I guess there are book people and not book people. I for one am a book person. Leather bound, cloth bound, thick paper to vellum, everything about a book is fascinating to me. I love my rare first editions. I enjoy my crappy Piers Anthony paperbacks.
When I am rich, I will have a room devoted to the display of my books, and I will call this room my Library or Study.
One of the first things I do when I walk into someone's house is look at the books on their shelves. If there are no books, I note that as well. An ebook will never compare. Yes, the bulk will be gone. No longer would I have to worry about being wealthy enough to devote an entire room just to the storage of books. All I have to worry about is magnetic fields wiping out my 'database' of books.
The nice feature would be being able to call up the book anywhere in the house. So the aforementioned bathtub scenario could be as easy as saying, 'Computer - Tale of two Cities, last accessed page'
There will have to be some pretty amazing advances that creates equivalent items before paper books go out of style. Will it happen? Yes, we only have so many trees to turn into books.
It is their service and they have the right to do this, but we, as observers to stupidity, get to comment on the stupidity.
With the proliferation of many different messenger systems, all those AIMers are going to be cut off from their friends who use MSN/Yahoo/ICQ. The motivation to use AIM diminishes as other messengers take off. So instead of AOL joining the community at large, they are creating a substantial, yet isolated community. It is a stupid mistake in the issue of a greater diverse internet. A smart move in the issue of keeping a captive audience. But in the end, they are just shooting themselves in the foot because if you are using AOL, you really don't need AIM to communicate to other AOLers but you will need another messenger to chat with your friends on MSN.
AOL just has a large enough ego to think these companies are clamoring to gain access to their herd of people. That may be partially true, but I believe it is more about these other applications trying to give their users as much versatility as possible, something AOL should think about.
I graduated in '93, but I seem to recall ads being all over the place. The college allowed all sorts of advertising. For a reduced cost, campus organizations could get signage with coke logos on them. The act of going into the bookstore and buying something meant I would get a pound of flyers in my sack, urging me to get credit cards, buy really cool calculators, storage cabinets, and once even a flyer from a local flower store to buy my sweetheart a dozen roses.
The point is, the advertising is going to be there. Whether it is the big Starbucks sign in the cafeteria, the Coke logo on the scoreboard, or a banner ad on the intranet.
E-Books are inevitable, but there is too much inherent value in real books to ever consider them dead. I believe E-books will be a lot like books an cassette, something for travellers.
Even the terminology used to describe acts of reading seem to take us away from the silicon world. For example, you curl up with a good book. This implies there is a real connection between reading and comfort.
Oddly, e-books have the potential of being able to go more places than real books. An e-book can be made to be water proof so you can read comfortably in the bathtub, pool, or shower without fear of soggy pages. But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Imagine a time when Crime and Punishment or War and Peace have the same weight as Harliquin Romance vol. #666. Also, as a train rider, I love to look to see what other people are reading. If everyone has e-books, I would never know that really cute girl is actually reading a compilation of Lovecraft or just another Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Let the e-books come, but don't expect them to take over.
The point you raise is a compelling one, but you have given the exact response most colleges and universities will have. They will put technological limits on available bandwidth (or as one other post mentions, put dorms on a seperate network with a seperate gateway). Many colleges and universities, especially liberal arts institutes, like to taut the concept of 'marketplace of ideas' and forcibly preventing an avenue of expression weakens this claim.
I do agree on putting limits, adding bottlenecks, just to protect areas of actual research and education from the fun and games of Napster (and other file sharing software).
The other thing you'll have to keep in mind that if Napster is banned, then the students will go back to ftp and hunting for the brief MP3 websites that appear and disappear. IRC trading will increase and bandwidth will still be affected.
And hopefully, those companies that have cut a deal will see an increase in sales. Universal, hopefully, will see a decline in popularity of its artists, leaving the artists no choice but to cut seperate deals with MP3.com moving us closer to switching the middleman from super greedy record label to super greedy dot.com company.
Seeing they already do this in central Illinois, I am fairly certain they did their market research and are comfortable that they will be able to make a small profit at least, or run it at cost as a non-profit service. If the latter is the case, the community may kick in some bucks to support the infrastructure.
Okay, I shall correct myself. The issues all dealt with emotional responses to events in my life that I am sure with microscopes and time I'd be able to neutralize the section of my brain causing the problem or I can take the easy way and write it off as demons and goblins going bump in the night.
Of course, I find it interesting I too once used Bertrand Russel and Ayn Rand in debates against religion. Isaac Asimov was a friend in many a creationist debates. As age settles in on some of us, we sometimes seek comfort in mysticism. It gives us some sense of hope, even if it is false. As my father said, the cruelist thing you can do to a person is take away their hope.
This is a touchy subject. I always chaff at any attempt to apply a label on any one particular group. In actuality, I think the cart is being put before the horse in this case.
I think pagan/occult type people are drawn to the technological fields. Essentially, (boy, now I'm really laying it on thick) the tech fields are the closest thing we have to a meritocracy where you are judged by what you are capable of doing not who you are or what God/dess you do or don't worship.
I think there is another factor in regards to this subject. When I was younger, I was a devote atheist. The concept of any Divine Figure was absurd to me. As I got older, there was too many things that could't be explained properly any other way except through a mystical/religious element. These things were all touchy/feely kinds of issues that you can't gather imperical evidence on. Because of my past beliefs, I was more open to hearing from different religions and belief structures which then led me down the path to a pagan belief.
I am also going to blame roleplaying games a bit in this process, because of D&D I was exposed to the concept of entire Worlds devoted to occultism.
Great, more Limbaugh fans. Actually, coming from rural America myself, I am glad to see the technology making inroads. I can see how this is effective for flatland areas, but what can be done for mountainous regions?
I'm wondering if the technology allows for repeaters, essentially maintaining line of site through a third antenna. In Montana, where mountains can run down the middle of communities, the community antenna could be LOS with the mountain top which could then feed out to the rest of the community. If this is possible, what are the potential weather effects on one's internet connection.
Another nitpick: The fact that they claim these colors that don't pass their test in high color aren't "web safe" is inane, at best. They consider these colors "unsafe" because they are shifted slightly in high-color?
I'd like to see these tests run again (or just looked at again) and count the number of colors that the color shifted but was only a slight degree. I understand why the colorshift is a factor as I had to design a website using frames that a.gif of a solid color had to match the BGROUND color of an adjacent frame in order to look correct. I suffered the subtle shifting problem and had to keep switching colors to get it right. What was worse was I only had the choice of dark blues and light grays.
But I think that is a rare problem as most of the time, as they mentioned in their article, transparency can be used to allow the BGROUND color come through and you will have a direct match.
And those people who have low color pallettes have gotten use to dithered colors. In their mind, that is what the web looks like. They have their resolution set at 640x480 and damn if they are going to change it. They like just five colors (red, green, blue, black, and white) and if they can see a purple a yellow and by golly an orange that doesn't dither, they are tickled pink.
I don't mean to be cruel to these users, but at some point in time designers have to stop designing for the lowest common denominator and move up to the second lowest common denominator.
This reminds me when I was visiting a friends company and was playing on their website. I forced the browser to use my choice of link color and background color. It caused a few minutes of hubbub when his boss realized that their clients might be able to do this and make the website look really bad.
In the end, the best thing a designer can do is to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Too many colors too much going on will cause it to look bad on someone's machine.
Fundamentally, I don't care if a transaction is traced to me. Yes, hello, I buy things that get shipped in plain brown packages. I do like the idea of not having to use my debit card (I too refuse the concept of credit as I've seen that version of Hell and have no desire to go back).
Currently I use a similar variation where I have an account at one bank with a debit card and I only keep a small amount of money in there for online buying. This could be made easier if I could just transfer money to a temporary number while I am shopping, use that number and never have to worry about who has sniffed that number. It would also make tracking my online purchases easier as I would get one statement listing all my debits from my account to temp numbers and a list of the amount of money stored on the temp numbers.
Take any anology too far and the differences will outweigh the similarities. In any event, I don't take him to task on his anology, but I do find myself, once again, questioning the timliness of this information. I think it is too soon to say that cyberspace is a frontier free from national authority and it is too late to even bring up the idea.
The Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaler, as per this analogy, weren't of any one nationality, unlike the Teutonic Knights and other organizations. They didn't answer to any King but to the a Knight General who supposedly answered to the Pope.
The Knights Templar organization is accredited for developing the concept of a bank. Money deposited in England was represented by a chit and that chit could be given to a Templar Citadel anywhere in exchange for an equal amount of money.
The analogy is about the non-national nature of the organization, not about its decline or use in occultic references in today's era.
You have it essentially correct. I can upload my mp3's into personal lockers to be able to listen wherever I want. But when the company takes it upon themselves to copy all the music without license to make available to whomever proves they have the cd (whether it was bought, borrowed, or stolen) is quite another.
Of course the next step is to shut down those personal storage sites, which will occur right about when someone realizes they can transfer files between the lockers and suddenly you don't have to worry about download times on Napster anymore.
Re:Why Does Jon Katz Bug the Shit Out of Me?
on
Mage The Ascension
·
· Score: 2
Alas, being relatively new, I have not be subjected to the works of Jon Katz a lot, but you did peg one element that kind of bothers me. At times it seems Katz simply writes thing that he thinks people will get pumped up about, not realizing that these thoughts and ideas have already been debated. Katz also seems to truly pander, as if simply walking in the same direction as everyone else makes him a leader of a movement.
I don't mean to bash or rag on Katz. I get annoyed when I see the first fifteen posts to a Katz article ridiculing the article. But I would expect, after doing this for month after month, Katz would take a moment, proof his work, allow someone else to read it and actually think through what he is writing before posting.
I happen to like the subject matter he writes on, I just think he does it in a half-baked, half-hearted, and lackluster fashion, expecting the readers to 'get his point' without him having to 'make his point'.
When I say comparable, I am saying within the same realm as the other settlements, which were actually around $20 million. $118 million is considerably more than that, but drastically less than the $450 million UMG was originally asking for.
Actually the figure is based off of a maximum punitive damage of $15,000 per cd. The damage is punitive due to the piracy charge, not simply preventing sales of cd's.
The judge reduced the amount drastically because mp3.com was acting with much more care and responsibility than other internet start ups. And I believe the fact that UMG was the only label not to settle out of court, the judge made a ruling comparable to those other settlements.
The ruling, while sucking big time, is relatively fair.
This is rampant speculation on my part, but what if all secondary and tertiary distribution of music was completely cut off. I'm even going to the extreme that you cannot even make a tape of a cd to play in you walkman. Would the popularity of Industry Music decline?
The other question basically is, do independent labels stand a chance in the current environment but will they become much more popular in one in which the music of an independent label is freely distributed, copied, and used by the consumer where the Industry Music is locked down?
I fully admit I am more attracted to underground bands, even when their 'underground' status is actually part of marketing. Who would care about a song if it couldn't be completely enjoyed in all its potential forms?
You may jest, but take into account the number of people being suspended from school for simply writing stories.
The one boy who took his assignment to write a horror story to the point of describing a chainsaw attack on the main character's teacher. He was suspended.
Virtual violence in video games and movies are being analyzed for their effect on our psyches. Cyber-rape was first discussed a year or two ago in regards to MUDs. What is reality? Is the spoon really there?
. . . with the specific goal of destroying the market for home digital audio recorders.
Hmmmm, while I don't doubt that AHRA was not a consumer friendly law, I do doubt that my congressional representative voted for something that had a 'specific goal' of 'destroying the market'. I can't imagine how those debates would go.
As a White-Wolf loyalist, the WoD Storyteller system was taken from Ars Magica, but the Mage construct which covers a hell of a lot more than just cyber-mages (blessed Euthanatos, I know many who deserve the your attention), is all Mark Reinhagan(sp).
Slashdot Mirror
When I am rich, I will have a room devoted to the display of my books, and I will call this room my Library or Study.
One of the first things I do when I walk into someone's house is look at the books on their shelves. If there are no books, I note that as well. An ebook will never compare. Yes, the bulk will be gone. No longer would I have to worry about being wealthy enough to devote an entire room just to the storage of books. All I have to worry about is magnetic fields wiping out my 'database' of books.
The nice feature would be being able to call up the book anywhere in the house. So the aforementioned bathtub scenario could be as easy as saying, 'Computer - Tale of two Cities, last accessed page'
There will have to be some pretty amazing advances that creates equivalent items before paper books go out of style. Will it happen? Yes, we only have so many trees to turn into books.
With the proliferation of many different messenger systems, all those AIMers are going to be cut off from their friends who use MSN/Yahoo/ICQ. The motivation to use AIM diminishes as other messengers take off. So instead of AOL joining the community at large, they are creating a substantial, yet isolated community. It is a stupid mistake in the issue of a greater diverse internet. A smart move in the issue of keeping a captive audience. But in the end, they are just shooting themselves in the foot because if you are using AOL, you really don't need AIM to communicate to other AOLers but you will need another messenger to chat with your friends on MSN.
AOL just has a large enough ego to think these companies are clamoring to gain access to their herd of people. That may be partially true, but I believe it is more about these other applications trying to give their users as much versatility as possible, something AOL should think about.
The point is, the advertising is going to be there. Whether it is the big Starbucks sign in the cafeteria, the Coke logo on the scoreboard, or a banner ad on the intranet.
Even the terminology used to describe acts of reading seem to take us away from the silicon world. For example, you curl up with a good book. This implies there is a real connection between reading and comfort.
Oddly, e-books have the potential of being able to go more places than real books. An e-book can be made to be water proof so you can read comfortably in the bathtub, pool, or shower without fear of soggy pages. But at the end of the day, it is the excitement of turning the next page to see what is going to happen, the smell of the paper, the heft and prestige of a good book that will keep them alive.
Imagine a time when Crime and Punishment or War and Peace have the same weight as Harliquin Romance vol. #666. Also, as a train rider, I love to look to see what other people are reading. If everyone has e-books, I would never know that really cute girl is actually reading a compilation of Lovecraft or just another Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Let the e-books come, but don't expect them to take over.
I do agree on putting limits, adding bottlenecks, just to protect areas of actual research and education from the fun and games of Napster (and other file sharing software).
The other thing you'll have to keep in mind that if Napster is banned, then the students will go back to ftp and hunting for the brief MP3 websites that appear and disappear. IRC trading will increase and bandwidth will still be affected.
And hopefully, those companies that have cut a deal will see an increase in sales. Universal, hopefully, will see a decline in popularity of its artists, leaving the artists no choice but to cut seperate deals with MP3.com moving us closer to switching the middleman from super greedy record label to super greedy dot.com company.
Seeing they already do this in central Illinois, I am fairly certain they did their market research and are comfortable that they will be able to make a small profit at least, or run it at cost as a non-profit service. If the latter is the case, the community may kick in some bucks to support the infrastructure.
Of course, I find it interesting I too once used Bertrand Russel and Ayn Rand in debates against religion. Isaac Asimov was a friend in many a creationist debates. As age settles in on some of us, we sometimes seek comfort in mysticism. It gives us some sense of hope, even if it is false. As my father said, the cruelist thing you can do to a person is take away their hope.
I think pagan/occult type people are drawn to the technological fields. Essentially, (boy, now I'm really laying it on thick) the tech fields are the closest thing we have to a meritocracy where you are judged by what you are capable of doing not who you are or what God/dess you do or don't worship.
I think there is another factor in regards to this subject. When I was younger, I was a devote atheist. The concept of any Divine Figure was absurd to me. As I got older, there was too many things that could't be explained properly any other way except through a mystical/religious element. These things were all touchy/feely kinds of issues that you can't gather imperical evidence on. Because of my past beliefs, I was more open to hearing from different religions and belief structures which then led me down the path to a pagan belief.
I am also going to blame roleplaying games a bit in this process, because of D&D I was exposed to the concept of entire Worlds devoted to occultism.
I'm wondering if the technology allows for repeaters, essentially maintaining line of site through a third antenna. In Montana, where mountains can run down the middle of communities, the community antenna could be LOS with the mountain top which could then feed out to the rest of the community. If this is possible, what are the potential weather effects on one's internet connection.
I'd like to see these tests run again (or just looked at again) and count the number of colors that the color shifted but was only a slight degree. I understand why the colorshift is a factor as I had to design a website using frames that a .gif of a solid color had to match the BGROUND color of an adjacent frame in order to look correct. I suffered the subtle shifting problem and had to keep switching colors to get it right. What was worse was I only had the choice of dark blues and light grays.
But I think that is a rare problem as most of the time, as they mentioned in their article, transparency can be used to allow the BGROUND color come through and you will have a direct match.
I don't mean to be cruel to these users, but at some point in time designers have to stop designing for the lowest common denominator and move up to the second lowest common denominator.
In the end, the best thing a designer can do is to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Too many colors too much going on will cause it to look bad on someone's machine.
Because I am a stickler for citation, I appreciate your questioning of this element. Here is a link to the news story I mentioned.
Currently I use a similar variation where I have an account at one bank with a debit card and I only keep a small amount of money in there for online buying. This could be made easier if I could just transfer money to a temporary number while I am shopping, use that number and never have to worry about who has sniffed that number. It would also make tracking my online purchases easier as I would get one statement listing all my debits from my account to temp numbers and a list of the amount of money stored on the temp numbers.
So, once again, my basic question is why?
The Knights Templar organization is accredited for developing the concept of a bank. Money deposited in England was represented by a chit and that chit could be given to a Templar Citadel anywhere in exchange for an equal amount of money.
The analogy is about the non-national nature of the organization, not about its decline or use in occultic references in today's era.
Of course the next step is to shut down those personal storage sites, which will occur right about when someone realizes they can transfer files between the lockers and suddenly you don't have to worry about download times on Napster anymore.
I don't mean to bash or rag on Katz. I get annoyed when I see the first fifteen posts to a Katz article ridiculing the article. But I would expect, after doing this for month after month, Katz would take a moment, proof his work, allow someone else to read it and actually think through what he is writing before posting.
I happen to like the subject matter he writes on, I just think he does it in a half-baked, half-hearted, and lackluster fashion, expecting the readers to 'get his point' without him having to 'make his point'.
When I say comparable, I am saying within the same realm as the other settlements, which were actually around $20 million. $118 million is considerably more than that, but drastically less than the $450 million UMG was originally asking for.
The judge reduced the amount drastically because mp3.com was acting with much more care and responsibility than other internet start ups. And I believe the fact that UMG was the only label not to settle out of court, the judge made a ruling comparable to those other settlements.
The ruling, while sucking big time, is relatively fair.
The other question basically is, do independent labels stand a chance in the current environment but will they become much more popular in one in which the music of an independent label is freely distributed, copied, and used by the consumer where the Industry Music is locked down?
I fully admit I am more attracted to underground bands, even when their 'underground' status is actually part of marketing. Who would care about a song if it couldn't be completely enjoyed in all its potential forms?
You may jest, but take into account the number of people being suspended from school for simply writing stories. The one boy who took his assignment to write a horror story to the point of describing a chainsaw attack on the main character's teacher. He was suspended. Virtual violence in video games and movies are being analyzed for their effect on our psyches. Cyber-rape was first discussed a year or two ago in regards to MUDs. What is reality? Is the spoon really there?
Hmmmm, while I don't doubt that AHRA was not a consumer friendly law, I do doubt that my congressional representative voted for something that had a 'specific goal' of 'destroying the market'. I can't imagine how those debates would go.
As a White-Wolf loyalist, the WoD Storyteller system was taken from Ars Magica, but the Mage construct which covers a hell of a lot more than just cyber-mages (blessed Euthanatos, I know many who deserve the your attention), is all Mark Reinhagan(sp).