garage operation and now mega coorporations. No credit where credit is due for real inovation, no mention of the real inventors of "the next cool thing", just of the latest guy to market a clone years later.
Overall I really hope that the dead tree coverage is better elseware in this world. Beside the likes of el`reg and vulture HQ only C`t seems to have some grip with what is going on. At slashdot we often joke about the dumbed down (or plain dumb) coverage by "normal" news sources (cnn/nyt), but the dedicated dead tree rags basicly have no journalism/real news whatsoever.
Sure its more complicated then this, but when looking back, do you see improvement over the years?
WTF am I doing here on Slashdot!?
/.ers jealous?
Making things up in an attempt to make other
So you only had 5 boxes? How lame ;)
"A telephone connection can transport you from one bulletin board to another [...] We were able to download an X-rated picture, no questions asked."
WHAT'S THE NUMBER PLEASE POST
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
You are an entirely mechanical process. So am I. Computers are simply not yet fast or capacious enough to mimic us, and some fundamental breakthroughs in our knowledge of a mind's operation apparently remain to be made, but one day there will be a thinking "machine". It's inevitable.
Computers weren't designed to think; they were designed to follow instructions.
That was then, this is now. Today humans constantly ask computers to do the thinking for them. My car has dashboard lights that tell me if my engine needs servicing or my oil need replacing; gone are the myriad dials that I would have to interpret myself. Stoplights are connected to sensors and to each other in order to optimize rush-hour traffic flow.
And that's just at the consumer level. Power plants and grids rely on systems designed not only to regulate power, but shut it down if necessary. PC software does "intelligent" background searches to locate information related to whatever I'm typing or reading. Most of the systems in a large airplane are automated because it would be impossible for a human to react quickly enough to maintain them.
The real problem with intelligent computers is that computers are still designed to live in a world of absolutes, truth and falsehood, and people never do. We don't learn about the world from logic, but instead we create logic to analyze the world. Human (and animal) brains learn by identifying patterns, and then observing when those patterns are broken. Computers are built around patterns and then, when those break, so do the computers.
Self-awareness is a property that the soul impinges on the mind, not an inherent property of neurons.
This is a metaphysical question, entirely unprovable, and one that real researchers try to avoid.
Classic Dumb Terminal
"It's ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the 80s, we should by how have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."
Finally. Someone knows why Raves and Ecstasy (The drug, not the feeling) are so popular.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?