I was in the studio a couple years ago when Noam Chomsky was recording his latest album. He and Cornell West had a little "talking" rap going on.
Me, I sat off to one side just digging the shit out of it -- these two aged hippies just bopping and rapping like there was no tomorrow.
I stayed late -- long after the session had ended. Noam and West were talking about what it means to be a "radical Christian." West (you'll remember) always refers to himself as a radical Christian. He derives his basic spiritual vibe from Chekhov, Hegel, and Miles Davis.
But Chomsky was tired. He didn't feel much like sparring. He sorta stayed in the corner of the room, his feet up on a ratty sofa, and wondered whether or not there was any Chivas in the little bottle the soundman kept underneath the console.
"No Chivas, Noam," said the soundman.
West laughed at that. "Chivas? You're shitting me."
"Not me, Cornell," said Noam.
"Damn. If you want some badass Hegelian synthesis, I advise Jack, man. Jack D. all the way."
Noam said he hadn't had a shot of Jack Daniels since the march on the Pentagon. Then he laughed and remembered how he and Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsburg sat out on the Washington Mall, burning incense, and screaming "Howl" at the top of their lungs.
Man oh man. I'll never forget that recording session with Noam and Cornell.
Have you ever heard of a thing called a "light meter?"
I've got a 35/2 -- a superb lens. No, it doesn't meter on my crappy N80 -- but I *do* know how to (a)compensate for Sunny 16 and (b) use a light meter.
Besides, the bodies don't matter. It's the lenses. I know a lot of folks who'll trash their bodies, but I've yet to meet *anyone* who trashes lenses. Lenses are the real investment. And if you've got a fetish for a particular lens with a specific kind of film -- you'll reach for any body that fits the lens.
(My own fetish is an old 1960ish Russian Jupiter on a Leica M4-P. The lens is spectacular -- it gives a distinctive *look*.)
I don't feel bad for the first-adopters. They always knew it was a risk, and if you didn't know it was a risk -- you shouldn't be a first adopter.
TIVO was a risk that first year. You coulda bought a 600 dollar paperweight. It's still a risk, in fact.
But what boggles me is that fact that studios are pushing to abolish analog outputs. My question is this: won't this simply spawn a new industry of A/D converter boxes? Or is the digital stream encrypted from tuner end to television end? And if that's the case, then how does the television decrypt the stream? (Is this like CSS, in other words?)
Those National Socialists were working on some wacky shit at the tail end of WWII -- anti-grav, antimatter. You think we just blasted away those factories along the Rhine?
No sir. We *moved* those secret factories -- the machines, the dies, the workers, you name it -- to the deserts of America.
PETA was some wicked shit 50 years ago. PETA today is just a cover to make sure folks don't catch on.
Surely, they're smart enough to do most of their searching from other IP addresses, right?
This may be their business address, but no self-respecting enforcement company is gonna do all their searching and spying from their business IP.
In fact, I'd wager you'd have better luck blocking *all* of AOL, Verizon -- and any other big ISP you can name.
I suspect they, too, tend to overthink their anonymous abilities and probably figure that they can blend in much easier if they get some big-name ISP account (maybe even off-shore) and hit you with what looks like just another script-kiddie attack from just-another big-name ISP IP block. They're probably right in doing it this way, but I bet they leave some pretty tell-tale signs that -- once folks figure it out -- will make them easier to block.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe the anonymity sniffers are really closer to 'anonymous' than the people who think they're surfing anonymously.
Maybe this outfit does indeed have some kickass, wicked spycraft that they're pulling.
This strategy is much like what happened in Oklahoma a few years back: attempting to declare the 1979 film 'The Tin Drum' obscene and then banning it. (And if I recall, some guy was even arrested in his own house for renting a copy of it. Absurd.)
Child pornography, of course, is a terrible, terrible thing, but the precedent that this sets is equally terrible (although in a completely different way.)
If they're doing this, why can't they start arresting and prosecuting Verizon and AT&T for allowing USA-based Al-Queda to talk back and forth? Surely, those six dudes in Buffalo had phone service, and I'll bet they used their phones to talk to each other. Maybe not plot mega-attacks, but at least to chit-chat and laugh at the latest Simpsons episode.
Or maybe terrorists don't "dig" the Simpsons. Just another example of American excess. Or American vulgarity. Or whatever it is that people are decrying America for these days.
And besides -- one final comment -- isn't WorldComm already in enough trouble as it is? Why don't they go after the sites themselves?
I find that if I ingest large quantities of caffeine -- more than 250 mg at one sitting -- that everything seems faster. That'd be me recommendation for increased brain-bandwidth. Or at least the perception of increased bandwidth.
Large quantities of caffeine make me feel like I've got a speed-up control on my forehead and I can tweak it anytime I want. Up, down. Up, down. Up, up, up, down. Up, down.
I also find that huge quanities increase my ability to concentrate on a single thing -- an episode of the Sopranos from my Tivo, for example -- and I swear that it *seems* faster when I'm cranked. Everybody talks faster, cars move faster, Tony beats his bartender over the head with an ice-bucket in hyperspeed. The result is that the episode makes a lot more sense yet seems to go by in light speed.
I'm cranked now, for example. The medicinal Red Bull is residing in my digestive system, marching out all its evil little enzymes into my 'System'.
I feel like Dr. Mullion Blasto.
I feel like I could watch a shitload of TIVO in a split-second.
I think the era of BBS is, in fact, dead and buried.
Why?
Because one of the best things about BBSing was the fact that not everyone was doing it, corporations hadn't discovered it, and Hilary Rosen was still kicking kickballs in the playground.
Any web-based BBS is insane. It misses the point. Maybe you or your 200 users don't feel that way, but now we're all in the shadows of the hegemon(s): Microsoft, Amazon, you name it.
Even in podunk Ames, Iowa -- where I spent a couple years in graduate school -- the BBS scene was alive and well. (I have fond memories of a bbs called GolfSucks...)
True, I didn't exactly want to participate in the numerous "Meet and Greets" for fear of actually, um, meeting some of the people in person I met online, but still: the scene was pretty interesting.
But now?
We all play in the playground under the watchful gaze of Rosen, Valenti, Ballmer, and Gates.
Nor did I spend two years at Evil Graduate School for an MA, two years at Evil Writer's Workshop for an MFA, and six years at Evil Graduate School for a Ph.D., but I don't go around signing my posts as:
Kelso Lundeen, M.A.,M.F.A.,Ph.D.
There's just something off-putting (and tacky) about tacking your credentials on stuff like this. I think it's an attempt by Brin to make sure folks know 'whereof he speaks', but it's annoying.
Strut your shit in your work, not in the byline for chrissake.
I don't want the DMCA SWAT team to come "hup-hup-hupping" their way into my trailer and dragging me off to a SuperMax facility in Colorado for advocating the notion of "squishing DRM".
Squish This Maddog
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
"Squish DRM" equals "Compromise" -- something Jack "Maddog... Grrr!..." Valenti and Hilary Rosen are incapable of understanding in their current, frothy states.
Yeah, but you know you've got the mojo crackerjack when you're a geek in a studio apartment -- and you have a a Murphy bed.
That said, I have to wonder if Bill Gates (for once) was right when he suggested several years ago that "media convergence" isn't really a thing that people want. People want to compute on computers, watch TV on a television, and watch movies in a movie theater. Converging the three into the single PC -- or the PC breakout box hooked up to a PC -- is nifty and very George Jetson-like (and who can forget his boy Elroy spiralling down from the old man's hoverbug in a mini-hoverbug of his very own?) -- but it seems that technology (in this case and others [palladium and MS's MediaPC's especially) is thinking too far ahead for its own good.
Watching TV on a computer is (for me, at least) much like reading e-books on a palm or an Ipaq or on the computer screen in a library -- it gets the job done, yes, but it's not very enjoyable. (I'm trying to figure out why the only ebooks I'm able read at any length are non-fiction. I can't, for example, bring myself to read fiction electronically. It seems, well, not right. And not comfortable. Yet I can sit on my little ragged sofa -- feet up, trusty Bawls soda beside me -- and can read deadtree fiction until the cows come home. But that's another story for another day...)
Whatever happened to Indrema, BTW? I know they closed and went out of business, but for some reason I thought they'd written a bunch of code and given it out under GPL after they went under...
Anyway, no one hardly talks about this stuff here -- reading deadwood books (not that there's any particular reason to) -- but I just thought I'd add my two cents.
Um, exactly what part of 'not that there's any particular reason to' didn't you understand?
Actually, I encourage Microsoft's work on Palladium.
Why?
Because it will herald a great (and much needed) rebirth of "personal computing." It'll launch (IMHO) a fairly comprehensive reassessment and reappraisal of why we use computers in the first place. And it'll most likely start a significant portion of us back on (or near) square one -- the late 1970's where the notion of "personal computing" really took off.
I'm serious. For those of us alive in the late 70's, it was a great time to be a "hobbyist." There weren't geeks and no real "hackers" or "script-kiddies". Just a bunch of people who -- especially here in America -- shared a common passion for building little boxes out of solder, wires, and circuit boards so that -- after everything was assembled correctly -- we could watch a couple lights blink on and off.
Later, once stuff like the TRS-80 and AppleII gained ground, it was really pretty cool. I still remember hanging out in the arcades and trying to write stuff like a TRS-80 version of Pac Man or Donkey Kong in Z80 assembly language with -- what? -- 127 X 47 blocky, black and white graphics.
(Insert snide comment here about old, outdated graphics, but if you do, you miss the point.)
I see this sort of "community hobbyism" in the Linux community (even though they don't call it that) but I think if Microsoft pushes forth this Palladium, we'll see a pretty significant split between those who embrace whatever new technology comes down the pike and those who take a hard look at where we've been and what we've achieved vis a vis Palladium and realize that better technology doesn't necessarily mean much. It means better technology, maybe, but it certainly doesn't herald or promised a better "user experience."
Palladium will also, I think, significant a fairly radical leap in the notion of "personal computing." This DRM technology is not personal computing. It's corporate computing. There's nothing personal about it. There's not much fun about it either. It leaves the "hobbyists" -- now called geeks, I guess -- out in the cold and looking toward all the nifty retro-tech.
The retro-tech movement, I think, will be stronger than ever if Palladium -- or something like it -- comes to pass. What that means -- retro-tech -- I'm not entirely sure, but I think it will be a gradual awareness that "good enough" really is "good enough" and something along the lines of "personal computing is dead, long live personal computing!"
But this isn't a problem either -- the idea of Digital Rights Denial.
I simply won't buy (and won't play) their movies.
Besides, think about it: how much do you really want to watch movies on your computer anyway? I'll gladly play DVDs on my big-ass television, go to the theater, or -- gasp! -- read a book.
Actually, this is slightly off-topic, but all this DRM has been one reason I've been staying *away* from all things computer as much as possible. I've been rediscovering the pleasures of reading -- reading actual books, not encrypted PDF files -- and (again, GASP!) I really like it.
This isn't the only reason I'm trying to make an effort to reconnect with deadwood books, but it's got me thinking -- especially as I'm sitting outside on a sunny day with my feet up -- how much I enjoyed reading as a kid (pre-computer days, BTW) and how little I've done it recently.
Stuff I've read recently:
- Virginia Woolf _Orlando_
- Ursula LeGuin, _Left Hand of Darkness_
- Joseph Conrad, _Under Western Eyes_
- Tolstoy, _Hadji Murad_ (You think this stuff with Russia and the Chechens is news? Try reading Hadji Murad. You realize it's been going on for over a hundred years.)
- Robert Jordan, first WOT book
- Robert E. Howard/L Sprague deCamp, a couple old Conan books I dug up in my boyhood box of books
- Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Levinky_ (Great book about coming to America at the turn of the century and growing up in NYC)
- Henry Roth, _Call it Sleep_ (Another great coming-of-age story. Coming to America from Europe.)
- W.G. Sebald _The Rings of Saturn_ (sort of a Borges meets Bruce Chatwin -- fascinating and very eerie.)
- Frank Herbert _Dune_ (Never read it. Loved it!)
- Heinrich Boll, _The Silent Angel_ (German soldier comes home and in the final days of WWII finds his hometown in ruins. Powerful, powerful book -- very moving, very sad.)
- Camus, The Stranger (Wow. Never read this either. Sat down and read it straight through. Renault is one interesting dude. This is the book where he kills an Arab for no (apparent) reason. But I guess that's the question: why did he kill the Arab on the beach?)
Anyway, no one hardly talks about this stuff here -- reading deadwood books (not that there's any particular reason to) -- but I just thought I'd add my two cents. I sincerely believe that the end result of any DRM technology is an intense, intense interest in retro-technology. Not that books are exactly retro, but you know what I mean. A rediscovery of all the cool things that Microsoft and Intel brainwashed us into thinking were dead -- the "good enough" technology.
Take the RIAA. The thing that's gonna kill the RIAA -- and put it to rest for good -- isn't going to be digital. It's going to be retro-tech: today's "old" CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes. People will rediscover this stuff -- the stuff that we look upon as "retro" -- and realize, look, this is all we need. This is what we want.
Microsoft's HomeTheaterPC will be proof-of-concept here. Of *course* it will fail. It will fail because (a) it's too expensive, (b) it's too restrictive, and (c) Gates was right when he said people don't want to watch TV on their computers. But that's not all: it will fail because it's overkill. All you really need is, um, an old television set and a VCR. That'll work. And maybe a cheapo DVD player to play films. College students, for example. What college student is gonna spend $1500 on a box like that? No one. Especially not when most folks realize that "retro"-tech -- the boring old VCR, the cheapo DVD -- is good enough.
Ditto for this "speak to a live representative" stuff. No one wants to interact with stupid phone trees. No one ever did, in fact, but companies figured they could get an even *bigger* profit in the boom-90s if they fired their phone reps and gave the bored 20-something dot-commers (comers? cummers?) something to do.
Now that the bored dot-coms are realizing that, yeah, they really do need to finish out those four years of college and that, well, four years of college is not so bad when you -- and most anyone else -- can pretty much laze on the green grass in the quad in front of the library and play hacky-sack and beat bongos and eat falafils and make bead necklaces and read Tacitus and Schopenhauer and get decent enough grades without a lot of pressure and get laid and smooch and suck and spend Sunday afternoon sleeping hard in a pretty comfortable bed in a pretty decent dorm with a not-too-shabby OC3 on a Big-10 American campus is, well, not a bad way to spend four years. I did it, and I'd wager most folks here did it -- and, for the most part, enjoyed it.
Why rush through the four or five or five and half years and get to -- what? -- the place where that guy on Startup.com got to and then realized that just as he could sit back and enjoy it and brag about how he rode his dirt bike down the aisle at the annual Starbucks shareholder convention and pretend like he was really changing the world -- why rush through it all and get to this -- riding a dumb bike down a red carpeted aisle in an auditorium filled with suits -- when you can pretty much sit back and coast and actually spend four or five years that are undeniably low-key, filled with booze and guilt-free sex and, for the most part, pretty damn enjoyable?
It is because of this -- these reasons and others -- that the RIAA and Jack "Maddog... Grrr!" Valenti of the MPAA are doomed. Their doomed because people are realizing that retro is okay. It's not bad. It may not be new and shiny and chromey and expensive, but it's cool and gets the job done and works fine when it's late on a Satuday night and you need to put something on the stereo with the boring old two Bose speakers because you've got that someone special sitting on the edge of your bed, looking at your lips and getting ready to give you a smooch that could, conceiably, change your life.
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I was in the studio a couple years ago when Noam Chomsky was recording his latest album. He and Cornell West had a little "talking" rap going on.
Me, I sat off to one side just digging the shit out of it -- these two aged hippies just bopping and rapping like there was no tomorrow.
I stayed late -- long after the session had ended. Noam and West were talking about what it means to be a "radical Christian." West (you'll remember) always refers to himself as a radical Christian. He derives his basic spiritual vibe from Chekhov, Hegel, and Miles Davis.
But Chomsky was tired. He didn't feel much like sparring. He sorta stayed in the corner of the room, his feet up on a ratty sofa, and wondered whether or not there was any Chivas in the little bottle the soundman kept underneath the console.
"No Chivas, Noam," said the soundman.
West laughed at that. "Chivas? You're shitting me."
"Not me, Cornell," said Noam.
"Damn. If you want some badass Hegelian synthesis, I advise Jack, man. Jack D. all the way."
Noam said he hadn't had a shot of Jack Daniels since the march on the Pentagon. Then he laughed and remembered how he and Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsburg sat out on the Washington Mall, burning incense, and screaming "Howl" at the top of their lungs.
Man oh man. I'll never forget that recording session with Noam and Cornell.
Damn.
Try: ActiveWin.com
Get real.
Have you ever heard of a thing called a "light meter?"
I've got a 35/2 -- a superb lens. No, it doesn't meter on my crappy N80 -- but I *do* know how to (a)compensate for Sunny 16 and (b) use a light meter.
Besides, the bodies don't matter. It's the lenses. I know a lot of folks who'll trash their bodies, but I've yet to meet *anyone* who trashes lenses. Lenses are the real investment. And if you've got a fetish for a particular lens with a specific kind of film -- you'll reach for any body that fits the lens.
(My own fetish is an old 1960ish Russian Jupiter on a Leica M4-P. The lens is spectacular -- it gives a distinctive *look*.)
I don't feel bad for the first-adopters. They always knew it was a risk, and if you didn't know it was a risk -- you shouldn't be a first adopter.
TIVO was a risk that first year. You coulda bought a 600 dollar paperweight. It's still a risk, in fact.
But what boggles me is that fact that studios are pushing to abolish analog outputs. My question is this: won't this simply spawn a new industry of A/D converter boxes? Or is the digital stream encrypted from tuner end to television end? And if that's the case, then how does the television decrypt the stream? (Is this like CSS, in other words?)
Confused.
Whatever happened to Bob and Doug MacKenzie.
They were from Canada, had freedom, and lots of beer.
Black ops. Hush hush.
Here's the secret:
PETA.
People for the Ethical Treatment of ALIENS.
Remember Roswell? Project Blue Book?
Those National Socialists were working on some wacky shit at the tail end of WWII -- anti-grav, antimatter. You think we just blasted away those factories along the Rhine?
No sir. We *moved* those secret factories -- the machines, the dies, the workers, you name it -- to the deserts of America.
PETA was some wicked shit 50 years ago. PETA today is just a cover to make sure folks don't catch on.
That's interesting reponse: the idea of leaving.
And the answer is equally interesting: to where?
Times really *have* changed when *Americans* might soon face the choice of having freedoms curtailed or lighting out for better shores.
But the question remains: where?
Where do Americans go when they want freedom?
I mean, I don't see the Statue of Liberty standing in any other harbor.
That blows my mind.
Surely, they're smart enough to do most of their searching from other IP addresses, right?
This may be their business address, but no self-respecting enforcement company is gonna do all their searching and spying from their business IP.
In fact, I'd wager you'd have better luck blocking *all* of AOL, Verizon -- and any other big ISP you can name.
I suspect they, too, tend to overthink their anonymous abilities and probably figure that they can blend in much easier if they get some big-name ISP account (maybe even off-shore) and hit you with what looks like just another script-kiddie attack from just-another big-name ISP IP block. They're probably right in doing it this way, but I bet they leave some pretty tell-tale signs that -- once folks figure it out -- will make them easier to block.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe the anonymity sniffers are really closer to 'anonymous' than the people who think they're surfing anonymously.
Maybe this outfit does indeed have some kickass, wicked spycraft that they're pulling.
Agreed.
This strategy is much like what happened in Oklahoma a few years back: attempting to declare the 1979 film 'The Tin Drum' obscene and then banning it. (And if I recall, some guy was even arrested in his own house for renting a copy of it. Absurd.)
Child pornography, of course, is a terrible, terrible thing, but the precedent that this sets is equally terrible (although in a completely different way.)
If they're doing this, why can't they start arresting and prosecuting Verizon and AT&T for allowing USA-based Al-Queda to talk back and forth? Surely, those six dudes in Buffalo had phone service, and I'll bet they used their phones to talk to each other. Maybe not plot mega-attacks, but at least to chit-chat and laugh at the latest Simpsons episode.
Or maybe terrorists don't "dig" the Simpsons. Just another example of American excess. Or American vulgarity. Or whatever it is that people are decrying America for these days.
And besides -- one final comment -- isn't WorldComm already in enough trouble as it is? Why don't they go after the sites themselves?
OMG.
That's so fucking true.
It's like if you speed up a movie camera, you essentially shoot slow-mo, right? (If it's played back at normal speed?)
Wow.
That changes everything. My poor fucking brain. I gotta take another Red Bull and think this over.
Yeah, two cans of RedBull and a double-espresso.
I find that if I ingest large quantities of caffeine -- more than 250 mg at one sitting -- that everything seems faster. That'd be me recommendation for increased brain-bandwidth. Or at least the perception of increased bandwidth.
Large quantities of caffeine make me feel like I've got a speed-up control on my forehead and I can tweak it anytime I want. Up, down. Up, down. Up, up, up, down. Up, down.
I also find that huge quanities increase my ability to concentrate on a single thing -- an episode of the Sopranos from my Tivo, for example -- and I swear that it *seems* faster when I'm cranked. Everybody talks faster, cars move faster, Tony beats his bartender over the head with an ice-bucket in hyperspeed. The result is that the episode makes a lot more sense yet seems to go by in light speed.
I'm cranked now, for example. The medicinal Red Bull is residing in my digestive system, marching out all its evil little enzymes into my 'System'.
I feel like Dr. Mullion Blasto.
I feel like I could watch a shitload of TIVO in a split-second.
Too much stimulation in the System, I guess.
I think the era of BBS is, in fact, dead and buried.
Why?
Because one of the best things about BBSing was the fact that not everyone was doing it, corporations hadn't discovered it, and Hilary Rosen was still kicking kickballs in the playground.
Any web-based BBS is insane. It misses the point. Maybe you or your 200 users don't feel that way, but now we're all in the shadows of the hegemon(s): Microsoft, Amazon, you name it.
Even in podunk Ames, Iowa -- where I spent a couple years in graduate school -- the BBS scene was alive and well. (I have fond memories of a bbs called GolfSucks...)
True, I didn't exactly want to participate in the numerous "Meet and Greets" for fear of actually, um, meeting some of the people in person I met online, but still: the scene was pretty interesting.
But now?
We all play in the playground under the watchful gaze of Rosen, Valenti, Ballmer, and Gates.
It ain't fun no mo', friend.
Nor did I spend two years at Evil Graduate School for an MA, two years at Evil Writer's Workshop for an MFA, and six years at Evil Graduate School for a Ph.D., but I don't go around signing my posts as:
Kelso Lundeen, M.A.,M.F.A.,Ph.D.
There's just something off-putting (and tacky) about tacking your credentials on stuff like this. I think it's an attempt by Brin to make sure folks know 'whereof he speaks', but it's annoying.
Strut your shit in your work, not in the byline for chrissake.
I don't know.
You know you're in trouble whenever anybody lists ',Ph.D.' after their name.
Or, even worse, when a 'Ph.D.' insists they be called: "Dr."
Ugh.
Yeah, the classic example is this:
A) The King dies, then the queen dies.
B) The King dies *because* the queen dies.
(A) is a story, (B) is a plot.
Of course, there's no conflict in (B), but you can certainly add most any type of conflict and still preserve the plot.
Make that "squishy DRM" not "squish DRM".
I don't want the DMCA SWAT team to come "hup-hup-hupping" their way into my trailer and dragging me off to a SuperMax facility in Colorado for advocating the notion of "squishing DRM".
"Squish DRM" equals "Compromise" -- something Jack "Maddog ... Grrr! ..." Valenti and Hilary Rosen are incapable of understanding in their current, frothy states.
Yeah, but you know you've got the mojo crackerjack when you're a geek in a studio apartment -- and you have a a Murphy bed.
...)
That said, I have to wonder if Bill Gates (for once) was right when he suggested several years ago that "media convergence" isn't really a thing that people want. People want to compute on computers, watch TV on a television, and watch movies in a movie theater. Converging the three into the single PC -- or the PC breakout box hooked up to a PC -- is nifty and very George Jetson-like (and who can forget his boy Elroy spiralling down from the old man's hoverbug in a mini-hoverbug of his very own?) -- but it seems that technology (in this case and others [palladium and MS's MediaPC's especially) is thinking too far ahead for its own good.
Watching TV on a computer is (for me, at least) much like reading e-books on a palm or an Ipaq or on the computer screen in a library -- it gets the job done, yes, but it's not very enjoyable. (I'm trying to figure out why the only ebooks I'm able read at any length are non-fiction. I can't, for example, bring myself to read fiction electronically. It seems, well, not right. And not comfortable. Yet I can sit on my little ragged sofa -- feet up, trusty Bawls soda beside me -- and can read deadtree fiction until the cows come home. But that's another story for another day
I bet this one will be as popular as Indrema.
Whatever happened to Indrema, BTW? I know they closed and went out of business, but for some reason I thought they'd written a bunch of code and given it out under GPL after they went under...
Don't forget about the smoke in Asylum I for the TRS-80. This predates the ZX81 by a year or so.
DeathMaze 5000, Asylum I and II were (possibly) the original first person shooters.
Um, exactly what part of 'not that there's any particular reason to' didn't you understand?
Actually, I encourage Microsoft's work on Palladium.
Why?
Because it will herald a great (and much needed) rebirth of "personal computing." It'll launch (IMHO) a fairly comprehensive reassessment and reappraisal of why we use computers in the first place. And it'll most likely start a significant portion of us back on (or near) square one -- the late 1970's where the notion of "personal computing" really took off.
I'm serious. For those of us alive in the late 70's, it was a great time to be a "hobbyist." There weren't geeks and no real "hackers" or "script-kiddies". Just a bunch of people who -- especially here in America -- shared a common passion for building little boxes out of solder, wires, and circuit boards so that -- after everything was assembled correctly -- we could watch a couple lights blink on and off.
Later, once stuff like the TRS-80 and AppleII gained ground, it was really pretty cool. I still remember hanging out in the arcades and trying to write stuff like a TRS-80 version of Pac Man or Donkey Kong in Z80 assembly language with -- what? -- 127 X 47 blocky, black and white graphics.
(Insert snide comment here about old, outdated graphics, but if you do, you miss the point.)
I see this sort of "community hobbyism" in the Linux community (even though they don't call it that) but I think if Microsoft pushes forth this Palladium, we'll see a pretty significant split between those who embrace whatever new technology comes down the pike and those who take a hard look at where we've been and what we've achieved vis a vis Palladium and realize that better technology doesn't necessarily mean much. It means better technology, maybe, but it certainly doesn't herald or promised a better "user experience."
Palladium will also, I think, significant a fairly radical leap in the notion of "personal computing." This DRM technology is not personal computing. It's corporate computing. There's nothing personal about it. There's not much fun about it either. It leaves the "hobbyists" -- now called geeks, I guess -- out in the cold and looking toward all the nifty retro-tech.
The retro-tech movement, I think, will be stronger than ever if Palladium -- or something like it -- comes to pass. What that means -- retro-tech -- I'm not entirely sure, but I think it will be a gradual awareness that "good enough" really is "good enough" and something along the lines of "personal computing is dead, long live personal computing!"
But this isn't a problem either -- the idea of Digital Rights Denial.
I simply won't buy (and won't play) their movies.
Besides, think about it: how much do you really want to watch movies on your computer anyway? I'll gladly play DVDs on my big-ass television, go to the theater, or -- gasp! -- read a book.
Actually, this is slightly off-topic, but all this DRM has been one reason I've been staying *away* from all things computer as much as possible. I've been rediscovering the pleasures of reading -- reading actual books, not encrypted PDF files -- and (again, GASP!) I really like it.
This isn't the only reason I'm trying to make an effort to reconnect with deadwood books, but it's got me thinking -- especially as I'm sitting outside on a sunny day with my feet up -- how much I enjoyed reading as a kid (pre-computer days, BTW) and how little I've done it recently.
Stuff I've read recently:
- Virginia Woolf _Orlando_
- Ursula LeGuin, _Left Hand of Darkness_
- Joseph Conrad, _Under Western Eyes_
- Tolstoy, _Hadji Murad_ (You think this stuff with Russia and the Chechens is news? Try reading Hadji Murad. You realize it's been going on for over a hundred years.)
- Robert Jordan, first WOT book
- Robert E. Howard/L Sprague deCamp, a couple old Conan books I dug up in my boyhood box of books
- Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Levinky_ (Great book about coming to America at the turn of the century and growing up in NYC)
- Henry Roth, _Call it Sleep_ (Another great coming-of-age story. Coming to America from Europe.)
- W.G. Sebald _The Rings of Saturn_ (sort of a Borges meets Bruce Chatwin -- fascinating and very eerie.)
- Frank Herbert _Dune_ (Never read it. Loved it!)
- Heinrich Boll, _The Silent Angel_ (German soldier comes home and in the final days of WWII finds his hometown in ruins. Powerful, powerful book -- very moving, very sad.)
- Camus, The Stranger (Wow. Never read this either. Sat down and read it straight through. Renault is one interesting dude. This is the book where he kills an Arab for no (apparent) reason. But I guess that's the question: why did he kill the Arab on the beach?)
Anyway, no one hardly talks about this stuff here -- reading deadwood books (not that there's any particular reason to) -- but I just thought I'd add my two cents. I sincerely believe that the end result of any DRM technology is an intense, intense interest in retro-technology. Not that books are exactly retro, but you know what I mean. A rediscovery of all the cool things that Microsoft and Intel brainwashed us into thinking were dead -- the "good enough" technology.
Link doesn't work.
Can you repost?
Everything that's old is new again? This is news.
... Grrr!" Valenti of the MPAA are doomed. Their doomed because people are realizing that retro is okay. It's not bad. It may not be new and shiny and chromey and expensive, but it's cool and gets the job done and works fine when it's late on a Satuday night and you need to put something on the stereo with the boring old two Bose speakers because you've got that someone special sitting on the edge of your bed, looking at your lips and getting ready to give you a smooch that could, conceiably, change your life.
Cripes. I've been saying this for years.
Take the RIAA. The thing that's gonna kill the RIAA -- and put it to rest for good -- isn't going to be digital. It's going to be retro-tech: today's "old" CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes. People will rediscover this stuff -- the stuff that we look upon as "retro" -- and realize, look, this is all we need. This is what we want.
Microsoft's HomeTheaterPC will be proof-of-concept here. Of *course* it will fail. It will fail because (a) it's too expensive, (b) it's too restrictive, and (c) Gates was right when he said people don't want to watch TV on their computers. But that's not all: it will fail because it's overkill. All you really need is, um, an old television set and a VCR. That'll work. And maybe a cheapo DVD player to play films. College students, for example. What college student is gonna spend $1500 on a box like that? No one. Especially not when most folks realize that "retro"-tech -- the boring old VCR, the cheapo DVD -- is good enough.
Ditto for this "speak to a live representative" stuff. No one wants to interact with stupid phone trees. No one ever did, in fact, but companies figured they could get an even *bigger* profit in the boom-90s if they fired their phone reps and gave the bored 20-something dot-commers (comers? cummers?) something to do.
Now that the bored dot-coms are realizing that, yeah, they really do need to finish out those four years of college and that, well, four years of college is not so bad when you -- and most anyone else -- can pretty much laze on the green grass in the quad in front of the library and play hacky-sack and beat bongos and eat falafils and make bead necklaces and read Tacitus and Schopenhauer and get decent enough grades without a lot of pressure and get laid and smooch and suck and spend Sunday afternoon sleeping hard in a pretty comfortable bed in a pretty decent dorm with a not-too-shabby OC3 on a Big-10 American campus is, well, not a bad way to spend four years. I did it, and I'd wager most folks here did it -- and, for the most part, enjoyed it.
Why rush through the four or five or five and half years and get to -- what? -- the place where that guy on Startup.com got to and then realized that just as he could sit back and enjoy it and brag about how he rode his dirt bike down the aisle at the annual Starbucks shareholder convention and pretend like he was really changing the world -- why rush through it all and get to this -- riding a dumb bike down a red carpeted aisle in an auditorium filled with suits -- when you can pretty much sit back and coast and actually spend four or five years that are undeniably low-key, filled with booze and guilt-free sex and, for the most part, pretty damn enjoyable?
It is because of this -- these reasons and others -- that the RIAA and Jack "Maddog
Or at least your weekend.