I guess one reason for that may be that these prediction have usually smelled of "top-down" thinking, and ignoring the effect of people's interaction with technology has and the creative uses thereof. Text messaging, apparently, came about by accident. Mobile companies included the feature, but more as an afterthought, and were surprised by it's popularity by the masses. At least three of the things above (smart phones probably excluded) are the result of this kind of reciprocal interaction (grassroots organizing, groupthink, whatever you want to call it).
Actually, the whaling part seems to have sorted itself out quite nicely. The government tried a year or two ago to take up "scientific" whaling again (whaling for scientific purposes), but ended up with a huge load of whale meat as no buyers were found. So they gave up.
So you wouldn't mind if the indians decided to drive the white invaders out of America? After all, the whites have been living as invaders there for less than 5 centuries, much less than the muslims in medieval Spain.
And saying that the spanish wanted them out is misleading, the catholic kings and the church wanted them out, what the people wanted is anybody's guess. Spain didn't exist at that point, the christian part was divided into three parts, the kingdom of Navarra, the kingdom of Castilia and the kingdom of Aragon. And although the Kingdom of Navarra came under the control of the catholic kings (Ferdinand and Isabella) it wasn't until the 19th century it became officially a part of Spain. And when the Moors came to the Iberian peninsula, it was under the control of the Visigoths and they didn't put up much of a fight, so "invasion" is maybe stretching it a bit. Besides, it was at a time when the people of Europe were wildly "invading" each other, none of the nations we know today actually existed at that time. You're obviously prejudiced against the muslims, but the truth is that Al-Andaluz was the most civilized part of Europe at that time.
One thing I find missing from the discussion is sensitivity to light. According to this site autism and light sensitivity go hand in hand. If autistic people are more sensitive to light, could it also be vice versa, i.e. that children that are sensitive to light risk being affected and turn autistic because of too much exposure to the flicker of the television screen. So, the obvious question the researchers should ask now is if autism is more related to old-school tube tv's rather than plasma or lcd screens? I know first hand that f.ex. people with tourette can be sensitive to light and their ticks increase by watching tube tv's, but not when wathcing plasma or lcd screens. Anime-shows on japanese television have been known to cause epileptic seizures (light flicker, bright colors, ultra fast editing). So if there is a correlation between watching television and turning autistic, it has to be somewhere along those lines.
You probably can find statistic evidence showing that those that read a lot of books usually wear glasses. So do books cause bad eye sight? No, probably not, inadequate reading light etc. is more likely to have an effect.
The language of the web is the language of the high-tech developed world. Whatever you think of the reasons, the merits or the future, the high-tech world now isn't South America, or vast parts of China or Asia. It's Western Europe and North America.
I don't think that was the point of Murdoch's argument (or maybe it was, but than he's a silly bunt). Saying that Spanish or Mandarin will perhaps become a dominant language on the internet is misleading, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all here have to learn some Mandarin to get by on Usenet or whatever. The thing is of course that the internet is spreading more rapidly than english around the world. If you go to Spain (f.ex.) one is immediately struck by the difficulty finding anyone who can speak English. Even the young people can't speak it very well in general (depends on areas, of course). And the spanish seem to feel closer to South Americans, as they often seem to have stronger cultural relations to them than the rest of Europe. Meaning that to penetrate the Spanish market you can't use english, and if you can enter the Spanish market, South America is pretty close by as it belongs to the same linguistic and (in part) cultural microcosmos. And to speak of things like Usenet again, Spanish speakers don't participate much in news groups where english is dominant, they tend to seek out the spanish ones (of which there are plenty).
And in Spain (and South America) the language of technology is Spanish. All the guides and manuals that come with operating systems and software are translated to Spanish and most better known programming manuals have their Spanish translations. So, I think Murdochs theories have merit, but his statements are a bit misleading. I guess the internet will be much like the real world when it comes to language, the spanish part or the mandarin part are f.ex. already pretty self-sufficient and english will not have much impact there, and vice versa.
SMS has been all the craze here (so to speak) for the last two years, I think. Those who use it the most are teenagers, since about every 13 year old here owns a cellphone, and like has been stated before, SMS is cheaper than calling. I can send my coworkers SMS-messages through e-mail, and this is just a public library, not a high-tech startup. The SMS-services offered are quite good, you can f.ex. get scores from the ongoing soccermatch sent to you via SMS in real time, so if you happen to have to attend a funeral while your favourite team is playing, you won't miss out on what's happening.
Well, being a native of Reikjavik I can give you some idea how things are here.
I think the situation is pretty good here. Lots of things going on tech-wise, icelanders are indeed very quick to grab new gadgets and technologies, I think that f.ex. the number of cellphones per capita is about the highest in the world (second only to Finland, I think). Almost every home in the country is connected to the internet, many ISP's and several free ones, ADSL is available everywhere and cable connection in several areas in the city, although not everywhere. There are a lot of firms ranging from low-level programming to high-class multimedia and should be fairly easy to find a job as the labourmarket is fluid and unemployment rate is very low.
Plus, the people are friendly and everybody speaks english fluently (a problem if you wanna learn the local language!) and the nightlife is phenomenal!.
Gummi
Re:Being poor doesn't mean being ignorant
on
Open Source Africa
·
· Score: 1
Of course, basic education is still the biggest problem. Pencils and notebooks are more needed than computers in the poorest countries.
Excactly. The infrastructure we're used to in the west just isn't there. I saw somewhere that 2/3 of the worlds population have never made a phonecall in their life, and that probably applies especially to the poorer countries. So even though Pakistan can produce sophisticated technology, that technology is only available to a very small percentage of Pakistanis. Same with some African countries, even if they can hook up to the internet, it isn't much use to those who don't have access to telephones, or even electricity.
Lord of the Flies is not about the need to escape technology. (And the Beach doesn't seem to be either according to some of the comments above (haven't seen it), that was Katz in interpetration mode). It would be more appropriate to look at Lord of the Flies as a commentary on human nature, how cruelty can so easily penetrate the surface, the struggle between good and evil, yadda yadda yadda. You get the drift. As it concentrates on children in isolation it must have been quite shocking in its time, but readers today probably don't find it shocking at all. I dug it, though, when I first read it. But that's years ago, may not be tha case on second reading. (LotF touches on technology, though, but rather treats it like a token of power (Piggy's glasses) )
Your argument is quite valid IMO, but this is not entirely a question of wether bundling two products together is legal or wether you like Microsoft or not.
Look at it this way: Ford has 90% share of the automobile-market (for arguments sake:-) and they decide to build their own proprietary stereo-equipment into every one of the cars they sell. They argue that it gives the customer more value, besides, the stereo equipment is tied to the rest of the car in such a way that the driver gets some important information about the engine, the road or whatnot through a friendly voice in the speakers (Brit-slashdotters may remember that Dave Allen sketch:-). Manufacturers such as Pioneer can not build this functionality into their product, and what's more, removing the original stereo means the car wont work anymore. How would the courts handle this kind of case?
I agree that much of the rhetoric generated around this case is anti-microsoft, and Judge Jackson's role is to weed out all the anti-rant and find the facts. Which he said he did. Netscape may have been out competed by a better product, but if Microsoft hadn't used these kind of tactics they would have lasted longer. And it also prevented manufacturers of other browser (f.ex. Opera) to compete on an even playground, making it almost impossible to penetrate the browser market with a new product.
Perhaps not directly connected to this, but I was paging through a '88 issue of Byte a while ago, the issue where the then brandnew Next box was previewed (needless to say, the people at Byte drooled:-)). Anyway, the article also contained an interview with Steve Jobs, and this one thing he said really caught my attention: Explaining why Next was based on Unix, Jobs said "Unix is the operating system of the future" and continued, saying something like he was really sure Unix would take over in the nineties. I (of course) thought of Linux and said to my self that Ol'Steve probably didn't realize how prophetic he'd been. Now I'm beginning to think he actually meant it!:-)
It's hard to believe but I seem to be the first to thing of Gottlob Frege, mathematician and the father of modern logic. I mean, he laid the ground for computer technology as we know it (admittedly with the help of Russell and others).
Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds in mathematics and logic.
David Hume, you know, empirism, the enlightenment, leading to modern science.
And how about some linguists:
Sir William Jones, the first to prove that sanskrit is indeed related to latin and greek, laying ground for comparative linguistics.
Ferdinand de Saussure, father of structuralism and modern lingustic theory.
No, not Noam Chomsky, although he counts as one of the most influential, inspiring thousands of linguists to publish heaps of rubbish.
Yeah, just too bad you won't be able to watch Chaplin at all in a hundred years or so, because all the copying (necessary because of degrading material) will have marred the film beyond recognision.
Well, it's probably been converted to digital format by now so that won't be a problem:-) Except for the fact that I won't be here in a hundred years or so and thus won't be able to watch it. G.
The future of the cinema is cinema! Arguing about different formats and technologies is generally fruitless and useless.
Besides, the chase for more clarity and better resolution is a bit absurd. The thing is, celluloid film (with all it's pros and cons) is an integral part of cinema, and the things it brings to the screen (apart from the actual moving pictures) is a big part of the movie experience just like brushstrokes and the pattern of the canvas are a part of experiencing a painting. Imagine watching Chaplins "The Gold Rush" in a computer colorized, digitally cleansed version where no signs of aging can be observed in the picture on the screen. Kind of takes away the atmosphere, doesn't it? "The Gold Rush" is an old movie, made with celluloid that takes on an aging process just like any other earthly material. It gives the movie an earthbound connection that tells us that this movie was made at a given point in time quite a long time ago, gives us a sense of its history, so to speak.
Digital of course takes that away. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, it just depends on what the moviemaker wants to get across. This is kind of like the movement in art that came (I think) out of the pop-art movement, where painters started to paint pictures that looked like photographs with amazing clarity and it takes a bit of time for laymen to determine wether it is an actual painting or not. Anyway, that method never caught on and hardly anybody paints that way anymore because the material (canvas, paint, brushes) are as much a part of a painting as the actual picture. Some painters go through a long and painstaking process in their work to get the effect of an aging Rembrandt painting. Another example would be all the computer-colorized versions of "Casablanca" and various other movies that were all the craze in the eighties but no-one even thinks twice about doing this anymore. That was an experiment in taking old movies and trying to recreate them the way their directors supposedly would have wanted to see them had they had colour film to begin with (colour was already an option at the time Casablanca was made, I think). By doing that their connection with time and space was altered and skewed and these versions never did seem right and never caught on. And the colours were a bit shitty, too.
The thing I'm trying to get across is that the material is an inseperable part of the film. Why do so many independent filmmakers still use 8mm or 16mm celluloid film (although they may use digital for editing and sound)? And look at the video-revolution. It isn't until now that you see videotape used for making movies, and that is because the filmmakers have learned how to use the material to their advantage. In films like "Blair Witch Project" or the danish Dogme movies ("The Celabration", "the Idiots") video was used most of the time and the directors did not try to hide technical faults but used them to their advantage ("The Blair WP" is quite an interesting example in the way it uses video tape for realism but distances the audience from the action with b/w film). If you want to see an interesting example of use of videotape the try to find Lars Von Triers "The Kingdom". Filmed on video, transferred to 16mm film and then transferred back to video! Trying to eliminate the feel for the material from the moviegoing experience is a bit like producing tasteless pop-corn so it won't interrupt the audience while it's watching the movie.
Digital screening will eventually catch on. It serves its purpose, esp. (like Ebert points out) in computer generated s.fx. scenes. Imax hasn't caught on, but it serves it's purpose in showing dazzling movies about the wonders of the pyramids or life and death in Serengeti. But the question is: when is digital ready for the big time. I say it's ready when one can seamlessly switch between film and digital projectors at screening time. Or when digital tech. can actually imitate exactly all the faults of celluloid film or videotape.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess one reason for that may be that these prediction have usually smelled of "top-down" thinking, and ignoring the effect of people's interaction with technology has and the creative uses thereof. Text messaging, apparently, came about by accident. Mobile companies included the feature, but more as an afterthought, and were surprised by it's popularity by the masses. At least three of the things above (smart phones probably excluded) are the result of this kind of reciprocal interaction (grassroots organizing, groupthink, whatever you want to call it).
Actually, the whaling part seems to have sorted itself out quite nicely. The government tried a year or two ago to take up "scientific" whaling again (whaling for scientific purposes), but ended up with a huge load of whale meat as no buyers were found. So they gave up.
So you wouldn't mind if the indians decided to drive the white invaders out of America? After all, the whites have been living as invaders there for less than 5 centuries, much less than the muslims in medieval Spain.
And saying that the spanish wanted them out is misleading, the catholic kings and the church wanted them out, what the people wanted is anybody's guess. Spain didn't exist at that point, the christian part was divided into three parts, the kingdom of Navarra, the kingdom of Castilia and the kingdom of Aragon. And although the Kingdom of Navarra came under the control of the catholic kings (Ferdinand and Isabella) it wasn't until the 19th century it became officially a part of Spain. And when the Moors came to the Iberian peninsula, it was under the control of the Visigoths and they didn't put up much of a fight, so "invasion" is maybe stretching it a bit. Besides, it was at a time when the people of Europe were wildly "invading" each other, none of the nations we know today actually existed at that time. You're obviously prejudiced against the muslims, but the truth is that Al-Andaluz was the most civilized part of Europe at that time.
One thing I find missing from the discussion is sensitivity to light. According to this site autism and light sensitivity go hand in hand. If autistic people are more sensitive to light, could it also be vice versa, i.e. that children that are sensitive to light risk being affected and turn autistic because of too much exposure to the flicker of the television screen. So, the obvious question the researchers should ask now is if autism is more related to old-school tube tv's rather than plasma or lcd screens? I know first hand that f.ex. people with tourette can be sensitive to light and their ticks increase by watching tube tv's, but not when wathcing plasma or lcd screens. Anime-shows on japanese television have been known to cause epileptic seizures (light flicker, bright colors, ultra fast editing). So if there is a correlation between watching television and turning autistic, it has to be somewhere along those lines.
You probably can find statistic evidence showing that those that read a lot of books usually wear glasses. So do books cause bad eye sight? No, probably not, inadequate reading light etc. is more likely to have an effect.
The language of the web is the language of the high-tech developed world. Whatever you think of the reasons, the merits or the future, the high-tech world now isn't South America, or vast parts of China or Asia. It's Western Europe and North America.
I don't think that was the point of Murdoch's argument (or maybe it was, but than he's a silly bunt). Saying that Spanish or Mandarin will perhaps become a dominant language on the internet is misleading, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all here have to learn some Mandarin to get by on Usenet or whatever. The thing is of course that the internet is spreading more rapidly than english around the world. If you go to Spain (f.ex.) one is immediately struck by the difficulty finding anyone who can speak English. Even the young people can't speak it very well in general (depends on areas, of course). And the spanish seem to feel closer to South Americans, as they often seem to have stronger cultural relations to them than the rest of Europe. Meaning that to penetrate the Spanish market you can't use english, and if you can enter the Spanish market, South America is pretty close by as it belongs to the same linguistic and (in part) cultural microcosmos. And to speak of things like Usenet again, Spanish speakers don't participate much in news groups where english is dominant, they tend to seek out the spanish ones (of which there are plenty).
And in Spain (and South America) the language of technology is Spanish. All the guides and manuals that come with operating systems and software are translated to Spanish and most better known programming manuals have their Spanish translations. So, I think Murdochs theories have merit, but his statements are a bit misleading. I guess the internet will be much like the real world when it comes to language, the spanish part or the mandarin part are f.ex. already pretty self-sufficient and english will not have much impact there, and vice versa.
Guðmundur
And don't forget that the US-ASCII character map wouldn't have been the default, allowing the use of special characters and/or other writing systems.
G.SMS has been all the craze here (so to speak) for the last two years, I think. Those who use it the most are teenagers, since about every 13 year old here owns a cellphone, and like has been stated before, SMS is cheaper than calling. I can send my coworkers SMS-messages through e-mail, and this is just a public library, not a high-tech startup. The SMS-services offered are quite good, you can f.ex. get scores from the ongoing soccermatch sent to you via SMS in real time, so if you happen to have to attend a funeral while your favourite team is playing, you won't miss out on what's happening.
Gummi
Well, being a native of Reikjavik I can give you some idea how things are here.
I think the situation is pretty good here. Lots of things going on tech-wise, icelanders are indeed very quick to grab new gadgets and technologies, I think that f.ex. the number of cellphones per capita is about the highest in the world (second only to Finland, I think). Almost every home in the country is connected to the internet, many ISP's and several free ones, ADSL is available everywhere and cable connection in several areas in the city, although not everywhere. There are a lot of firms ranging from low-level programming to high-class multimedia and should be fairly easy to find a job as the labourmarket is fluid and unemployment rate is very low.
Plus, the people are friendly and everybody speaks english fluently (a problem if you wanna learn the local language!) and the nightlife is phenomenal!.
Gummi
Excactly. The infrastructure we're used to in the west just isn't there. I saw somewhere that 2/3 of the worlds population have never made a phonecall in their life, and that probably applies especially to the poorer countries. So even though Pakistan can produce sophisticated technology, that technology is only available to a very small percentage of Pakistanis. Same with some African countries, even if they can hook up to the internet, it isn't much use to those who don't have access to telephones, or even electricity.
Gummi
Gummi
Your argument is quite valid IMO, but this is not entirely a question of wether bundling two products together is legal or wether you like Microsoft or not.
Look at it this way: Ford has 90% share of the automobile-market (for arguments sake:-) and they decide to build their own proprietary stereo-equipment into every one of the cars they sell. They argue that it gives the customer more value, besides, the stereo equipment is tied to the rest of the car in such a way that the driver gets some important information about the engine, the road or whatnot through a friendly voice in the speakers (Brit-slashdotters may remember that Dave Allen sketch:-). Manufacturers such as Pioneer can not build this functionality into their product, and what's more, removing the original stereo means the car wont work anymore. How would the courts handle this kind of case?
I agree that much of the rhetoric generated around this case is anti-microsoft, and Judge Jackson's role is to weed out all the anti-rant and find the facts. Which he said he did. Netscape may have been out competed by a better product, but if Microsoft hadn't used these kind of tactics they would have lasted longer. And it also prevented manufacturers of other browser (f.ex. Opera) to compete on an even playground, making it almost impossible to penetrate the browser market with a new product.
regards,
Guðmundur
Perhaps not directly connected to this, but I was paging through a '88 issue of Byte a while ago, the issue where the then brandnew Next box was previewed (needless to say, the people at Byte drooled:-)). Anyway, the article also contained an interview with Steve Jobs, and this one thing he said really caught my attention: Explaining why Next was based on Unix, Jobs said "Unix is the operating system of the future" and continued, saying something like he was really sure Unix would take over in the nineties. I (of course) thought of Linux and said to my self that Ol'Steve probably didn't realize how prophetic he'd been. Now I'm beginning to think he actually meant it! :-)
It's hard to believe but I seem to be the first to thing of Gottlob Frege, mathematician and the father of modern logic. I mean, he laid the ground for computer technology as we know it (admittedly with the help of Russell and others).
Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds in mathematics and logic.
David Hume, you know, empirism, the enlightenment, leading to modern science.
And how about some linguists:
Sir William Jones, the first to prove that sanskrit is indeed related to latin and greek, laying ground for comparative linguistics.
Ferdinand de Saussure, father of structuralism and modern lingustic theory.
No, not Noam Chomsky, although he counts as one of the most influential, inspiring thousands of linguists to publish heaps of rubbish.
Yeah, just too bad you won't be able to watch Chaplin at all in a hundred years or so, because all the copying (necessary because of degrading material) will have marred the film beyond recognision.
Well, it's probably been converted to digital format by now so that won't be a problem:-) Except for the fact that I won't be here in a hundred years or so and thus won't be able to watch it. G.
The future of the cinema is cinema! Arguing about different formats and technologies is generally fruitless and useless.
Besides, the chase for more clarity and better resolution is a bit absurd. The thing is, celluloid film (with all it's pros and cons) is an integral part of cinema, and the things it brings to the screen (apart from the actual moving pictures) is a big part of the movie experience just like brushstrokes and the pattern of the canvas are a part of experiencing a painting. Imagine watching Chaplins "The Gold Rush" in a computer colorized, digitally cleansed version where no signs of aging can be observed in the picture on the screen. Kind of takes away the atmosphere, doesn't it? "The Gold Rush" is an old movie, made with celluloid that takes on an aging process just like any other earthly material. It gives the movie an earthbound connection that tells us that this movie was made at a given point in time quite a long time ago, gives us a sense of its history, so to speak.
Digital of course takes that away. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, it just depends on what the moviemaker wants to get across. This is kind of like the movement in art that came (I think) out of the pop-art movement, where painters started to paint pictures that looked like photographs with amazing clarity and it takes a bit of time for laymen to determine wether it is an actual painting or not. Anyway, that method never caught on and hardly anybody paints that way anymore because the material (canvas, paint, brushes) are as much a part of a painting as the actual picture. Some painters go through a long and painstaking process in their work to get the effect of an aging Rembrandt painting. Another example would be all the computer-colorized versions of "Casablanca" and various other movies that were all the craze in the eighties but no-one even thinks twice about doing this anymore. That was an experiment in taking old movies and trying to recreate them the way their directors supposedly would have wanted to see them had they had colour film to begin with (colour was already an option at the time Casablanca was made, I think). By doing that their connection with time and space was altered and skewed and these versions never did seem right and never caught on. And the colours were a bit shitty, too.
The thing I'm trying to get across is that the material is an inseperable part of the film. Why do so many independent filmmakers still use 8mm or 16mm celluloid film (although they may use digital for editing and sound)? And look at the video-revolution. It isn't until now that you see videotape used for making movies, and that is because the filmmakers have learned how to use the material to their advantage. In films like "Blair Witch Project" or the danish Dogme movies ("The Celabration", "the Idiots") video was used most of the time and the directors did not try to hide technical faults but used them to their advantage ("The Blair WP" is quite an interesting example in the way it uses video tape for realism but distances the audience from the action with b/w film). If you want to see an interesting example of use of videotape the try to find Lars Von Triers "The Kingdom". Filmed on video, transferred to 16mm film and then transferred back to video! Trying to eliminate the feel for the material from the moviegoing experience is a bit like producing tasteless pop-corn so it won't interrupt the audience while it's watching the movie.
Digital screening will eventually catch on. It serves its purpose, esp. (like Ebert points out) in computer generated s.fx. scenes. Imax hasn't caught on, but it serves it's purpose in showing dazzling movies about the wonders of the pyramids or life and death in Serengeti. But the question is: when is digital ready for the big time. I say it's ready when one can seamlessly switch between film and digital projectors at screening time. Or when digital tech. can actually imitate exactly all the faults of celluloid film or videotape.
Or I may be totally wrong:-)