I think that's the key statement. And you have to look at it systematically, not emotionally. It's very hard to do. But try this:
A car is just a tool for moving people around. There are several other tools that can also move people around. The car-tool is very useful for thinly-spread populations that have lots of space to give over to the car's use and who have lots of individual resources to support their individual car.
But, as soon as they need to move into a space that is reasonably congested with other people, and with other things (buildings, trees, baby carriages, what-have-you) their car is no longer an optimal tool and, in fact, requires a disproportionate amount of space and systematic resources (traffic management, police, ambulances, and so on).
So, yeah. We have to get over the idea that someone who can drive their car up to the edges of the city, must therefore be able to drive their car *into* the city. Once we do that, lots of opportunities to better get them to where they want to go (along with everybody else) are available to us.
My 12-yr-old has an email under our ISP account that I can monitor and it barely matters. Email is what her Mum & Dad use. Instead, she's obsessed with IM ("MSN" is what she calls it), facebook & MySpace. *That's* what keeps me awake at night.
I was in the "building web libraries" business back then. I can tell you that search wasn't necessarily that bad, you just had to pay for it .
Though I have to tell ya, when matahari came out, we couldn't believe how good it was compared to altavista and all the rest. And the looks on our client's faces when we said we used an "offline search bot" was priceless. The money that come out of their pockets wasn't too bad either!
I gotta say, I really grooved on the historical aspects of the last four and was kind of looking for that to continue but it's not like I'm not going to read it hot off the press.
And, anyway, who knows what it's really going to be about. It's not like you can judge a book by it's publisher's blurb!
I run a virtual reference service for a provincial public library collaborative . Our stats are off the chart. We are running at triple the customer traffic that we had expected. So, essentially, lots of people already know that a person can find them stuff way better than an algorithm. There are two basic problems with this:
1. is that most people hate looking for things
2. is that most people are lousy at looking for stuff on the web.
Our solution, of course, is that we have institutions full of people what *do* like looking for things and *are* very good at it. THose people are called librarians.
In a funny turn of luck, the mall developers ignored little old downtown Nanaimo and it's now full of hip-ish bookstores, cafes, comic shops, etc. Now that the planners have discovered that they still have a downtown, Let's hope they don't wreck it, too.
Rueger is right on: Coal Mining? Here's a link that took, oh, 38secs. to find: http://www.nanaimo-info.com/gpage.html7.html/
I don't pretend to predict the future but when the majority of the citizenry can freely flout a law that they don't understand and don't think is that important and when those who benefit from that law can do very little to enforce or punish almost all of the infringement..... well, the end of that law must be upcoming somewhere in the near future.
I've no idea how that law will end, what the last thrashing desperation of the "IP holders" will look like, and what, if anything, will replace (so called) IP. But it's gonna innerestin', for sure.
Yes, I agree with you that it "must be a tremendous step up...". I think, however, that it only has to be a step up for *some* (small "a") applications that the current internet is used for. Further, I think it's possible to cherry-pick some of those applications for which the internet is woefully inadequate and for which there should be a large enough set of users to support a superior alternative. However, it's late and my brain's tired so I admit I can't think of any good examples right now;-(
Okay, I RTFA'd a bit more closely: it does say that he is talking about "a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network" but later on the article states, "Even Clark agrees with those who say the internet currently serves most of its users quite well." So my point is still that he doesn't necessarily need *every* net user to be successful, just a large enough sub-set. And, yes, I know that means having two networks in the long run. I'm not certain that that's a showstopper.
"Revolutionary means that you are uprooting all the existing users."
This isn't necessarily true. There are now a *huge* number of internet users using it for a wide array of purposes. Many of those purposes have nothing to do with each other except that they use the same "transmission control protocol" and their packets might run alongside each other's for a while.
The point might be that he's looking to build a new internet for *some* of the users of the current internet. That sub-set of current users can still be a large enough number to make it all worthwhile for somebody.
I suspect "Wired bashing" is a pretty easy piss for this crowd as it might likely be for the Ars crowd.
That said, I do get pretty tired of the "won't the future be greeeeaaaat!" boosterism in Wired (and elsewhere). But I've got V.1 #6 (or something like that, I'm too lazy to dig it out and look) and I'm still a sucker for their style and, before some wise guy pipes up, yeah, I keep reading it more often than not.
Airports are incredibly space intensive, actually. Even in North America, airport space can become a problem. Vancouver's airport CEO is starting to lay the "groundwork" for a completely new location for our airport (and maybe even a cooperative airport shared with Seattle). I'm sure he knows how explosive the problem will become (all the flat land around here is already spoken for and the current airport is close to a protected estuary and rich people's houses). The problem might be 20 years away but it's not too early to begin worrying about it.
Yeah, that sounds good in theory. The practical problems arise when the "situation" you are in changes at a given "moment". In other words, most people only have on OS available to them at any given moment and they can't change it at a "moment's" notice. That leads to lots of the problems that people encounter. Here's one (of a million) example: a user of a windows box in a small business office has everything they need until they get the bright idea to connect a small wifi hub so that they can use their spiffy new "wireless-ready" laptop in the office. Now they have all sorts of nasty security problems because their "appropriate" OS defaults to "inappropriate" settings now that it's serving wireless bits to the world.
dcobbler
www.digitalcobbler.com
It so happens, I just read Pattern Recognition. Finished it last night!
What *I* think he shows (whether intentionally or not) is
the speed with which tech-induced cultural changes are separating digital-savvy from non-savvy. A forum-based community chasing snippets of anonymous video on the web might as well be "science fiction" to those who can't get their heads around it. Gibson's figured this out, to great effect.
I'm still in business. I started building content-rich websites in 1996.
1. I saw that "information" on the web is still just "information". I'm a librarian so I knew I could do something with it.
2. I hired sharp, 20-something MLIS grads, promised them that they wouldn't get rich but that they might get to do something interesting, and told them, "throw out the rules you learned in Library School, but keep all the concepts."
3. I tried *very hard* not to spend more than I brought in in a given year and we usually succeeded.
4. I never got rich but I'm still paying the mortgage on my house and liking (for the most part) what I'm doing.
5. We constantly looked for new and better ways of doing our stuff but *never* through out the previous iteration if it seemed to still do the job.
How I did this shouldn't be a secret and I know lots of others on/. can claim the same kind of (limited) success. Nevertheless, my accountant once called me a "survivor" and it always astonished me how people would plunge headlong into the next new thing without thinking about their "survivial" at all?
But just as many minority languages are dying out, the languages that dominate the globe, such as Chinese, English and Spanish, are becoming increasingly varied and complex, says David Lightfoot, a language researcher at Georgetown University. And new languages may even spring up. For example, new versions of Chinese are likely to emerge that cannot be understood by some other Chinese speakers.
Not only that. There are already a whole bunch of different versions of Chinese languages that can't be understood by each other.
And I think English is fracturing into different versions that will, increasingly, be "foreign" to each other.
Maybe there will many fewer languages in the world in a few centuries, but I don't think there will ever be just one.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
Seems to me that the best "record" of a language is, unfortunately, a few people who can speak it fluently. Anything else (paper, tape, tablet, whatever) is just an inexact substitute for the "living" language.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
You have to get good information to feed into your system. And that information is, at least partly, based on what something thinks or knows and don't you, in many situations, have to get them to *tell* you that. And what if the people who are really the opinion leaders (as opposed to "gossip leaders" who, although they talk a lot, might *not* be taken very seriously by others) won't tell you or, at least, don't tell you the truth about what they think or know.
I accept the pretense that this is potentially powerful stuff but I'm also thinking that this is stuff with which it's easy to get it wrong in a big way.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
I had a 1971 Renault 16ts. Excellent car. The "16" was the first ever hatchback. I bought it in 1981 with 75,000 miles on it, sold it two year's later with 95,000 miles. Only thing I had to fix was the brakes. I drove it on winter roads in British Columbia with four people on board several times; sometimes with five people. Everybody was always impressed with it.
I don't know how long number portability has been available here but the first big splash has been made by a national carrier (cityfido) who will replace your landline with a Canadian$40/month unlimited usage plan (that's v.competitive here) with which you can keep your (former) landline number.
This seems to be a big hit and is good for the bottom line of a company that had been struggling badly last year.
I haven't used this service myself, mind. Losing the landline in favour of a mobile wouldn't work right now for my family.
1. When is a "computer" no longer what we think of as a "computer"? This transition has been going on for a long time and, while the trend in the popular hype has been to say that "...one day you will do "everything" on your home computer...blah, blah", you're suggesting that it will start going the other way because people will realize that "...if you can't do "everything" on your device then it's not a "computer", it's a [digital content device with a catchy name]." This forced-drm compliance may well be the thing that starts this split.
2. The nature of computers connected in a *inter-net* includes a level of power for the individual computers to act in a wide-range of capacities that no amount of forced-DRM can truly repress. This, too, is an interesting future to contemplate and one that the current DRM zealots probably shudder to think of (if they, indeed, can conceive of this alternate scenario at all).
I guess I'm an incorrigible optimist too. There are ways to look at this without the sky-is-falling gloom.
We do that a lot, don't we?
We get obsessed with the technology that's changing how we do things and then we completely ignore the effects of that technology until we are well into the change. IMHO, that's because we're always trying to get new technology to do the same old things "faster" and "easier". It's usually the iconoclasts/rebels/weirdos/(your favourite label here) who are the first to point out that the new tech can do things we've never thought of.
I wouldn't presume to reduce Eco's complex discourse down to this simple conclusion but I do believe that's part of what he's getting at.
Okay, yeah. I was kind of making a rhetorical point about the original article/post but it didn't come off too well.
I've been an amateur since the seventies. I've only had a digital for about 18 months and, yes, I'm taking *way* more pictures. I had to get more memory for the iMac because iPhoto was bogging-down from all the pictures in my library and now I'm scheming to trade in my coolpix 995 along with my Canon Elan and lenses to get a much better digital. When I do that, the only flim camera I'll have left will be my RB67 and I realize that, one day, that will go too; except I'll probably have to give it away and I'll likely have found that I can barely remember how to use it by then!
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's the key statement. And you have to look at it systematically, not emotionally. It's very hard to do. But try this:
A car is just a tool for moving people around. There are several other tools that can also move people around. The car-tool is very useful for thinly-spread populations that have lots of space to give over to the car's use and who have lots of individual resources to support their individual car.
But, as soon as they need to move into a space that is reasonably congested with other people, and with other things (buildings, trees, baby carriages, what-have-you) their car is no longer an optimal tool and, in fact, requires a disproportionate amount of space and systematic resources (traffic management, police, ambulances, and so on).
So, yeah. We have to get over the idea that someone who can drive their car up to the edges of the city, must therefore be able to drive their car *into* the city. Once we do that, lots of opportunities to better get them to where they want to go (along with everybody else) are available to us.
My 12-yr-old has an email under our ISP account that I can monitor and it barely matters. Email is what her Mum & Dad use. Instead, she's obsessed with IM ("MSN" is what she calls it), facebook & MySpace. *That's* what keeps me awake at night.
Cheers,
DCobbler
I was in the "building web libraries" business back then. I can tell you that search wasn't necessarily that bad, you just had to pay for it .
Though I have to tell ya, when matahari came out, we couldn't believe how good it was compared to altavista and all the rest. And the looks on our client's faces when we said we used an "offline search bot" was priceless. The money that come out of their pockets wasn't too bad either!
Ciao,
Dcobbler
I gotta say, I really grooved on the historical aspects of the last four and was kind of looking for that to continue but it's not like I'm not going to read it hot off the press.
And, anyway, who knows what it's really going to be about. It's not like you can judge a book by it's publisher's blurb!
Dcobbler.
I run a virtual reference service for a provincial public library collaborative . Our stats are off the chart. We are running at triple the customer traffic that we had expected. So, essentially, lots of people already know that a person can find them stuff way better than an algorithm. There are two basic problems with this:
1. is that most people hate looking for things
2. is that most people are lousy at looking for stuff on the web.
Our solution, of course, is that we have institutions full of people what *do* like looking for things and *are* very good at it. THose people are called librarians.
Ciao, Dcobbler.
In a funny turn of luck, the mall developers ignored little old downtown Nanaimo and it's now full of hip-ish bookstores, cafes, comic shops, etc. Now that the planners have discovered that they still have a downtown, Let's hope they don't wreck it, too. Rueger is right on: Coal Mining? Here's a link that took, oh, 38secs. to find: http://www.nanaimo-info.com/gpage.html7.html/
I don't pretend to predict the future but when the majority of the citizenry can freely flout a law that they don't understand and don't think is that important and when those who benefit from that law can do very little to enforce or punish almost all of the infringement..... well, the end of that law must be upcoming somewhere in the near future. I've no idea how that law will end, what the last thrashing desperation of the "IP holders" will look like, and what, if anything, will replace (so called) IP. But it's gonna innerestin', for sure.
Actually, it looks like Microcell didn't get the license to do this in Sask (as well as Manitoba). read this from the "who we are" page of inukshuk.
So, Sasktel still gets to do this for their customers, no?
Cheers, Dcobbler
Yes, I agree with you that it "must be a tremendous step up...". I think, however, that it only has to be a step up for *some* (small "a") applications that the current internet is used for. Further, I think it's possible to cherry-pick some of those applications for which the internet is woefully inadequate and for which there should be a large enough set of users to support a superior alternative. However, it's late and my brain's tired so I admit I can't think of any good examples right now ;-(
cheers,
dcobbler
Okay, I RTFA'd a bit more closely: it does say that he is talking about "a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network" but later on the article states, "Even Clark agrees with those who say the internet currently serves most of its users quite well." So my point is still that he doesn't necessarily need *every* net user to be successful, just a large enough sub-set. And, yes, I know that means having two networks in the long run. I'm not certain that that's a showstopper.
Dcobbler
www.digitalcobbler.com
"Revolutionary means that you are uprooting all the existing users."
This isn't necessarily true. There are now a *huge* number of internet users using it for a wide array of purposes. Many of those purposes have nothing to do with each other except that they use the same "transmission control protocol" and their packets might run alongside each other's for a while.
The point might be that he's looking to build a new internet for *some* of the users of the current internet. That sub-set of current users can still be a large enough number to make it all worthwhile for somebody.
Dcobbler
www.digitalcobbler.com
I suspect "Wired bashing" is a pretty easy piss for this crowd as it might likely be for the Ars crowd.
That said, I do get pretty tired of the "won't the future be greeeeaaaat!" boosterism in Wired (and elsewhere). But I've got V.1 #6 (or something like that, I'm too lazy to dig it out and look) and I'm still a sucker for their style and, before some wise guy pipes up, yeah, I keep reading it more often than not.
Ciao, dcobbler
Airports are incredibly space intensive, actually. Even in North America, airport space can become a problem. Vancouver's airport CEO is starting to lay the "groundwork" for a completely new location for our airport (and maybe even a cooperative airport shared with Seattle). I'm sure he knows how explosive the problem will become (all the flat land around here is already spoken for and the current airport is close to a protected estuary and rich people's houses). The problem might be 20 years away but it's not too early to begin worrying about it.
Yeah, if you go through the wrong line-up in a train station I doubt it causes this! Ciao, Dcobbler
Yeah, that sounds good in theory. The practical problems arise when the "situation" you are in changes at a given "moment". In other words, most people only have on OS available to them at any given moment and they can't change it at a "moment's" notice. That leads to lots of the problems that people encounter. Here's one (of a million) example: a user of a windows box in a small business office has everything they need until they get the bright idea to connect a small wifi hub so that they can use their spiffy new "wireless-ready" laptop in the office. Now they have all sorts of nasty security problems because their "appropriate" OS defaults to "inappropriate" settings now that it's serving wireless bits to the world.
dcobbler
www.digitalcobbler.com
It so happens, I just read Pattern Recognition. Finished it last night!
What *I* think he shows (whether intentionally or not) is the speed with which tech-induced cultural changes are separating digital-savvy from non-savvy. A forum-based community chasing snippets of anonymous video on the web might as well be "science fiction" to those who can't get their heads around it. Gibson's figured this out, to great effect.
dcobbler - www.digitalcobbler.com
I'm still in business. I started building content-rich websites in 1996.
/. can claim the same kind of (limited) success. Nevertheless, my accountant once called me a "survivor" and it always astonished me how people would plunge headlong into the next new thing without thinking about their "survivial" at all?
1. I saw that "information" on the web is still just "information". I'm a librarian so I knew I could do something with it.
2. I hired sharp, 20-something MLIS grads, promised them that they wouldn't get rich but that they might get to do something interesting, and told them, "throw out the rules you learned in Library School, but keep all the concepts."
3. I tried *very hard* not to spend more than I brought in in a given year and we usually succeeded.
4. I never got rich but I'm still paying the mortgage on my house and liking (for the most part) what I'm doing.
5. We constantly looked for new and better ways of doing our stuff but *never* through out the previous iteration if it seemed to still do the job.
How I did this shouldn't be a secret and I know lots of others on
dcobbler - www.digitalcobbler.com
Not only that. There are already a whole bunch of different versions of Chinese languages that can't be understood by each other.
And I think English is fracturing into different versions that will, increasingly, be "foreign" to each other.
Maybe there will many fewer languages in the world in a few centuries, but I don't think there will ever be just one.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
Seems to me that the best "record" of a language is, unfortunately, a few people who can speak it fluently. Anything else (paper, tape, tablet, whatever) is just an inexact substitute for the "living" language.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
Yes but,
You have to get good information to feed into your system. And that information is, at least partly, based on what something thinks or knows and don't you, in many situations, have to get them to *tell* you that. And what if the people who are really the opinion leaders (as opposed to "gossip leaders" who, although they talk a lot, might *not* be taken very seriously by others) won't tell you or, at least, don't tell you the truth about what they think or know.
I accept the pretense that this is potentially powerful stuff but I'm also thinking that this is stuff with which it's easy to get it wrong in a big way.
- dcobbler: the world needs another blog: www.digitalcobbler.com/blog
It's true.
I had a 1971 Renault 16ts. Excellent car. The "16" was the first ever hatchback. I bought it in 1981 with 75,000 miles on it, sold it two year's later with 95,000 miles. Only thing I had to fix was the brakes. I drove it on winter roads in British Columbia with four people on board several times; sometimes with five people. Everybody was always impressed with it.
That's my 2-bits. dcobbler.
This seems to be a big hit and is good for the bottom line of a company that had been struggling badly last year. I haven't used this service myself, mind. Losing the landline in favour of a mobile wouldn't work right now for my family.
1. When is a "computer" no longer what we think of as a "computer"? This transition has been going on for a long time and, while the trend in the popular hype has been to say that "...one day you will do "everything" on your home computer...blah, blah", you're suggesting that it will start going the other way because people will realize that "...if you can't do "everything" on your device then it's not a "computer", it's a [digital content device with a catchy name]." This forced-drm compliance may well be the thing that starts this split.
2. The nature of computers connected in a *inter-net* includes a level of power for the individual computers to act in a wide-range of capacities that no amount of forced-DRM can truly repress. This, too, is an interesting future to contemplate and one that the current DRM zealots probably shudder to think of (if they, indeed, can conceive of this alternate scenario at all).
I guess I'm an incorrigible optimist too. There are ways to look at this without the sky-is-falling gloom.
We do that a lot, don't we?
We get obsessed with the technology that's changing how we do things and then we completely ignore the effects of that technology until we are well into the change. IMHO, that's because we're always trying to get new technology to do the same old things "faster" and "easier". It's usually the iconoclasts/rebels/weirdos/(your favourite label here) who are the first to point out that the new tech can do things we've never thought of.
I wouldn't presume to reduce Eco's complex discourse down to this simple conclusion but I do believe that's part of what he's getting at.
Okay, yeah. I was kind of making a rhetorical point about the original article/post but it didn't come off too well.
I've been an amateur since the seventies. I've only had a digital for about 18 months and, yes, I'm taking *way* more pictures. I had to get more memory for the iMac because iPhoto was bogging-down from all the pictures in my library and now I'm scheming to trade in my coolpix 995 along with my Canon Elan and lenses to get a much better digital. When I do that, the only flim camera I'll have left will be my RB67 and I realize that, one day, that will go too; except I'll probably have to give it away and I'll likely have found that I can barely remember how to use it by then!