Amateur Revolution?

Ant writes "Fast Company's article mentions that networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations from from astronomy to computing. Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion. Linux poses a real threat to Microsoft. The Sims is among the most popular computer games ever. These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades."

Comments

get it up

[Anonymous Coward]

first posts are way too easy these days. really, its making me sick, gets off your lives.

Re:get it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the amateurs at Google©.

Just let's face the facts:

- Google© is the favourite search engine for terrorists, paedophiles, communists, neo-nazis and George W. Bush (the latter commenting: "Whew, this is tricky!" when confronted with the confusing user interface of Google©)

- Google© has long ago sold out to AOL Time Warner; the next round of IPO will increase their shares and they are likely to achieve a total majority of shares by the end of 2005.

- Gmail fails to meet the standard of users above Novice-level; those who are used to the comfort of a sophisticated email-client, like Microsoft Outlook, connected to a powerful and secure server-side solution, like Microsoft Exchange. When I called the Google©-helpdesk ("Hoogle") and asked for POP3 and IMAP support, I heard the insulting sound of muffled laughter, then a "Sorry, we really don't ...", again laughing; then the line was dead. Mind you, we are paying > 80,000 USD per month in AdSense-fees.

- Gmail still does not work fully with less sopisticated browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox. This may be caused by lacking standards-support in these browsers. Fortunately, barely nobody uses these nowadays, so the problem can safely be ignored for the time being. After all, the standard user-agent for web access is the mature and secure Internet Explorer

- Google©'s investment in Doubleclick.com and other "online marketing" agencies is a dubious move; personally, I can live with text-only advertising as practised by Google© so far, but our company ads are exclusively deployed using latest Macromedia Flash technology, because this simply is what our professional customers expect of us

- The ethical credibility of Google© has been on the decline since a new employee of Google© (a "noogler", according to the company-internal nomenclatura, or "Goospeak") has leaked some disturbing information regarding cruel rituals of initiation, including gross acts of homoerotic sexuality, horses and mutants. However, law authorities are now more alert towards Google©, since the so called FAGACT has passed the Californian legislative. Trivia: the percentage of heterosexual Google©-employees has reached an all-time low of << 0.09% as of an assessment on 2004-08-22.

whoamg

[Anonymous Coward]

fristage postage

Also in the news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloggers beat the "poo-poo" out of Dan Rather.

Pro-Am?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Baahh! RC Pro-Am sucked, one of the worst NES games ever! The controls were horrible!

Re:Corps will continue to rule, people are sheep..

[Vaxgod]

This perhaps may be off topic (just a little), but my wife has dark cirlces around her eyes. She has always felt ugly because of them, and been tormented all her life because people think she is on drugs. In fact they are not related to drugs in any way, it's genetic. I tried to convice her that people are mature enough not to judge people that way, but that always fails in practice. It's actually quite amazing the difference in treatment she receives when wearing/not wearing makeup.

$.2

Re:Corps will continue to rule, people are sheep..

[dema]

Keep in mind, Hip Hop and Rap are two different genres.