I work at the Ars Electronica Center and I can confirm that it's not really news, the I/O brush having been exposed there for a rather long time.
Like most exhibits in the AEC, the I/O brush is not meant to be useful in the praxis, but rather to show new ways of interaction that new technologies offer - like 'moonies', a project where you can chase butterflies projected on a screen of vapour, or 'scrapple', a kind of reversal of virtual reality (which is basically a music sampler, only you create music not by editing the track on the screen, but by putting real objects of various shapes on a grid projected on a table). And lots of others, which are along the same lines - 'conspiratio', 'music box' etc. See for yourself on http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005/programm/allproj ects.asp
It seems like especially kids love the I/O brush, resulting in high amounts of tear and wear on the hardware.
It's not absurd to call it unstoppable when you take into account our obvious uncapability of dealing with such matters. Sure, a scientifically versed humanity could contrive to stop or reverse something like this, theoretically at least, and a responsible and reasonable humanity might even find a way to bring up all ressources necessary for such a gigantic feat. Only: we're not all that. We won't be able to do anything, because we hardly ever do anything about anything. Vide the current Most Important Tragedy In The Whole Wide World (tm) - for years past scientists have been warning in unison, their models have been predicting a catastrophy, the measures necessary would have cost peanuts... And what happened? So what reason does anyone have to assume that by some miraculous process we're going to change just in time to prevent the catastrophy?
I'd wish people would trust scientists more - after all, they're no idiots, and their community has rules and controls in place designed to prevent any individual scientist from talking absolute rubbish - neither of which can be told about politicians or whoever it is that keeps contesting their theories.
It is true that we're comming out of an ice age, and that the warming is normal. Only the RATE this happens at is all but normal, something like it has never happened before. This could well tip the earth out of the equilibrium and make it uninhabitable. Those who have researched this for decades seem to agree that this is a possibility and this is exactly what seems to be happening, so why are laymen ever contesting it?
I do try to say GNU/Linux whenever possible, I find it rather impractical to pronounce, but i use it whenever writing.
I wish people would give Richard a break. I can understand his feelings very well - there he goes starting this whole thing and then some whiz-kid comes along and takes all the credit. Now he ends up being perceived as a funny fat man of dubitable cleanliness rambling about some matter that nobody cares about. Moreover, people seem to think of him as an impostor trying to ride on the bandwagon of Free Software's popularity, trying to stick up his label on it after the fact.
Sundry documentaries on Free Software give you the impression that Linus invented it, overwhelming majority of the unwashed believe this to be a fact, and certainly more people know about Linus than about Richard.
It might be that Richard is making himself slighly ridiculous with his tirades about the naming of the end-product, but that doesn't deserve him the treatment he receives. His claims may be not wise from the standpoint of PR, but they're not the less justified. Credit where credit's due. Just call it GNU/Linux and don't forget mentioning RMS when talking about FS, I hope that should make him happy.
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I work at the Ars Electronica Center and I can confirm that it's not really news, the I/O brush having been exposed there for a rather long time.
j ects.asp
Like most exhibits in the AEC, the I/O brush is not meant to be useful in the praxis, but rather to show new ways of interaction that new technologies offer - like 'moonies', a project where you can chase butterflies projected on a screen of vapour, or 'scrapple', a kind of reversal of virtual reality (which is basically a music sampler, only you create music not by editing the track on the screen, but by putting real objects of various shapes on a grid projected on a table). And lots of others, which are along the same lines - 'conspiratio', 'music box' etc. See for yourself on http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005/programm/allpro
It seems like especially kids love the I/O brush, resulting in high amounts of tear and wear on the hardware.
It's not absurd to call it unstoppable when you take into account our obvious uncapability of dealing with such matters. Sure, a scientifically versed humanity could contrive to stop or reverse something like this, theoretically at least, and a responsible and reasonable humanity might even find a way to bring up all ressources necessary for such a gigantic feat. Only: we're not all that. We won't be able to do anything, because we hardly ever do anything about anything. Vide the current Most Important Tragedy In The Whole Wide World (tm) - for years past scientists have been warning in unison, their models have been predicting a catastrophy, the measures necessary would have cost peanuts... And what happened? So what reason does anyone have to assume that by some miraculous process we're going to change just in time to prevent the catastrophy?
I'd wish people would trust scientists more - after all, they're no idiots, and their community has rules and controls in place designed to prevent any individual scientist from talking absolute rubbish - neither of which can be told about politicians or whoever it is that keeps contesting their theories.
It is true that we're comming out of an ice age, and that the warming is normal. Only the RATE this happens at is all but normal, something like it has never happened before. This could well tip the earth out of the equilibrium and make it uninhabitable. Those who have researched this for decades seem to agree that this is a possibility and this is exactly what seems to be happening, so why are laymen ever contesting it?
I do try to say GNU/Linux whenever possible, I find it rather impractical to pronounce, but i use it whenever writing.
I wish people would give Richard a break. I can understand his feelings very well - there he goes starting this whole thing and then some whiz-kid comes along and takes all the credit. Now he ends up being perceived as a funny fat man of dubitable cleanliness rambling about some matter that nobody cares about. Moreover, people seem to think of him as an impostor trying to ride on the bandwagon of Free Software's popularity, trying to stick up his label on it after the fact.
Sundry documentaries on Free Software give you the impression that Linus invented it, overwhelming majority of the unwashed believe this to be a fact, and certainly more people know about Linus than about Richard.
It might be that Richard is making himself slighly ridiculous with his tirades about the naming of the end-product, but that doesn't deserve him the treatment he receives. His claims may be not wise from the standpoint of PR, but they're not the less justified. Credit where credit's due. Just call it GNU/Linux and don't forget mentioning RMS when talking about FS, I hope that should make him happy.