...and read The Lord of The Rings trilogy once a year. Should always be an entertaining read, and you'll catch some stuff not included in the movies.
You'll also see quite how much the second film played around with the events of 'The Two Towers'.... But anyway that's another rant.
On to book recommendations - I'll stick with stuff that's been on my reading pile recently:
Rebels & Redcoats - Hugh Bicheno
This is the book of an upcoming TV series on the American Revolutionary War - so its a pretty light read and sticks to a straighforward narrative for the most part. Bicheno is very much in revisionist historian mode and can't conceal his relish for sticking the bayonet into sundry US shiboleths. I have no deep knowledge of the period, but I suspect he is overegging things somewhat. His basic arguments are interesting however although I'd have preferred a little more emphasis upon the economic and political underpinnings of the conflict.
The Mating Mind - Geoffrey Miller
Popular evolutionary psychology done well. Briefly Miller's thesis is that human intelligence is the product of runaway sexual selection (like a peacock's tail). Well written and compelling.
Guns, Germs & Steel - by Jared Diamond
Actually this isn't on my current reading pile (I haven't read it for a couple of years in fact), but its a great book. Deep history, with the emphasis on deep. Diamond is looking for the fundamental causes for why things have turned out as they have over the last 10,000 years or so. If you've ever played any of the 'Civilisation' games you'll be interested in this book.
The Aubrey/Maturin Books - Patrick O'Brien
You think Robert Jordan is bad, there are 20 books in this series (and it'll never finish 'cuz O'Brien died a couple of years back)! These are age of sail naval books (like Forester's Hornblower novels), with two interesting main characters written by someone with an excellent ear for the period's dialogue and eye for its telling idiosyncracies. I'm saving the last in the series for my next holiday. There's a Hollywood movie in the offing (yay!), but they've cast Russel Crowe in the lead (oh dear).
The Curse of Chalion - Lois Bujold
Bujold takes a break from her Vorkosigan sci-fi books to do a fantasy novel. Its pretty low fantasy and the novel focuses more upon character and plot (of the aristocratic 'lurking in the arras' kind) rather than continent spanning quests or eeeevil overlords. The novel's scenario is inspired by the historical events leading up to the dynastic union of Castile and Aragon, but Bujold has filed all the serial numbers off if Los Reyes Catholicos isn't usually your thing - if you liked Guy Gavriel Kaye's recent books then this will do you nicely.
The Courts of the Morning - John Buchan
I've not actually read this yet, but its a Buchan novel I'd never heard of. Hoperfully its a neglected gem rather than deservedly obscure...
Oh and I'll second (third? fourth? whatever) some of the other books I've seen on the thread:
Because who wouldn't jump at the chance to spend $10 to walk on sticky floors and try to listen to the movie over the loud breather three seats to your right. But even that's not as bad as the dumb broad two rows back yammering away on her cell phone. Or maybe it's because of the $5.00 tubs of lard with bits of popcorn suspended in it. And let's not forget the 300# man who has to cut across you to go to the bathroom at least twice during the picture. Or the yammering fan-boy who's seen the movie a gazillion times and is telling his buddy next to him what's about to happen about five minutes before it actually happens on the screen.
I'm intrigued by the various comments I've seen along these lines. The number of times I've seen posts describing this stuff (here and in other fora) would seem to indicate that this is commonly encountered behaviour in cinemas stateside.
I live in the UK and go out to the cinema fairly often (both mainstream multiplex and small arthouse places - two or three times a month maybe) and this sort of boorish behaviour just doesn't happen in London. I'm struggling to think of the last time I heard a phone go off in an auditorium for instance - if it did the owner would be embarrassed and ring off quickly rather than blithely talk through the film.
So are audiences in the US really that uncouth? If so, why?
No amount of wishing and suing will make the digital domain go away. For whatever reason that I cannot understand the RIAA refuses to even consider to adapt. My best guess is it is a poorly chosen use of 'pride'.
As my other post said upthread, its not pride - its stupidity with a capital S. Just because these guys are rich doesn't mean they're clever. For the most part major label execs are old A&R men ie. guys who dropped out of school to spend all their time getting shitfaced at gigs.
Their entire business model is built on (a) their lock on the distribution channel, (b) their collusive and oligarchic pricing (derived from (a) above) and (c) their ability to dangle golden-seeming carrots in front of naive young acts that are actually grotesquely exploitative indenture contracts (derived from (a) and (b) above). In any other industry these people would be working in the postroom or on a nightshift checking the locks and switching lights off.
The record companies see this -- they have to -- and probably know it is inevitable down the line.
Don't bet on it. I've got a friend who had a nice little gig a few years back running 'Internet 101' courses for EMI execs in between doing freelance 'implement a website' dot-commery.
To a man (and these folk were pretty much 100% male) the reaction she got was either uncomprehending complacency, arrogant dismissal or (later on, once P2P actually started to bite) total outrage and a knee-jerk 'send in the lawyers'.
She's a pretty easy-going chick on the whole and not given to sweeping generalisations, but based on her experience 'music industry' execs were not just ignorant - they were flat-out stupid. Her analysis of the 'record industry' was essentially that they recruit almost exclusively from the A&R guys and what other job in the last few decades has paid so well for feckless eedjits who's prime asset in the job-market is that they like going to gigs and doing shedloads of drugs?
These guys have lived very well off their distribution lock, doing fuck all for which they have pulled in a tasty executive/professional level of compensation and, like many a rentier interest in the past, they honestly thought (to the extent that they thought at all) that this was the ordained way that the world worked. Hence the strange blend of furious outrage and whiny self-pity that has come from the industry mouthpieces since they woke up to the P2P threat - its not that they have no clue (although they don't), its that most of them honestly believe that the world owes them a living.
OK obviously you RTFA, but how about going back and reading for comprehension?
Firstly (and this applies to lots of other posters not just you) the piece in question is the framing article for the magazine's quarterly IT review. There's a bunch of follow-on articles that might forestall some of the reflex "I'm sick of articles saying the tech sector is dead" posts I've seen in this thread. I can't say for sure, 'cuz I've only read the (dead tree version of) the first article myself this lunchtime, but given that that article isn't telling a "tech is dead" story I'll hazard a guess that those other articles follow the same basic argument.
Secondly turning to the point in the article you question in your post. By the analogy, IT has a hundred years before realising its full potential. This isn't an ironic example of some lame journo getting it wrong again - its the complete fucking point of the article.
The author is quite intentionally saying that IT now (with 4 decades of Moore's Law under our belts and at least another decade to run) is at the stage that railways were at in 1857 - by that point the railway mania (the 'gilded age' according to the model quoted in the article) was well and truly over - after a wild 30 year ride of speculative boom/bust, infrastructure buildout, rampant stock-jobbery, dodgy political fixes and several spectacular crashes. Sound familiar?
Bucketloads of cash were made/lost during the mania and heaps of track was laid; but the *real* benefits of the technology had barely started to kick in and, as you say, the 'golden age' of railways paid dividends in terms of raised economic growth rates and long term structural adjustments to trade and transportation costs for a hundred years (at least) - one of the key benefits being the ability of the US to expand all the way to the Pacific and incorporate all of the intervening real estate into an economy that became the industrial powerhouse of the C20th world trading system (another 'benefit' was the ability of modern societies to mobilise and support huge armies in the field all year round, thus ushering in the era of total war - but I digress).
The article's analogy between 1857 and today isn't perfect - the irruption and gilded age driven by Moore's Law looks like it'll run for at least 50 years (1961-2011) rather than the 30-odd of the railways (1829-59) and I suspect we have at least one more boom/crash to go before we are out of the gilded age for ICs (my candidate for this being the incorporation of mobile wireless devices into a technology stack running from mainframes at the top down to keyfob/cigarette lighter-scale items intergrated into PANs), so we're probably only around 1849 or so on the railway analogy.
But the fundamental point that you (and pretty much everyone else) seem to have missed in the article is that even if you go with the author's fairly pessimistic reading of the analogy, computing devices based upon ICs have only just entered their 'golden age' and yes, this mature phase is likely to run for at least a century; during which the effects of the technology on our society will dwarf what we have seen so far.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll also see quite how much the second film played around with the events of 'The Two Towers'.... But anyway that's another rant.
On to book recommendations - I'll stick with stuff that's been on my reading pile recently:
Rebels & Redcoats - Hugh Bicheno
This is the book of an upcoming TV series on the American Revolutionary War - so its a pretty light read and sticks to a straighforward narrative for the most part. Bicheno is very much in revisionist historian mode and can't conceal his relish for sticking the bayonet into sundry US shiboleths. I have no deep knowledge of the period, but I suspect he is overegging things somewhat. His basic arguments are interesting however although I'd have preferred a little more emphasis upon the economic and political underpinnings of the conflict.The Mating Mind - Geoffrey Miller
Popular evolutionary psychology done well. Briefly Miller's thesis is that human intelligence is the product of runaway sexual selection (like a peacock's tail). Well written and compelling.
Guns, Germs & Steel - by Jared Diamond
Actually this isn't on my current reading pile (I haven't read it for a couple of years in fact), but its a great book. Deep history, with the emphasis on deep. Diamond is looking for the fundamental causes for why things have turned out as they have over the last 10,000 years or so. If you've ever played any of the 'Civilisation' games you'll be interested in this book.
The Aubrey/Maturin Books - Patrick O'Brien
You think Robert Jordan is bad, there are 20 books in this series (and it'll never finish 'cuz O'Brien died a couple of years back)! These are age of sail naval books (like Forester's Hornblower novels), with two interesting main characters written by someone with an excellent ear for the period's dialogue and eye for its telling idiosyncracies. I'm saving the last in the series for my next holiday. There's a Hollywood movie in the offing (yay!), but they've cast Russel Crowe in the lead (oh dear).
The Curse of Chalion - Lois Bujold
Bujold takes a break from her Vorkosigan sci-fi books to do a fantasy novel. Its pretty low fantasy and the novel focuses more upon character and plot (of the aristocratic 'lurking in the arras' kind) rather than continent spanning quests or eeeevil overlords. The novel's scenario is inspired by the historical events leading up to the dynastic union of Castile and Aragon, but Bujold has filed all the serial numbers off if Los Reyes Catholicos isn't usually your thing - if you liked Guy Gavriel Kaye's recent books then this will do you nicely.
The Courts of the Morning - John Buchan
I've not actually read this yet, but its a Buchan novel I'd never heard of. Hoperfully its a neglected gem rather than deservedly obscure...
Oh and I'll second (third? fourth? whatever) some of the other books I've seen on the thread:
A Song of Ice & Fire - George Martin
A Fire Upon The Deep - Vernor Vinge
A Deepness In The Sky - Vernor Vinge
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Regards
Luke
I'm intrigued by the various comments I've seen along these lines. The number of times I've seen posts describing this stuff (here and in other fora) would seem to indicate that this is commonly encountered behaviour in cinemas stateside.
I live in the UK and go out to the cinema fairly often (both mainstream multiplex and small arthouse places - two or three times a month maybe) and this sort of boorish behaviour just doesn't happen in London. I'm struggling to think of the last time I heard a phone go off in an auditorium for instance - if it did the owner would be embarrassed and ring off quickly rather than blithely talk through the film.
So are audiences in the US really that uncouth? If so, why?
Regards
Luke
Their entire business model is built on (a) their lock on the distribution channel, (b) their collusive and oligarchic pricing (derived from (a) above) and (c) their ability to dangle golden-seeming carrots in front of naive young acts that are actually grotesquely exploitative indenture contracts (derived from (a) and (b) above). In any other industry these people would be working in the postroom or on a nightshift checking the locks and switching lights off.
Luke
Don't bet on it. I've got a friend who had a nice little gig a few years back running 'Internet 101' courses for EMI execs in between doing freelance 'implement a website' dot-commery.
To a man (and these folk were pretty much 100% male) the reaction she got was either uncomprehending complacency, arrogant dismissal or (later on, once P2P actually started to bite) total outrage and a knee-jerk 'send in the lawyers'.
She's a pretty easy-going chick on the whole and not given to sweeping generalisations, but based on her experience 'music industry' execs were not just ignorant - they were flat-out stupid. Her analysis of the 'record industry' was essentially that they recruit almost exclusively from the A&R guys and what other job in the last few decades has paid so well for feckless eedjits who's prime asset in the job-market is that they like going to gigs and doing shedloads of drugs?
These guys have lived very well off their distribution lock, doing fuck all for which they have pulled in a tasty executive/professional level of compensation and, like many a rentier interest in the past, they honestly thought (to the extent that they thought at all) that this was the ordained way that the world worked. Hence the strange blend of furious outrage and whiny self-pity that has come from the industry mouthpieces since they woke up to the P2P threat - its not that they have no clue (although they don't), its that most of them honestly believe that the world owes them a living.
Luke
OK obviously you RTFA, but how about going back and reading for comprehension?
Firstly (and this applies to lots of other posters not just you) the piece in question is the framing article for the magazine's quarterly IT review. There's a bunch of follow-on articles that might forestall some of the reflex "I'm sick of articles saying the tech sector is dead" posts I've seen in this thread. I can't say for sure, 'cuz I've only read the (dead tree version of) the first article myself this lunchtime, but given that that article isn't telling a "tech is dead" story I'll hazard a guess that those other articles follow the same basic argument.
Secondly turning to the point in the article you question in your post. By the analogy, IT has a hundred years before realising its full potential. This isn't an ironic example of some lame journo getting it wrong again - its the complete fucking point of the article.
The author is quite intentionally saying that IT now (with 4 decades of Moore's Law under our belts and at least another decade to run) is at the stage that railways were at in 1857 - by that point the railway mania (the 'gilded age' according to the model quoted in the article) was well and truly over - after a wild 30 year ride of speculative boom/bust, infrastructure buildout, rampant stock-jobbery, dodgy political fixes and several spectacular crashes. Sound familiar?
Bucketloads of cash were made/lost during the mania and heaps of track was laid; but the *real* benefits of the technology had barely started to kick in and, as you say, the 'golden age' of railways paid dividends in terms of raised economic growth rates and long term structural adjustments to trade and transportation costs for a hundred years (at least) - one of the key benefits being the ability of the US to expand all the way to the Pacific and incorporate all of the intervening real estate into an economy that became the industrial powerhouse of the C20th world trading system (another 'benefit' was the ability of modern societies to mobilise and support huge armies in the field all year round, thus ushering in the era of total war - but I digress).
The article's analogy between 1857 and today isn't perfect - the irruption and gilded age driven by Moore's Law looks like it'll run for at least 50 years (1961-2011) rather than the 30-odd of the railways (1829-59) and I suspect we have at least one more boom/crash to go before we are out of the gilded age for ICs (my candidate for this being the incorporation of mobile wireless devices into a technology stack running from mainframes at the top down to keyfob/cigarette lighter-scale items intergrated into PANs), so we're probably only around 1849 or so on the railway analogy.
But the fundamental point that you (and pretty much everyone else) seem to have missed in the article is that even if you go with the author's fairly pessimistic reading of the analogy, computing devices based upon ICs have only just entered their 'golden age' and yes, this mature phase is likely to run for at least a century; during which the effects of the technology on our society will dwarf what we have seen so far.
Luke