You might as well get used to staying around home. The security and safety problems with air transportation are just part of the problem with long-distance travel. There's also the problem of decreasing fuel supplies/increasing costs, and the ecosuicidal problem of pollution and climate change. Has anyone else noticed that air carriers keep going out of business? Maybe it simply isn't a viable business anymore.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, within the current generation's lifetime, long-distance travel again became fairly uncommon, and the late-20th-century jet-set boom turned out to be an historical blip. Fortunately we now have global communication, so people wouldn't exactly be cut off from the rest of the world like in the 19th century and before... but physical travel may become a luxury. And the global manufacturing economy? Could be strictly a short-term phenomenon, with it eventually becoming cheaper and safer to make things in Toledo rather than ship them in from Thailand. P.S. Be nice to your local farmer; you may end up depending on him to produce food for you.
Batteries are only part of the problem with wirelessness. There's factors like performance and reliability that go to hell when you lose the wires.
(Non-technical) people keep suggesting that the college I work for "go wireless" for our networking... not grasping that we'd be replacing a switched 100Mbps line to every computer (with 1Gbps only a wiring-closet upgrade away) with shared wireless spectrum that tops out at 54Mbps and requires encryption, access limits, etc. People ask why I never call anyone from my mobile phone, and instead go find a landline instead... it's because I want to be able to hear and be heard. Why do you think most of the civilized world switched from wireless television to cable?
Buy a clue people: in almost any category of technology, wireless sucks compared to wired. And getting rid of a slender cable from my mouse or keyboard to my monitor is not worth it.
"256 levels of pressure is not going to cut it for pro work."
<sarcasm>Right, because before Wacom upped their tablets to 512 levels of pressure, no one was able to produce any professional-level work with them.</sarcasm> For, say, an illustrator doing linework (i.e. working in greyscale), 256 levels is certainly adequate.
"The Wacom tablet with the built-in display is a tablet PC done right."
Except that the Cintiq's are too bulky to use on your lap; working on a desk-mounted tablet loses a lot of the nudge-it-clockwise-for-a-better-angle benefit. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to have one, but the reason I haven't saved up my nickels and bought one is the fact that it's still a not-quite-there-yet solution. Until the technology improves to the point that I can draw with a stylus on a computer as naturally as easily I can draw on paper with a pencil, I'll continue buying pads of Strathmore bristol, keep the Microtek warmed up, and use my Intuos for clean-up, coloring, etc.
"And, you can definitely rotate [off-monitor tablets], and rotate your screen. "
I think you may be missing the point: rotating a drawing tablet isn't a simple portrait-vs.-landscape thing; it's about being able to turn the thing you're drawing on 37 degrees clockwise to get a better angle drawing a curve, then rotating it 62 degrees counterclockwise to draw a line from a more comfortable angle, etc. A good tablet/display would make that practical; whereas separate tablets and displays don't.
"(you can't of course hear it at all if you're over 25 or so, as you age you lose the ability to hear in those outlier frequency ranges)."
I'm old enough to have children who are over 25*, and I heard that painfully clearly. I'll probably lose that range eventually, but you really gotta stop believing that "everyone older than me is decrepit" nonsense.
If every piece about which someone once said "that's not art" were removed from the art museums of the world, it would leave acres of empty walls. Pop art, environmental art, de Stijl, Expressionist, Fauve, Impressionist, Surreal, Dada, Cubist... were all dismissed as "not art". And many of the great classic works were done in styles or with techniques that were - at first - dismissed as "bad art". I don't go quite so far as the folks who claim that anything the artist declares to be art is art, but the flip side of the coin, simply saying that something isn't art doesn't make that so, either.
"The other problem is that I and possibly other people prefer hard-wired art, you know, the good ol' idea of art provoking emotions, not responding to them."
What exactly is the "problem" with this? Some people prefer art consisting of pretty landscapes, some prefer art symbolizing man's eternal struggle to understand himself, some prefer art featuring dogs playing poker, some prefer art that abstractly conveys the artist's mood, and some prefer art that involves the viewer in the creation itself. I don't think anyone was suggesting that you be required to replace your Rembrandt prints or Rothko imitations with empathic digital images, so what's the "problem" if this sort of thing exists too?
A piece of electronics is most likely to fail in the first several weeks or months of its life; a 386 motherboard with RAM, an NE2000 card, and a power supply (now without a hard drive or regular diskette drive activity to support) that haven't failed in 10+ years are going to have a MTBF going forward from today that's pretty darn long. (The floppy drive is a little more iffy, but the only time it gets used is after a power outage.) If any component on my homebrew print server ever does fail, and I can't pull a replacement part out of a box, I'll spring $50 for an overpriced device containing the equivalent components in a cute little box, like you describe. Until then, I'll just keep that $50 in the bank (or, to be honest, try to remember the beer and pizza I spent it on) and enjoy the free print server I've been using for the past several years.
"...if you don't mind using a cheap netgear print server..."
Heck, if you have a 386 box with an ethernet card and a floppy drive sitting around, you can turn any laser printer with a parallel port into a "network" printer, without even spending a dime: print server on a diskette
"The best value for money in laser printers is a single-digit HP Laserjet off of eBay."
A few years ago I replaced a late-1980s-vintage LaserJet III (which I think qualifies as "single digit" {smile}) in the marketing department of the business I worked for at the time. The thing still functioned, but they needed something with more processing power and RAM for complex page layouts, and wanted something that could spit out more than single-digits-per-minute copies. I would've taken it home with me, except that I knew I wouldn't be able to carry it from the car to my apartment.
I work now for a college where there's a LaserJet 5 in an unattended open computer lab, where it's been abused like hell for years. The paper-feed mechanism's getting a bit dodgy, but put a short stack of paper in the bypass tray and it works just fine.
Invisibility is already possible. The underlying principle behind it is not technological or mystical but sociological. See the works of Ralph Ellison ("Invisible Man"), Kate Clinton ("In Search of the Invisible Lesbian"), and Grant Morrison ("The Invisibles") for more info.
"I am also willing to bet the average person has been a shitty writer for a lot longer than the last 2 decades."
Of course: it didn't start with the introduction of the IBM PC or the Apple Mac; it goes back to the introduction of TV and to a lesser extent radio. The "average person" (middle-class, high-school graduate) from the early 20th century used to read the news, and maybe even his entertainment. But today he probably gets most of his news from TV and/or radio, and what reading he does is the unfiltered, unedited stuff of blogs and chat. His father's writing was poor, his is shitty, and his son's is going to be abysmal. The only up-side is that his son's going to be a lot more "computer literate"... whatever that comes to mean.
I meant "Chaucer or even Shakespeare", referring to the fact that Chaucer is definitely difficult to interpret, but "even Shakespeare" (which is easier) is still too much for many contemporary readers.
No question about it: the correlation between spelling skills and reading history is damn near 1. Writing skills correlate pretty strongly with one's reading history as well. Let's face it: English spelling rules are arcane enough that the only way to learn them is by rote memorization, or by seeing enough of these words at an early enough age to develop an sense of the patterns that underly them. I have 99.9th percentile spelling skills, and my writing ranges from adequate to glorious, depending on whether I'm in the mood and spend the time on it. It's not because I'm so much smarter than everyone else; it's primarily because I read so much more (and at an earlier age) than most people.
What's different is that changes which previously took a couple generations are now being compressed into a couple decades. We're moving into a post-literate world, in which the medium that helped to standardize and stablize language (the written word) is becoming less important in day-to-day life than "the spoken word" and th txtd wd. For good or ill, in this dawning era English is slipping off the rails and could go almost anywhere... and probably will. This is the world in which previously nonsensical phrases such as "I should of" come into usage, and the people who learn this version of English and its descendents are going to find standard written English of the 20th century as inscrutible as 20th century readers find the writings of Chaucer or even Shakespeare. At least they'll have versions of some of these classics, translated for them by the scribes of Hollywood...
Um, Michael Dell "did OK" by going starting his own business and going into computer marketing and sales. While I have no doubt that he was a competent self-taught hardware tech back (I bought one of his "PC's Limited, Turbo XT" boxes around the same time he stopped needing a fake ID to buy beer, which may even have some of his finger prints on it), his success was based on bizness skillz, not his value to employers as a technology professional.
More than 25 years ago I was hired by a fortune 500, without even as much as a high-school diploma to work on a microcomputer project.
Yeah, I got hired by a retail chain to do stuff for them with Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE when I was still in college 22 years ago. But that was a lot easier to get hired for back then (when micros were new and nobody in DP knew anything about them) than it is today.
There's probably a lot more opportunities in the world of psychology for someone who also knows computers than in the world of computers for someone who knows psychology. I'm not saying it's right, but the technology field doesn't really give a damn about understanding how people process information, interact with their computers, etc. but at least psychologists have taken an interesting in computers as tools for research (and even treatment), so you may find some job opportunities from that.
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You might as well get used to staying around home. The security and safety problems with air transportation are just part of the problem with long-distance travel. There's also the problem of decreasing fuel supplies/increasing costs, and the ecosuicidal problem of pollution and climate change. Has anyone else noticed that air carriers keep going out of business? Maybe it simply isn't a viable business anymore.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, within the current generation's lifetime, long-distance travel again became fairly uncommon, and the late-20th-century jet-set boom turned out to be an historical blip. Fortunately we now have global communication, so people wouldn't exactly be cut off from the rest of the world like in the 19th century and before... but physical travel may become a luxury. And the global manufacturing economy? Could be strictly a short-term phenomenon, with it eventually becoming cheaper and safer to make things in Toledo rather than ship them in from Thailand. P.S. Be nice to your local farmer; you may end up depending on him to produce food for you.
Sorry, dude, but if all the evidence convinces you that it was faked, you either are certifiably paranoid, or you're just too stupid to understand it.
And I say that with zero emotional attachment.
Batteries are only part of the problem with wirelessness. There's factors like performance and reliability that go to hell when you lose the wires.
(Non-technical) people keep suggesting that the college I work for "go wireless" for our networking... not grasping that we'd be replacing a switched 100Mbps line to every computer (with 1Gbps only a wiring-closet upgrade away) with shared wireless spectrum that tops out at 54Mbps and requires encryption, access limits, etc. People ask why I never call anyone from my mobile phone, and instead go find a landline instead... it's because I want to be able to hear and be heard. Why do you think most of the civilized world switched from wireless television to cable?
Buy a clue people: in almost any category of technology, wireless sucks compared to wired. And getting rid of a slender cable from my mouse or keyboard to my monitor is not worth it.
"256 levels of pressure is not going to cut it for pro work."
<sarcasm>Right, because before Wacom upped their tablets to 512 levels of pressure, no one was able to produce any professional-level work with them.</sarcasm> For, say, an illustrator doing linework (i.e. working in greyscale), 256 levels is certainly adequate.
"The Wacom tablet with the built-in display is a tablet PC done right."
Except that the Cintiq's are too bulky to use on your lap; working on a desk-mounted tablet loses a lot of the nudge-it-clockwise-for-a-better-angle benefit. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to have one, but the reason I haven't saved up my nickels and bought one is the fact that it's still a not-quite-there-yet solution. Until the technology improves to the point that I can draw with a stylus on a computer as naturally as easily I can draw on paper with a pencil, I'll continue buying pads of Strathmore bristol, keep the Microtek warmed up, and use my Intuos for clean-up, coloring, etc.
"And, you can definitely rotate [off-monitor tablets], and rotate your screen. "
I think you may be missing the point: rotating a drawing tablet isn't a simple portrait-vs.-landscape thing; it's about being able to turn the thing you're drawing on 37 degrees clockwise to get a better angle drawing a curve, then rotating it 62 degrees counterclockwise to draw a line from a more comfortable angle, etc. A good tablet/display would make that practical; whereas separate tablets and displays don't.
That's how you save even more: buy a used one.
I didn't ask what you disliked about it; I asked what the "problem" was. Unless the "problem" is that you don't like it... ?
"(you can't of course hear it at all if you're over 25 or so, as you age you lose the ability to hear in those outlier frequency ranges)."
:)
I'm old enough to have children who are over 25*, and I heard that painfully clearly. I'll probably lose that range eventually, but you really gotta stop believing that "everyone older than me is decrepit" nonsense.
*Except that I was doing it with guys.
"Just show nice, thought provoking art all the time."
Nice-all-the-time isn't very thought-provoking.
If every piece about which someone once said "that's not art" were removed from the art museums of the world, it would leave acres of empty walls. Pop art, environmental art, de Stijl, Expressionist, Fauve, Impressionist, Surreal, Dada, Cubist... were all dismissed as "not art". And many of the great classic works were done in styles or with techniques that were - at first - dismissed as "bad art". I don't go quite so far as the folks who claim that anything the artist declares to be art is art, but the flip side of the coin, simply saying that something isn't art doesn't make that so, either.
"The other problem is that I and possibly other people prefer hard-wired art, you know, the good ol' idea of art provoking emotions, not responding to them."
What exactly is the "problem" with this? Some people prefer art consisting of pretty landscapes, some prefer art symbolizing man's eternal struggle to understand himself, some prefer art featuring dogs playing poker, some prefer art that abstractly conveys the artist's mood, and some prefer art that involves the viewer in the creation itself. I don't think anyone was suggesting that you be required to replace your Rembrandt prints or Rothko imitations with empathic digital images, so what's the "problem" if this sort of thing exists too?
What exactly is going to fail? Air convection?
A piece of electronics is most likely to fail in the first several weeks or months of its life; a 386 motherboard with RAM, an NE2000 card, and a power supply (now without a hard drive or regular diskette drive activity to support) that haven't failed in 10+ years are going to have a MTBF going forward from today that's pretty darn long. (The floppy drive is a little more iffy, but the only time it gets used is after a power outage.) If any component on my homebrew print server ever does fail, and I can't pull a replacement part out of a box, I'll spring $50 for an overpriced device containing the equivalent components in a cute little box, like you describe. Until then, I'll just keep that $50 in the bank (or, to be honest, try to remember the beer and pizza I spent it on) and enjoy the free print server I've been using for the past several years.
"Think about the power used, the space, the noise, etc."
I have. The power, space, and noise associated with a fanless 386 in a slimline box with no hard drive are actually quite minimal.
"...if you don't mind using a cheap netgear print server..."
Heck, if you have a 386 box with an ethernet card and a floppy drive sitting around, you can turn any laser printer with a parallel port into a "network" printer, without even spending a dime: print server on a diskette
"The best value for money in laser printers is a single-digit HP Laserjet off of eBay."
A few years ago I replaced a late-1980s-vintage LaserJet III (which I think qualifies as "single digit" {smile}) in the marketing department of the business I worked for at the time. The thing still functioned, but they needed something with more processing power and RAM for complex page layouts, and wanted something that could spit out more than single-digits-per-minute copies. I would've taken it home with me, except that I knew I wouldn't be able to carry it from the car to my apartment.
I work now for a college where there's a LaserJet 5 in an unattended open computer lab, where it's been abused like hell for years. The paper-feed mechanism's getting a bit dodgy, but put a short stack of paper in the bypass tray and it works just fine.
"Can you provide a link to the expansion of the licence? Thats interesting."
If you Google "Mickey Mouse" and "copyright act" you'll find plenty of info. Try starting with The Mouse That Ate the Public Domain
Invisibility is already possible. The underlying principle behind it is not technological or mystical but sociological. See the works of Ralph Ellison ("Invisible Man"), Kate Clinton ("In Search of the Invisible Lesbian"), and Grant Morrison ("The Invisibles") for more info.
"I am also willing to bet the average person has been a shitty writer for a lot longer than the last 2 decades."
Of course: it didn't start with the introduction of the IBM PC or the Apple Mac; it goes back to the introduction of TV and to a lesser extent radio. The "average person" (middle-class, high-school graduate) from the early 20th century used to read the news, and maybe even his entertainment. But today he probably gets most of his news from TV and/or radio, and what reading he does is the unfiltered, unedited stuff of blogs and chat. His father's writing was poor, his is shitty, and his son's is going to be abysmal. The only up-side is that his son's going to be a lot more "computer literate"... whatever that comes to mean.
I meant "Chaucer or even Shakespeare", referring to the fact that Chaucer is definitely difficult to interpret, but "even Shakespeare" (which is easier) is still too much for many contemporary readers.
Yup. There's a couple spelling errors/typos in there. Just saw them. Maybe one of these days I'll actually try proofreading what I type. {grin}
No question about it: the correlation between spelling skills and reading history is damn near 1. Writing skills correlate pretty strongly with one's reading history as well. Let's face it: English spelling rules are arcane enough that the only way to learn them is by rote memorization, or by seeing enough of these words at an early enough age to develop an sense of the patterns that underly them. I have 99.9th percentile spelling skills, and my writing ranges from adequate to glorious, depending on whether I'm in the mood and spend the time on it. It's not because I'm so much smarter than everyone else; it's primarily because I read so much more (and at an earlier age) than most people.
What's different is that changes which previously took a couple generations are now being compressed into a couple decades. We're moving into a post-literate world, in which the medium that helped to standardize and stablize language (the written word) is becoming less important in day-to-day life than "the spoken word" and th txtd wd. For good or ill, in this dawning era English is slipping off the rails and could go almost anywhere... and probably will. This is the world in which previously nonsensical phrases such as "I should of" come into usage, and the people who learn this version of English and its descendents are going to find standard written English of the 20th century as inscrutible as 20th century readers find the writings of Chaucer or even Shakespeare. At least they'll have versions of some of these classics, translated for them by the scribes of Hollywood...
a fellow named Dell who did OK without a degree.
Um, Michael Dell "did OK" by going starting his own business and going into computer marketing and sales. While I have no doubt that he was a competent self-taught hardware tech back (I bought one of his "PC's Limited, Turbo XT" boxes around the same time he stopped needing a fake ID to buy beer, which may even have some of his finger prints on it), his success was based on bizness skillz, not his value to employers as a technology professional.
More than 25 years ago I was hired by a fortune 500, without even as much as a high-school diploma to work on a microcomputer project.
Yeah, I got hired by a retail chain to do stuff for them with Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE when I was still in college 22 years ago. But that was a lot easier to get hired for back then (when micros were new and nobody in DP knew anything about them) than it is today.
There's probably a lot more opportunities in the world of psychology for someone who also knows computers than in the world of computers for someone who knows psychology. I'm not saying it's right, but the technology field doesn't really give a damn about understanding how people process information, interact with their computers, etc. but at least psychologists have taken an interesting in computers as tools for research (and even treatment), so you may find some job opportunities from that.