eShrek – n. software that is big-business in and of itself. For entertainment purposes only, not business or personal enrichment. (From Old Internet eMail and New Hollywood Shrek, after Yiddish “shrek” (monster), sometimes with connotations of shlock, shmaltz, shmata, or other short throw-away Yiddish words denoting things not highly regarded.) Compare “crapware.”
Author: Stearns
i finger gadgets
Damn, I thought I had found a Christmas gift for my wife that was not a gadget. You may love a gadget. You may tell your friends. You may keep using it for a year. Or not. But to me, a gadget is defined as something you don’t immediately replace when it’s lost. Gadgets aren’t game-changers that permanently alter how you live.
Maturity
<%image(20071124-church.jpg|853|494|600K polygon model of church ruins produced by a laser-scan of the archaeological site.)%>
Self-destruction of a monster?
My cable company seems to be self-destructing. We can only hope.
Recently I wrote about my cableco cutting off my service, and not turning it back on until I answered questions about my and my wife’s social security numbers and download habits.
Last Monday I called to complain that despite the premium I was paying for 3Mb/s service, I was getting 300 Kb/s downloads and worse. They responded by cutting me off completely. I’ll spare you the dialog, but you can just substitute any page from Franz Kafka or Lewis Carroll. A guy came on Wednesday to replace my cable modem and splitter, and it appeared in his immediate testing to yield close to the expected 3000 Kb/s.
Over the next few days I found that I only got that speed immediately after rebooting the cable-modem. After a few minutes, it would drop to 1500, 600, 300, 150, and finally 30 Kb/s. Slower than an acoustic modem from before my children were born. All through the rest of the week, I would reboot, and watch as the speed fell off.
Charter stopped taking my calls altogether. They just hung up on me over and over again.
After one of these calls we ordered DSL from our local phone company. The modem arrived Friday. I plugged it in and it worked! 3.5 to 4 Mb/s. And it has stayed that way ever since. I’ve been trying to get my mail and Webpages copied off from Charter, but they won’t let me log in.
Since then, I’ve discovered two things I didn’t know or pay any attention to when things just worked:
This war brought to you by the RIAA
This morning my Internet service was out. Usually, I call and get either a recorded message saying that there’s an outage in my area and that technicians have been dispatched, or a I get a voice menu that talks me through resetting my modem. They don’t let you talk to an actual person until you do this.
But today, I got right through to a person. He asked for my social security number, my wife’s social security number, and what I used the Internet for. I was specifically asked what I downloaded. After several more minutes of monkeying around, the putative technician (who must have recieved his degree from a Blackwater USA training camp), told me that “it was broken” and they’d send someone out next Tuesday. After several minutes of screaming at him, and then my wife screaming at him (the big guns), the service was back on.
Could this possibly be anything other than Homeland Security outsourcing the RIAA’s bidding to the telecom operators? It sounds absurd, but the weird thing is — we already they know that this has happened. There’s no question of “can this happen”, only a question of what happened here in this case.
The Real-Time Internet, circa 2007 – It's about the information, not the interaction
World-Wide Web technology is primarily static. The technology is designed around slow repeated cycles of request-a-page/get-a-page. Technologies like Flash, Curl, and Laszlo are aimed at improving this interaction while staying within the WWW framework. But the Web isn’t about interaction, it’s about information and, to a certain extent, transactions. While these drivers remain unchanged, two stories in my local paper this week have shown me that the expectations of pace have changed.
Mixed Reality
Getting virtual worlds away from a computer screen and into a physical classroom space doesn’t have to be hard. These Greenbush Labs guys are using a commercial computer/whiteboard link to run open source software based on the KAT. How cool is that?
Check out their other projects and the related stuff on YouTube. What a great way to get the word out. (See also.)
Harvard statue becomes Halo avatar
<%image(20070925-halo3.jpg|500|332|John Harvard as Halo's Master Chief)%>In another sign of the significance of virtual reality, MIT hackers transformed the Harvard benefactor into a character from the popular video game.
The Virtual Gets Real
I figure there is no technology on earth to which the Chief Technical Officer of Intel Corp doesn’t have access. Today he chose to talk about Qwaq and Croquet during his closing keynote address to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco’s huge Moscone Center.
<%image(20070920-smallhall.jpg|166|124|The auditorium at the Moscone Center.)%><%image(20070920-virtualauditorium_sm.jpg|174|124|The virtual auditorium in Qwaq Forums, showing Intel's Miramar desktop on one virtual screen, a movie about virtual surgery on another, and in between is a model of the patient.)%>
Watchacallem
What is the right name for the American political group that finds the constitution to be outdated for today’s world, political correctness an object of derision, civil liberties to be dangerous, and seeks to abandon the ideas of the national founding fathers (as well as I imagine the majority of our actual parents and grandparents).
The media refers to such folks as “conservatives”, but I can’t find any sense in which that is true.
Some of this group are called “Neo-Conservatives.” This deliciously oxymoronic term specifically refers to the students of Leo Straus, who believed that the intellectual elite needed to deceive the masses through a culture of fear in order to perpetuate … well, to perpetuate something. It’s never been clear to me what. Anyway, it’s not right to assume that every Bushie is a Neo-Con, or even a student of philosophy. And besides, what do you call the deceived masses that support them? Are they also Neo-Cons?
“Republican” is not right either. I don’t think that every one of today’s Republicans subscribes to this radicalism, and the ideas are certainly not true of historical leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, or Alexander Hamilton.
“Right wing” may be relatively true, but it isn’t very specific. Same for “Radical”.
Ironically, the ideas of the early 1800’s “Radical Republican” movement in Britain might be described today as… “liberal.”
Current usage of the term “idiot” seems apt. But again, historically this term was used to refer to people whose mental development was inhibited or disordered from the norm. My experience is that many such folks are happy, caring, sensitive, sincere, and eager to be helpful. None of this seems to apply.
Seriously, what do we call the putsch against the last 300 years of liberal ideas such as the rule of law and protection of the individual?
