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Sunday, December 19, 2004 |
Two from Roland's Sunday Smart Trends #37:
The 'hot city'
Going online from "hotspots" at the airport, Starbucks or McDonald's was a major breakthrough in Internet technology. Now, the next generation of wireless Web surfing is happening in "hot zones," which are popping up in unlikely places.
Like the Los Gatos Opera House.
Source: Sam Diaz, San Jose Mercury News, December 13, 2004
Not quite out of this world
After years of hype, a new, cheaper way to blanket cities with wireless coverage may finally be about to get off the ground.
[Note: Even if the article of the Economist is well-informed, it took about two weeks before this news spread out. Interesting! And I really enjoyed how Wi-Fi Networking News picked it, with this title, "Stratascopic! Broadband from Blimps."]
Call it a low-orbit satellite or a high-flying blimp, but wireless broadband takes on a new form.
Sources: The Economist, December 2, 2004; Glenn Fleishman, Wi-Fi Networking News, December 15, 2004
5:31:15 PM 
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MODEST NEEDS.
This is probably one of the last places you expected to get pitched yet another charity at Christmas, but I urge you to consider Modest Needs.
If you've ever had your bacon saved by a someone giving you a few hundred dollars when it looked like nobody else would, and not making a big deal of it, you'll understand the concept behind Modest Needs.
Thanks to Kevin Kelly for introducing me to this excellent and genuinely modest charity.
[Gibson Blog]
10:46:51 AM
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Mark Cuban wonders: Is it illegal to collect movies ?.
Hollywood is afraid of people in theaters with camcorders. They want to pass laws so that bad, bad people like Kramer and Jerry Seinfeld cant grow cottage industries selling us wobbly movies with the sound of breathing on the soundtrack, pressed on DVDs and sold for 5 or 10 dollars on street corners.
I look at this tiny, tiny industry and ask why would people buy these DVDs ?
. . .
But I digress. Picking on Hollywood some more….. There is always a reason why their transition to new technologies has been slow. One of the repetitive themes is that there is a big risk in having a digital copy of a program or movie available because the quality is nearly as good as the original. That fear brought us the stupidity of the Broadcast Flag. It brought threats not to offer programming in High Def. Not that long ago, it was a threat not to offer programming and movies on DVD ! All for fear of near original quality hitting the masses.
So imagine my suprise when I go to the newstand and pick up a magazine that I wont name, and I see ads for pristine 35mm prints of newer movies that have yet to be released on DVD.
I have been buying this same publication for the past 6 years. I started buying it not because Im a movie collector, but because during the broadcast.com days, it was a great source of public domain movies and programs that we would host for streaming.
It was possible to buy the 35mm prints, in pristine condition, back then. Its still possible today. To paraphrase Monty Python: If I were so inclined , I could purchase one of those rubbery, I mean film prints , of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow , or I Robot, or Hero with Jet Li, for 700 bucks a pop. I have my choice of places to buy Terminator 3, should I so desire. (this is where you all go ’YES, YES” Then I could take my lovely film to any of the many transfer houses and have it converted to DVD, HD, VHS wherever my proclivities take me. Or if perversion were my thing, I could just have them put it on a hard drive in any manner of codec.
If TV were my passion, I could call or email one of several advertisers offering my choice of 25 THOUSAND tv shows available for 14.95. Less , if I ordered in volume.
Of course, with every ad, there are those magic words that make everything alright.
"No Rights Implied or Given"
So collectors can purchase, own, sell and replicate movies and programs all they want. Every movie, every tv show you could ever want is out there. Waiting for you. Just as its been for at least 6 years.
Where is the outrage ? Where is the furor ? Who will stop all this madness ?
Or maybe its all illegal and Hollywood slipped this law by me. [Blog Maverick]
10:44:18 AM
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Quicksilver questions.
I just finished Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, and I have to admit bafflement.
It’s great fun, with a great evocation of the period and plenty of sly digs at the modern reader (I liked the Duke of Monmouth as the Dan Quayle of the 1685 campaign). At the same time, I can’t help feeling I’ve completely missed the point here.
The style is that of fantasy, but the novel seems to be entirely historically accurate apart from the fact that the members of the Cabal have been replaced by new characters with the same acronym, some of whom play a minor role in the story, and that one of the key characters comes from the island of Qwghlm, apparently a British possession.
I don’t know exactly what gives here: maybe a reader can point me in the right direction. A lot of readers had much the same reaction to Jonathan Strange which I loved, so I’m open to the idea that there’s more here than I’ve seen so far.
There’s a whole Metaweb (a type of wiki apparently) about all this, which may be worth exploring.
[Crooked Timber]
Okay. Here's the thing about Quicksilver, and the whole Baroque Cycle goodness: they are really novels of ideas, clad in fantastic and historical stylee.
Rip-roaring yarns are great, but they're all the better when they serve as a medium of transport for the alchemical goodness of ruminations on the nature forces that matter to us in the New Millennium. In Newton's mechanical theory (which Stephenson's work seems to favor over the Leibnizian alternative -- with maybe one exception), forces are themselves unseen, but the locus of observable changes. Stephenson takes a new turn on the application of the concept or "revolution" hither and yon, to think through a bit military and political forces, force of personality, information flow as forceful, the force of memory, psychological forces such as anger and greed, the force of commitment to a religious or political ideal, and so on.
Some of these forces are akin to the alchemical: they make of something common something fine and different in kind. These forces yield political authority, for example. Or they make a metal -- copper or gold -- count as money. Or a commoner a royal. Or a poor woman wealthy. Or a wealthy man poor.
There's no argument here on much of this; Stephenson shows rather than tells. (Seen versus unseen -- Stephenson plots the second derivative of these forces!)
The exception about favoring the Leibnizian: Waterhouse's work on a computing device. And there's much to say about that, but not without giving away more of what happens in volumes two and three than I mean to do here. I've tried to be careful not to spoil anything for potential lovers of the books who haven't gotten to them yet. Suffice it to say that I entirely enjoyed the Cycle, and I think about the characters, stories, and ideas often.
10:38:53 AM
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