While Bentham did theorize the panopticon as a penal architecture, it's important to note that it was also intended by Bentham to be an architecture for the workplace - a disturbing paralell. Regardless, it was Foucault's analysis (and not Bentham's own, which saw the panopticon as an unproblematic moral reformatory) of panoptic architecture that developed the most cogent discussion of how power works (in corrosive ways) within the panopticon. Foucault's discussion has routinely been applied to critiques of IT (perhaps the most well known being Shoshana Zuboff's "In The Age of the Smart Machine"). So while it's nice to note Bentham here, it's probably more true to the spirit of the piece to keep Foucault in mind.
I have a Rio Chiba and it works perfectly with my PowerBook. Everything is done thru iTunes just like the iPod. I think all of Rio's products work on OS X.
I think this is definately an issue. Consider pro audio digital recording for good acoustics should be done at 96 kHz, which equates to about 20 MB per minute of stereo recording. Factor in overdubs, standard multitracking, and track duplication for the final mix, and a 5 minute song can easily eat 1 GB on disk. This leaves very little scratch disk for the DAW software to use for undo space, etc. Soundproofing is probably a better alternative. Really, is anybody that doesn't already have an isolated recording environment really going to care about a little noise from a disk anyway? It doesn't transfer into the recording (most pro audio cards have external DAC breakouts for this very purpose), and you shouldn't hear a disk over the din of the music you're playing. Good idea, but overkill.
Retailers are licensed regionally, as is the media they sell. Although I like the idea of mp3 speculation there are some serious leagl problems (not to mention DRM problems) with it.
I've been fighting with Mandrake 10 (Comm. Ed.) for a couple of weeks now to get my Linksys WUSB 12 interface working. No dice. I'm getting closer, but not there yet. Apparently the Prism 2 chipset has proved problematic for many Mandrake users. USB hotswapping is also apparently a problem with some USB Wi-Fi adapters. Ugh...
He makes a good point about the prevelance of the Market economy in video games, but this is probably more of a prgmatic than political decision. Could you imagine trying to program a game with a functional Command driven economy? It would be an interesting experiment in Economic modeling. Does anybody know of a game that makes a good run at this (ie. not a fixed per turn income or anything like that, but something relatively sophistocated)?
Ok, lets buy that argument then. If management only has to enforce the will of the shareholders to be moral, what does this say about the morality of the shareholders? (We'll ignore privately held companies) Shareholders may be all over the world, and they may have a very diverse set of interests. This is a system that can't be controlled if you buy into the standard market economy rhetoric. Either we accept the free market and stop bitching about loosing jobs to it, or we make the market a little less free. Morality isn't an issue here. Public companies are a schizophrenic beast containting many competing and conflicting moralitites, and as such those that set its course are bound to act without morality, lest they upset their masters.
I'm not so sure it's the nature of the work on its own that makes a job unpleasant (although I'm sure it's a contributing factor). I think the structure of the workplace has a lot to do with it. Environments which employ IT people tend to be dominated by management hooked on the latest trends in creative organization. My experience has lead me to believe that when management philosophys are changing continually its hard to find a sense of stability in your work. I think this is compounded by a knowledge gap between alot of managers and IT professionals (if you're a plumber your foreman is also probably a plumber), and is further complicated by increasingly decentralized company structures (outsourcing, division specialization) which erode attempts at standardization. I think its the nature of the hi-tech workplace that ends up making people unhappy (low stability, highly demanding, inconsistent). Mind you, idiots installing spyware never helped.
Just to add to that earlier thought. I've found that the best way to study (mind you this is highly subjective) is to take my notes on paper and then before the exam period, I transcribe my note on my PC or laptop. This way I'm taking note in class, and forcing my self to read them all and occasionally reinterpret them before the exams. I find it works brilliantly. Stick with the pen and paper, save money and get better marks.
If you haven't read his stuff already, I'd recommend Robert Sawyer. He's a Canadian Sci-Fi writer. He tends to incorporate a lot of philisophical 'what ifs' into his works, so if you're looking for something with a more 'cerebral' pace to it, this might be a good place to look.
What about development platforms like.NET? These unifeid environments aim to resolve many programming languages, and resources in a unified bundle. This has been a long standing goal for many development environments. We've seen all kinds of Java and C++ wrappers emerge that allow integration into various other languages, platforms, and environments. That said, I think there is a alot to be said about how similar OSs and PLs really are.
I know Nintendo carts were pirated successfully a few years back, so I think that Nintendo's intention to fight piracy by releasing older hardware in China is probably centered on two assumptions : 1.) The technology has already been paid for by the rest of the world when it was first released so any money made rereleasing it now is gravy, and 2.) most of the big entertainment consumers (the US, Europe, Japan, and Canada) have graduated to later generations of game consoles, so there is no demand for the export of SNES priated material. China was/is notorious for suplpying the world with pirated CDs , CDROMs, and DVDs, so I'd imagine that Nintendo thinks that while this may not eliminate piracy, at least it will localize it.
It might seem like a minor complaint... not having a wavetable synth... but alot of computer based musicians rely on these kinds of tools. I think that this utlity bundle looks great too, and it fills in some gaps in the linux software offering, but it doesn't nearly bring linux in line with Windows and Mac platforms (not that it was expected to). I'm stuck on my Windows box until I can get a few more specialty audio apps too. We all like to pontificate on how all any OS needs is a word processor, a web browser, and a few compilers and that's that, but more often than not it's those little specialty apps that make or break it.
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While Bentham did theorize the panopticon as a penal architecture, it's important to note that it was also intended by Bentham to be an architecture for the workplace - a disturbing paralell. Regardless, it was Foucault's analysis (and not Bentham's own, which saw the panopticon as an unproblematic moral reformatory) of panoptic architecture that developed the most cogent discussion of how power works (in corrosive ways) within the panopticon. Foucault's discussion has routinely been applied to critiques of IT (perhaps the most well known being Shoshana Zuboff's "In The Age of the Smart Machine"). So while it's nice to note Bentham here, it's probably more true to the spirit of the piece to keep Foucault in mind.
I have a Rio Chiba and it works perfectly with my PowerBook. Everything is done thru iTunes just like the iPod. I think all of Rio's products work on OS X.
I think this is definately an issue. Consider pro audio digital recording for good acoustics should be done at 96 kHz, which equates to about 20 MB per minute of stereo recording. Factor in overdubs, standard multitracking, and track duplication for the final mix, and a 5 minute song can easily eat 1 GB on disk. This leaves very little scratch disk for the DAW software to use for undo space, etc. Soundproofing is probably a better alternative. Really, is anybody that doesn't already have an isolated recording environment really going to care about a little noise from a disk anyway? It doesn't transfer into the recording (most pro audio cards have external DAC breakouts for this very purpose), and you shouldn't hear a disk over the din of the music you're playing. Good idea, but overkill.
Retailers are licensed regionally, as is the media they sell. Although I like the idea of mp3 speculation there are some serious leagl problems (not to mention DRM problems) with it.
I've been fighting with Mandrake 10 (Comm. Ed.) for a couple of weeks now to get my Linksys WUSB 12 interface working. No dice. I'm getting closer, but not there yet. Apparently the Prism 2 chipset has proved problematic for many Mandrake users. USB hotswapping is also apparently a problem with some USB Wi-Fi adapters. Ugh...
He makes a good point about the prevelance of the Market economy in video games, but this is probably more of a prgmatic than political decision. Could you imagine trying to program a game with a functional Command driven economy? It would be an interesting experiment in Economic modeling. Does anybody know of a game that makes a good run at this (ie. not a fixed per turn income or anything like that, but something relatively sophistocated)?
I don't think this should have been modded down. Aside from being pretty humorous, it's also relatively insightful.
Ok, lets buy that argument then. If management only has to enforce the will of the shareholders to be moral, what does this say about the morality of the shareholders? (We'll ignore privately held companies) Shareholders may be all over the world, and they may have a very diverse set of interests. This is a system that can't be controlled if you buy into the standard market economy rhetoric. Either we accept the free market and stop bitching about loosing jobs to it, or we make the market a little less free. Morality isn't an issue here. Public companies are a schizophrenic beast containting many competing and conflicting moralitites, and as such those that set its course are bound to act without morality, lest they upset their masters.
I'm not so sure it's the nature of the work on its own that makes a job unpleasant (although I'm sure it's a contributing factor). I think the structure of the workplace has a lot to do with it. Environments which employ IT people tend to be dominated by management hooked on the latest trends in creative organization. My experience has lead me to believe that when management philosophys are changing continually its hard to find a sense of stability in your work. I think this is compounded by a knowledge gap between alot of managers and IT professionals (if you're a plumber your foreman is also probably a plumber), and is further complicated by increasingly decentralized company structures (outsourcing, division specialization) which erode attempts at standardization. I think its the nature of the hi-tech workplace that ends up making people unhappy (low stability, highly demanding, inconsistent). Mind you, idiots installing spyware never helped.
Just to add to that earlier thought. I've found that the best way to study (mind you this is highly subjective) is to take my notes on paper and then before the exam period, I transcribe my note on my PC or laptop. This way I'm taking note in class, and forcing my self to read them all and occasionally reinterpret them before the exams. I find it works brilliantly. Stick with the pen and paper, save money and get better marks.
Take Gung Ho and replace all of the cars with computer terminals and add some more flourescent lighting, and I think you've pretty much got it.
If you haven't read his stuff already, I'd recommend Robert Sawyer. He's a Canadian Sci-Fi writer. He tends to incorporate a lot of philisophical 'what ifs' into his works, so if you're looking for something with a more 'cerebral' pace to it, this might be a good place to look.
What about development platforms like .NET? These unifeid environments aim to resolve many programming languages, and resources in a unified bundle. This has been a long standing goal for many development environments. We've seen all kinds of Java and C++ wrappers emerge that allow integration into various other languages, platforms, and environments. That said, I think there is a alot to be said about how similar OSs and PLs really are.
I know Nintendo carts were pirated successfully a few years back, so I think that Nintendo's intention to fight piracy by releasing older hardware in China is probably centered on two assumptions : 1.) The technology has already been paid for by the rest of the world when it was first released so any money made rereleasing it now is gravy, and 2.) most of the big entertainment consumers (the US, Europe, Japan, and Canada) have graduated to later generations of game consoles, so there is no demand for the export of SNES priated material. China was/is notorious for suplpying the world with pirated CDs , CDROMs, and DVDs, so I'd imagine that Nintendo thinks that while this may not eliminate piracy, at least it will localize it.
It might seem like a minor complaint ... not having a wavetable synth ... but alot of computer based musicians rely on these kinds of tools. I think that this utlity bundle looks great too, and it fills in some gaps in the linux software offering, but it doesn't nearly bring linux in line with Windows and Mac platforms (not that it was expected to). I'm stuck on my Windows box until I can get a few more specialty audio apps too. We all like to pontificate on how all any OS needs is a word processor, a web browser, and a few compilers and that's that, but more often than not it's those little specialty apps that make or break it.