US coastal tech companies need to overcome their prejudices enough to see that not everyone in the rural US is a hayseed, but not quite enough to realise that India is a massive country with a long tradition of science and literature, teeming with really smart human beings who can add value to their business. I think I understand!
Apple is LOSING MY MONEY because of content resolution.
Yes, but they are gaining thousands of other people's money, that they wouldn't get if they offered full resolution video, because the content owners don't want to cannibalise DVD sales etc. I know people like to think that they're important to companies like Apple, but actually the relationships between the content providers and distribution channels are far more important to businesses than what the user wants.
Names, like history, are the story of the victor..
on
Martian Naming Madness
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...and they don't last forever. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, names that were in place for hundreds (NZ) or thousands (Aust) years were ignored by the British settlers when naming them in the 18th/19th century. Slowly, more of them - particularly significant ones like mountains - are becoming known by their original names.
A lot of people view this as being PC, but I think a bigger issue is that the names actually had meaning for the original inhabitants and the stories of these names were recorded in song, visual arts, histories, etc. which gives them an ongoing reason to have the names. On the other hand, if you just give something a name because it's different than anything else, at some stage someone will have to make a name meaningful, and they'll do it without reference to the original. (When China settles Mars, for example, I'm sure they won't keep the English names).
Business owners free to be as idiotically bigoted as they want to be, and consumers free to give their money to companies that don't suck. It's better than the sort of concealed racism we have now.
Isn't it funny how I've only ever heard white people use this argument.
You can't sell something to someone who can get it for themselves for free.
Haven't you seen those fridges filled with bottled water, roughly what you get from a tap? Brand, convenience, and reliability are worth money. As I think iTunes Music store demonstrated.
I agree that TiVo will fail, but I don't really think it has that much to do with their feature set. At the moment, the features people are clammoring for here (DVD burning, HD, etc) might have reduced the number of people who drop their subscription (churn), but it wouldn't have grown their user base to a point that they could compete as an independent device maker against the "almost good enough" DVRs of the cable cos.
It's all about vertical integration. Just as you can't just launch a product and get it on your supermarket shelves unless you're Proctor and Gamble or a few others, the media equipment market is in no way "open", because of the integration between programme owners and distributors. At the moment the Cable MSO's / aggregators hold all the cards, because they have the highest barriers to entry. They happen to have (for the most part) the same money that makes the programmes, so any MSO who backs Tivo (particularly a Tivo that is less "hobbled" as many here want) is going to be punished by the big programme owners.
I think they had an Internet business model in an old-media market environment. The Tivo of the future will be about IP television, where distribution isn't the bottleneck and there will be a raft of a la carte programming available. Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Apple) will slowly drive this - it will still be a niche market (you won't be getting "desperate housewives" or other event programming on it) but lower overheads will make it profitable enough. Unfortunately for TiVo, it's hard to see what they have (other than some very experienced people) that Microsoft or Apple would want to acquire. Both those companies can roll their own software pretty effectively. If Apple does acquire, I think they can afford to sit for a couple of months and drive the stock value down even further.
All this is a real shame for TiVo, and seeing as there have been some gratuitous political comments in this thread, I'll just note that this is a great case study on how the production of "faith in the market" to produce innovative goods and services in the most efficient way is the biggest con job in history, as economists increasingly realise. Not that the market is bad, it just can't deal with infrastructure as well as it can with products that use it.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last.
Absolutely!
But there's no reason to use a camera at all when with enough time with the pencil you can do a perfectly adequate representation of a scene.
And there's no reason why you should use a high-level programming language when you can do everything with enough time in assembler, where you'll learn the true meaning of programming.
Look, the question was about digital arts, which is an entirely different domain than drawing still lifes, in much the same way as you don't compare geeks writing code for embedded microprocessors with those who develop enterprise databases, even though its "still programming".
Artists' imaginations are also constructed by their tools, and the institutional dimensions of art have been radically transformed since the introduction of new media (not that new media has been directly responsible for all those changes). Oil paints are not some kind of "natural medium" for art, they're the product of a specific social history (and set of economic relationships). I agree with you that students need to develop high-level skills in thinking about how images work, how they will be percieved and how to manipulate their form, but there's absolutely no reason this "craft" can't be developed in the digital arena. In fact, I would assert that the art made by my students with good digital chops is on the whole more thoughtful and effective than the work of those with painting chops. There are good and bad students in both camps, of course, but to put forward your kind of aesthetic fundamentalism is just silly, even if it does seem "insightful" to those who've never looked at a contemporary art magazine.
The US is using a very clear strategy that runs like this:
We will reduce a small proportion of our illegal tarrifs and trade protection around agriculture and manufacturing (as much as we can without pissing off the middle americans who work in these industries) if you allow us to dominate your IP-dependent service industries - in other words: mortgage your future for a few extra bucks right now.
The idiots agreeing to this have been told that they'll be the US' IP bitch forever more, but the debate is also tied up with political issues e.g. "security concerns" (racism) that requires Australia to align itself economically with other Western countries rather than e.g. China, which would make a lot more economic (and, long term, political) sense.
The issues aren't simple - no one wants to be seen to be not aligning with the US, the farmer lobby believes that tarrifs are their main problem rather than broader structural changes in the economy, and the US is very good at influencing the media to make life very difficult for those opposing its interests.
But what if the page you found was result number 137 and you can't quite remember the search terms? Not as uncommon as you might think for researchers. It's easier to remember the context in which you were searching ("Three days ago I was looking for information on foo when I was home sick") rather than the actual terms.
I end up using history a fair bit, but more importantly, the potential is there for it to be used a lot more given a simpler implementation. (The argument is a bit like "how many people use their phone for text messaging anyway?" back in 1998 - obviously not nearly as many people as could given a viable implementation)
You must be new to Slashdot. That is kinda the point of Slashdot: the readers are a part of the experience. I didn't have time to do a full review that would satisfy everyone's needs, so I did one that satisfied mine, confident the readers would add their comments.
Only about 6 years on Slashdot, so fairly new but still enough to understand how it works.
There's nothing wrong with your review for what it is, and it's cool that you've spent the time to share your experiences, but I don't think most people dropping $500 or $1000 on server are going to be using it for that purpose. So I'm not sure why the eds decided to publish it (which is different than just linking to it).
Not a big deal, just one of those things that makes it less likely to hit that subscribe link...
OS X Server is designed for larger networks. For home users it's more practical and cost-effective to stick with OS X client, use personal file sharing and USB printer sharing, and not spend money on a dedicated server and network printer.
And so we can ask the editors: why are they running a two part review of a significant product, where the reviewer is obviously not using the product for its intended purpose? I'm considering OS X Server for two 40-seat labs and the comments have been much more informative than the actual review. Can the eds commission a proper review?
Good point. It's worth noting that having most of your customers breaking the law is actually very useful for the studios/networks/MPAA/RIAA - it allows them much greater flexibility in pursuing people they don't like (think DeCSS). So the poster suggesting 'it doesn't matter because people do it anyway' is missing the point: in the current environment, if you can be pegged as a criminal, anything done by the law becomes pretty much justified.
This is a classic slashdot comment. Camera phones are to "real" cameras like text messaging/SMS is to e-mail. When the articles on the sms boom in Europe/Asia came out a couple of years ago, most gringos here were saying "WHY WOULD YOU SEND A MESSAGE WHERE IT TAKES 3 BUTTON PRESSES TO MAKE A LETTER AND IT'S LIMITED TO 160 CHARACTERS???" Of course, humans know SMS is cool and easy (why is this so hard for tech people to get their head around?). Analysts know that SMS is specifically useful because it's relatively synchronous, usable in a whole range of locations, reasonably priced, and stable.
My P800 hasn't replaced my Olympus, which I use more than ever. But now I take snapshots in places where I never would have thought to take my camera, where a camera isn't appropriate, or i just want to send a pic *right then and there* to someone. It's more an extension of SMS to include images than a camera replacement.
LaunchBar for OS X has been a godsend for me in the absence of a decent metadata system. it lets you find any file by typing some letters out of its name, so you can open almost any file without taking your hands off the keyboard. it also learns from your abbreviations. If you name your files well it works great. Check it out at versiontracker.com - no affiliation, just a satisfied user who has tried way too many organisational tools that have sucked.
I think it's important to remember that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's attitude and Premiere's interface in particular before Apple bought FCP from Macromedia.
It's that Quark-style "hey, we own this market, we don't need to fix anything if we don't want to" attitude that did them in. Apple have clearly decided that they don't want the main reason to have a mac (a/v media editing) in the hands of unfriendly third parties.
It's much the same as Microsoft not leaving the main reason for having a PC (office apps) to 3rd parties.
I posted the following to another list (fibreculture.org) that seems relevant: It may be easy for another free search engine to take Google's place in the current climate, or should I say the climate up untiI about 18 months ago. I'm not sure that it is actually true right now (we'd need google to go bust to check). But more to the point I'm thinking about the bigger picture of content economics, where there is no reason to believe that because it has been free in the past that it will be in the future - and I think Google can probably make a go of charging for access.
Overall, despite the neterati's classy line in sloganeering ("Information wants to be free"), more money changes hands for content now than ever before. Have a look at the history of TV - who predicted that people would pay a subscription fee for cableTV in the 1960s? Why would you pay for what you can get for free?
The answer, as Rupert knows, is that the "information economy" content properties can be (and increasingly *are*) owned by media conglomerates who'll charge your ass to see it. Regularly, becuase content is no longer a product but a service, costing $x/month. Read Clay Shirky (shirky.com) for lots of insights on that. The content service comes with a service contract which places increasing constraints on what is or isn't acceptable use of that content.
Now I don't want to get into a conversation about whether that's a good thing. What I'm suggesting is that content is increasingly becoming part of a chain of business relationships from producer to intermediary to end user. Google knows this, which is why they're recently advertised for a business development manager for their news division. My guess is that Google News will become the subscription online news channel. They'll be able to make it work because they are the only entity capable of providing a single consumer front end to all the subscription news services out there. They'll lock up licenses for most of the pay archives fairly quickly I expect. I guess I'd probably pay $20/month for unlimited searchable access to major media organisations across the world. More if I could get work to pay for it:)
Now a question would be: what if many of the major content providers across all areas (newspapers, media cos etc.) sign a licensing agreement with google to say, "you are the only search engine we're gonna let search our content". We're going to block deep linking based on referrers from any other search engines. Users can pay an extra $5/month to your ISP to have "Google access". The ISP might wear the charge in the first few months but eventually they'll pass it on to their users, who will pay. Who wants a web without google? Remember that the other search engines will only take you to weblogs, slashdot, a few academic institutions, and other non-branded stuff mainstream media consumers don't want. I can see Google making plenty of cash in this way. Because they're nice people they might give free google access to IPs in third world countries.
Anyway, as murdoch found with soccer, if there's something most of the world wants, you can put it behind a wall and make people pay for it. Everyone in online content's been talking about the cable MSO charging model but no-one's had a big enough proportion of the web's content to make it viable. I reckon the ubiquity of Google now makes it the first company capable of making a for-fee internet. Not the ISPs, not Yahoo, not MSN, not AOL-TW have had this position. Interesting times ahead.
Or any book on consulting. It sounds like you need some professional guidance here. I particularly recommend Peter Block's Flawless Consulting. No affiliation, just a satisfied consultant.
For instance, when I read your posting and decided to reply to it, I center-clicked the "Reply" link and then kept reading what I was doing while Slashdot's "Post Comment" page loaded. Once the tab color changed to indicate it was done loading, I clicked over to write this. Not only did I not have to wait for the reply page to appear, but when I was done, I didn't have to wait for the original page to reload before I could keep reading.
Any time I'm reading a page with a bunch of interesting links (maybe a news article or something), I'll center-click them all and then, once I've finished the original article (thus preserving my train of thought) I can read through 'em, one by one, and they're all pre-loaded and ready to go.
When I want to compare a bunch of pages (maybe pulling up 7 or 8 country profiles from the World Factbook or something) I can center-click all the links in rapid succession and then flip back and forth between them with ease.
Hmm, I do all this anyway, but just use command-click to pop multiple windows on IE and now Safari. Not quite as elegant as tabbing, but certainly not a big enough difference to stop me using an otherwise better browser.
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress.
This kind of "mad genius professor" model of innovation isn't really borne out by the facts.
Increasing global communications is creating diversity as well as homogenisation. Certain things are being homogenised, but overall there's much more variation in knowledge and production of culture than previously. This can be verified by having a look around, or reading Mauro Guillen's comprehensive review (500KB PDF) of the evidence in his excellent book The Limits of Convergence.
As another poster noted, standardisation has been happening through textbooks anyway. But more to the point, there are way more textbooks available now than there used to be, and a lot of teachers aren't up with them. There should be no excuse for tired profs wheeling out their favourite old chestnut that they learnt from and not paying attention to contemporary work in the field. Hopefully, something like Open Courseware will increase the pressure on educators to provide the best possible texts in their work.
The whole idea of peer review, open source, and open courseware is that more eyes on the work are better, and why rewrite when you can reuse and modify. I've always scoured the web for what's happening in my field, then adapted, modified, or discarded to suit anyway - so I look forward to having some more highly reviewed content to build into my lectures!
Open Courseware is just a great initiative. In my view any standardisation that does occur will be more than offset by the increase in quality of people's material, and the overall contribution to the field that open source/courseware encourages.
find some of the advice being dished out here pretty outta control
Here's some facts:
1) It doesn't make sense to say pixels aren't accepted by the "art world" when SFMOMA is hosting a big show of online art (http://010101.sfmoma.org/). Sure, some people around your parts may not wear it, and there's even a famous Australian critic who still writes in major newspapers that photography is "on the verge of being accepted as an art form", but generally those involved in setting agendas for contemporary art are up with technology.
The key thing to remember is that there are *a lot of different "art worlds"*. Choose your world carefully!
2) If you're really serious about computers as art and read slashdot, I'm surprised that you haven't come across all the sites which show online art such as http://rhizome.org/artbase, which has an advisory panel represeneting of all the major contemporary public museums in the US. If you have a look around you will find there are plenty of places looking for digital work. You would get a low grade for your research component in my class! Sign up for some mailing lists where digital artists hang out, such as nettime. You'll get a picture of what opportunities are available and the kinds of aesthetic ideas people are working with.
3) I think you need to ask yourself how seriously you are interested in engaging with contemporary discourses on art, versus applying your knowledge of historical art practices to computer graphics. Contrary to one poster, the "people who discuss the term 'art'" are precisely the ones who are advancing digital media within the art context.
To have your work accepted as "art", you really need to devote yourself to fully understanding this context. If you apply yourself to the study of innovative works of art created in the last 40 years, you will find they have plenty to offer about finding an appropriate context for your work. Flip through some magazines like Artforum, frieze, etc. These are mainstream magazines and you'll see digital art in them. Rip out the appropriate pages to show to your professor!
To get your music downloaded on Napster, you essentially have to be famous already. On MP3.com, people can actually find you, even if you're unknown simply by browsing.
That's not entirely true. I use Napster to find other tracks by artists who are far away from being famous, but who I've heard one thing by and want to check out more. And if I like a lot of their stuff, I usually buy the CD.
Many artists don't have material on MP3.com or don't have commercially released material on mp3.com. I like the try before you buy aspect of Napster more than anything...
Ahh Slashdot, where ignoring someone's answer and forcefully restating your own opinion becomes "insightful".
Read what he says, there is a greater diversity of media now than ever before - and he provides concrete examples. What does your "90+% of media controlled by 6 companies" mean? (there is no data on the linked page). Is it 90+% of people's attention, or advertising dollars? You really don't provide any evidence to counter Shirky's point.
Even the International Federation of Journalists' studies note that "in almost every country around the world we are seeing an overall growth in the number of people practicing journalism. However, the overwhelming proportion of that growth is not occurring in traditional ways nor in traditional media outlets." The net is part of that, obviously, but there are also a whole host of independent radio and tv outlets which never existed prevoiusly.
There is simply no evidence for claiming an increased concentration of media, unless you restrict your analysis to something called "the mainstream media" - a concept which only journalists still think is important. Journalists are still laughably (and patronisingly) wringing their hands over "balance" and "bias" in their "mainstream media", when a whole generation of very cynical youth are already hip to the idea that journalists do not - and can not - represent their interests. To a young person today, the fact that content is sponsored by Disney is no more or less likely to make it "true" or useful to them than if it's written by an "independent" journalist who will be pushing their own propaganda / view of the world (much as you are doing in this post). Today's media consumer doesn't swallow anything whole, so you can climb down off that high horse.
The days of (overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class) journalists deciding what is "fit to print" are over, and the media landscape is more diverse and better off for it. Indymedia is a great example of that process. And there are a whole lot of other excellent media sources which make my media life better now than ever before.
The bottom line for me is that a story such as Bush's involvement in an abortion would never have reached me or any of my friends in the 1980s. So I don't see any reason to claim that the sky is falling.
Your courses at hunter seem to integrate "applied" and "theoretical" knowledge of New Media - as opposed to many other Universities which will separate theory from studio. Could you elaborate on your teaching philosophy and why you teach the way you do?
Also, what relationship does teaching have to your other work?
Slashdot Mirror
US coastal tech companies need to overcome their prejudices enough to see that not everyone in the rural US is a hayseed, but not quite enough to realise that India is a massive country with a long tradition of science and literature, teeming with really smart human beings who can add value to their business. I think I understand!
Apple is LOSING MY MONEY because of content resolution. Yes, but they are gaining thousands of other people's money, that they wouldn't get if they offered full resolution video, because the content owners don't want to cannibalise DVD sales etc. I know people like to think that they're important to companies like Apple, but actually the relationships between the content providers and distribution channels are far more important to businesses than what the user wants.
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=PG
Does anyone know what's up with that?
...and they don't last forever. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, names that were in place for hundreds (NZ) or thousands (Aust) years were ignored by the British settlers when naming them in the 18th/19th century. Slowly, more of them - particularly significant ones like mountains - are becoming known by their original names.
A lot of people view this as being PC, but I think a bigger issue is that the names actually had meaning for the original inhabitants and the stories of these names were recorded in song, visual arts, histories, etc. which gives them an ongoing reason to have the names. On the other hand, if you just give something a name because it's different than anything else, at some stage someone will have to make a name meaningful, and they'll do it without reference to the original. (When China settles Mars, for example, I'm sure they won't keep the English names).
Business owners free to be as idiotically bigoted as they want to be, and consumers free to give their money to companies that don't suck. It's better than the sort of concealed racism we have now.
Isn't it funny how I've only ever heard white people use this argument.
Haven't you seen those fridges filled with bottled water, roughly what you get from a tap? Brand, convenience, and reliability are worth money. As I think iTunes Music store demonstrated.
I agree that TiVo will fail, but I don't really think it has that much to do with their feature set. At the moment, the features people are clammoring for here (DVD burning, HD, etc) might have reduced the number of people who drop their subscription (churn), but it wouldn't have grown their user base to a point that they could compete as an independent device maker against the "almost good enough" DVRs of the cable cos.
It's all about vertical integration. Just as you can't just launch a product and get it on your supermarket shelves unless you're Proctor and Gamble or a few others, the media equipment market is in no way "open", because of the integration between programme owners and distributors. At the moment the Cable MSO's / aggregators hold all the cards, because they have the highest barriers to entry. They happen to have (for the most part) the same money that makes the programmes, so any MSO who backs Tivo (particularly a Tivo that is less "hobbled" as many here want) is going to be punished by the big programme owners.
I think they had an Internet business model in an old-media market environment. The Tivo of the future will be about IP television, where distribution isn't the bottleneck and there will be a raft of a la carte programming available. Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Apple) will slowly drive this - it will still be a niche market (you won't be getting "desperate housewives" or other event programming on it) but lower overheads will make it profitable enough. Unfortunately for TiVo, it's hard to see what they have (other than some very experienced people) that Microsoft or Apple would want to acquire. Both those companies can roll their own software pretty effectively. If Apple does acquire, I think they can afford to sit for a couple of months and drive the stock value down even further.
All this is a real shame for TiVo, and seeing as there have been some gratuitous political comments in this thread, I'll just note that this is a great case study on how the production of "faith in the market" to produce innovative goods and services in the most efficient way is the biggest con job in history, as economists increasingly realise. Not that the market is bad, it just can't deal with infrastructure as well as it can with products that use it.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last.
Absolutely!
But there's no reason to use a camera at all when with enough time with the pencil you can do a perfectly adequate representation of a scene.
And there's no reason why you should use a high-level programming language when you can do everything with enough time in assembler, where you'll learn the true meaning of programming.
Look, the question was about digital arts, which is an entirely different domain than drawing still lifes, in much the same way as you don't compare geeks writing code for embedded microprocessors with those who develop enterprise databases, even though its "still programming".
Artists' imaginations are also constructed by their tools, and the institutional dimensions of art have been radically transformed since the introduction of new media (not that new media has been directly responsible for all those changes). Oil paints are not some kind of "natural medium" for art, they're the product of a specific social history (and set of economic relationships). I agree with you that students need to develop high-level skills in thinking about how images work, how they will be percieved and how to manipulate their form, but there's absolutely no reason this "craft" can't be developed in the digital arena. In fact, I would assert that the art made by my students with good digital chops is on the whole more thoughtful and effective than the work of those with painting chops. There are good and bad students in both camps, of course, but to put forward your kind of aesthetic fundamentalism is just silly, even if it does seem "insightful" to those who've never looked at a contemporary art magazine.
The US is using a very clear strategy that runs like this:
We will reduce a small proportion of our illegal tarrifs and trade protection around agriculture and manufacturing (as much as we can without pissing off the middle americans who work in these industries) if you allow us to dominate your IP-dependent service industries - in other words: mortgage your future for a few extra bucks right now.
The idiots agreeing to this have been told that they'll be the US' IP bitch forever more, but the debate is also tied up with political issues e.g. "security concerns" (racism) that requires Australia to align itself economically with other Western countries rather than e.g. China, which would make a lot more economic (and, long term, political) sense.
The issues aren't simple - no one wants to be seen to be not aligning with the US, the farmer lobby believes that tarrifs are their main problem rather than broader structural changes in the economy, and the US is very good at influencing the media to make life very difficult for those opposing its interests.
But what if the page you found was result number 137 and you can't quite remember the search terms? Not as uncommon as you might think for researchers. It's easier to remember the context in which you were searching ("Three days ago I was looking for information on foo when I was home sick") rather than the actual terms.
I end up using history a fair bit, but more importantly, the potential is there for it to be used a lot more given a simpler implementation. (The argument is a bit like "how many people use their phone for text messaging anyway?" back in 1998 - obviously not nearly as many people as could given a viable implementation)
You must be new to Slashdot. That is kinda the point of Slashdot: the readers are a part of the experience. I didn't have time to do a full review that would satisfy everyone's needs, so I did one that satisfied mine, confident the readers would add their comments.
Only about 6 years on Slashdot, so fairly new but still enough to understand how it works.
There's nothing wrong with your review for what it is, and it's cool that you've spent the time to share your experiences, but I don't think most people dropping $500 or $1000 on server are going to be using it for that purpose. So I'm not sure why the eds decided to publish it (which is different than just linking to it).
Not a big deal, just one of those things that makes it less likely to hit that subscribe link...
OS X Server is designed for larger networks. For home users it's more practical and cost-effective to stick with OS X client, use personal file sharing and USB printer sharing, and not spend money on a dedicated server and network printer.
And so we can ask the editors: why are they running a two part review of a significant product, where the reviewer is obviously not using the product for its intended purpose? I'm considering OS X Server for two 40-seat labs and the comments have been much more informative than the actual review. Can the eds commission a proper review?
Good point. It's worth noting that having most of your customers breaking the law is actually very useful for the studios/networks/MPAA/RIAA - it allows them much greater flexibility in pursuing people they don't like (think DeCSS). So the poster suggesting 'it doesn't matter because people do it anyway' is missing the point: in the current environment, if you can be pegged as a criminal, anything done by the law becomes pretty much justified.
Yeah, that's why they kill about five civilians for every soldier in Iraq.
This is a classic slashdot comment. Camera phones are to "real" cameras like text messaging/SMS is to e-mail. When the articles on the sms boom in Europe/Asia came out a couple of years ago, most gringos here were saying "WHY WOULD YOU SEND A MESSAGE WHERE IT TAKES 3 BUTTON PRESSES TO MAKE A LETTER AND IT'S LIMITED TO 160 CHARACTERS???" Of course, humans know SMS is cool and easy (why is this so hard for tech people to get their head around?). Analysts know that SMS is specifically useful because it's relatively synchronous, usable in a whole range of locations, reasonably priced, and stable.
My P800 hasn't replaced my Olympus, which I use more than ever. But now I take snapshots in places where I never would have thought to take my camera, where a camera isn't appropriate, or i just want to send a pic *right then and there* to someone. It's more an extension of SMS to include images than a camera replacement.
Danny
LaunchBar for OS X has been a godsend for me in the absence of a decent metadata system. it lets you find any file by typing some letters out of its name, so you can open almost any file without taking your hands off the keyboard. it also learns from your abbreviations. If you name your files well it works great. Check it out at versiontracker.com - no affiliation, just a satisfied user who has tried way too many organisational tools that have sucked.
I think it's important to remember that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's attitude and Premiere's interface in particular before Apple bought FCP from Macromedia.
It's that Quark-style "hey, we own this market, we don't need to fix anything if we don't want to" attitude that did them in. Apple have clearly decided that they don't want the main reason to have a mac (a/v media editing) in the hands of unfriendly third parties.
It's much the same as Microsoft not leaving the main reason for having a PC (office apps) to 3rd parties.
It may be easy for another free search engine to take Google's place in the current climate, or should I say the climate up untiI about 18 months ago. I'm not sure that it is actually true right now (we'd need google to go bust to check). But more to the point I'm thinking about the bigger picture of content economics, where there is no reason to believe that because it has been free in the past that it will be in the future - and I think Google can probably make a go of charging for access.
Overall, despite the neterati's classy line in sloganeering ("Information wants to be free"), more money changes hands for content now than ever before. Have a look at the history of TV - who predicted that people would pay a subscription fee for cableTV in the 1960s? Why would you pay for what you can get for free?
The answer, as Rupert knows, is that the "information economy" content properties can be (and increasingly *are*) owned by media conglomerates who'll charge your ass to see it. Regularly, becuase content is no longer a product but a service, costing $x/month. Read Clay Shirky (shirky.com) for lots of insights on that. The content service comes with a service contract which places increasing constraints on what is or isn't acceptable use of that content.
Now I don't want to get into a conversation about whether that's a good thing. What I'm suggesting is that content is increasingly becoming part of a chain of business relationships from producer to intermediary to end user. Google knows this, which is why they're recently advertised for a business development manager for their news division. My guess is that Google News will become the subscription online news channel. They'll be able to make it work because they are the only entity capable of providing a single consumer front end to all the subscription news services out there. They'll lock up licenses for most of the pay archives fairly quickly I expect. I guess I'd probably pay $20/month for unlimited searchable access to major media organisations across the world. More if I could get work to pay for it
Now a question would be: what if many of the major content providers across all areas (newspapers, media cos etc.) sign a licensing agreement with google to say, "you are the only search engine we're gonna let search our content". We're going to block deep linking based on referrers from any other search engines. Users can pay an extra $5/month to your ISP to have "Google access". The ISP might wear the charge in the first few months but eventually they'll pass it on to their users, who will pay. Who wants a web without google? Remember that the other search engines will only take you to weblogs, slashdot, a few academic institutions, and other non-branded stuff mainstream media consumers don't want. I can see Google making plenty of cash in this way. Because they're nice people they might give free google access to IPs in third world countries.
Anyway, as murdoch found with soccer, if there's something most of the world wants, you can put it behind a wall and make people pay for it. Everyone in online content's been talking about the cable MSO charging model but no-one's had a big enough proportion of the web's content to make it viable. I reckon the ubiquity of Google now makes it the first company capable of making a for-fee internet. Not the ISPs, not Yahoo, not MSN, not AOL-TW have had this position. Interesting times ahead.
Or any book on consulting. It sounds like you need some professional guidance here. I particularly recommend Peter Block's Flawless Consulting. No affiliation, just a satisfied consultant.
Any time I'm reading a page with a bunch of interesting links (maybe a news article or something), I'll center-click them all and then, once I've finished the original article (thus preserving my train of thought) I can read through 'em, one by one, and they're all pre-loaded and ready to go.
When I want to compare a bunch of pages (maybe pulling up 7 or 8 country profiles from the World Factbook or something) I can center-click all the links in rapid succession and then flip back and forth between them with ease.
Hmm, I do all this anyway, but just use command-click to pop multiple windows on IE and now Safari. Not quite as elegant as tabbing, but certainly not a big enough difference to stop me using an otherwise better browser.
Danny
This kind of "mad genius professor" model of innovation isn't really borne out by the facts.
Open Courseware is just a great initiative. In my view any standardisation that does occur will be more than offset by the increase in quality of people's material, and the overall contribution to the field that open source/courseware encourages.
Danny
find some of the advice being dished out here pretty outta control
Here's some facts:
1) It doesn't make sense to say pixels aren't accepted by the "art world" when SFMOMA is hosting a big show of online art (http://010101.sfmoma.org/). Sure, some people around your parts may not wear it, and there's even a famous Australian critic who still writes in major newspapers that photography is "on the verge of being accepted as an art form", but generally those involved in setting agendas for contemporary art are up with technology.
The key thing to remember is that there are *a lot of different "art worlds"*. Choose your world carefully!
2) If you're really serious about computers as art and read slashdot, I'm surprised that you haven't come across all the sites which show online art such as http://rhizome.org/artbase, which has an advisory panel represeneting of all the major contemporary public museums in the US. If you have a look around you will find there are plenty of places looking for digital work. You would get a low grade for your research component in my class! Sign up for some mailing lists where digital artists hang out, such as nettime. You'll get a picture of what opportunities are available and the kinds of aesthetic ideas people are working with.
3) I think you need to ask yourself how seriously you are interested in engaging with contemporary discourses on art, versus applying your knowledge of historical art practices to computer graphics. Contrary to one poster, the "people who discuss the term 'art'" are precisely the ones who are advancing digital media within the art context.
To have your work accepted as "art", you really need to devote yourself to fully understanding this context. If you apply yourself to the study of innovative works of art created in the last 40 years, you will find they have plenty to offer about finding an appropriate context for your work. Flip through some magazines like Artforum, frieze, etc. These are mainstream magazines and you'll see digital art in them. Rip out the appropriate pages to show to your professor!
Good luck,
Danny
To get your music downloaded on Napster, you essentially have to be famous already. On MP3.com, people can actually find you, even if you're unknown simply by browsing.
That's not entirely true. I use Napster to find other tracks by artists who are far away from being famous, but who I've heard one thing by and want to check out more. And if I like a lot of their stuff, I usually buy the CD.
Many artists don't have material on MP3.com or don't have commercially released material on mp3.com. I like the try before you buy aspect of Napster more than anything...
Danny
Ahh Slashdot, where ignoring someone's answer and forcefully restating your own opinion becomes "insightful".
Read what he says, there is a greater diversity of media now than ever before - and he provides concrete examples. What does your "90+% of media controlled by 6 companies" mean? (there is no data on the linked page). Is it 90+% of people's attention, or advertising dollars? You really don't provide any evidence to counter Shirky's point.
Even the International Federation of Journalists' studies note that "in almost every country around the world we are seeing an overall growth in the number of people practicing journalism. However, the overwhelming proportion of that growth is not occurring in traditional ways nor in traditional media outlets." The net is part of that, obviously, but there are also a whole host of independent radio and tv outlets which never existed prevoiusly.
There is simply no evidence for claiming an increased concentration of media, unless you restrict your analysis to something called "the mainstream media" - a concept which only journalists still think is important. Journalists are still laughably (and patronisingly) wringing their hands over "balance" and "bias" in their "mainstream media", when a whole generation of very cynical youth are already hip to the idea that journalists do not - and can not - represent their interests. To a young person today, the fact that content is sponsored by Disney is no more or less likely to make it "true" or useful to them than if it's written by an "independent" journalist who will be pushing their own propaganda / view of the world (much as you are doing in this post). Today's media consumer doesn't swallow anything whole, so you can climb down off that high horse.
The days of (overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class) journalists deciding what is "fit to print" are over, and the media landscape is more diverse and better off for it. Indymedia is a great example of that process. And there are a whole lot of other excellent media sources which make my media life better now than ever before.
The bottom line for me is that a story such as Bush's involvement in an abortion would never have reached me or any of my friends in the 1980s. So I don't see any reason to claim that the sky is falling.
Danny
Your courses at hunter seem to integrate "applied" and "theoretical" knowledge of New Media - as opposed to many other Universities which will separate theory from studio. Could you elaborate on your teaching philosophy and why you teach the way you do?
Also, what relationship does teaching have to your other work?
Thanks,
Danny (also an educator/consultant)