Tech

More Media Disintermediation?

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Last month, Marc Andreessen suggested that the Hollywood writers’ strike…and the response of the studios to that strike…will accelerate a structural shift in the industry–specifically, a move toward a Silicon-Valley-like model in which the creators of the product–the talent–have strong ownership interests in the companies. (Link via Newmark’s Door.)

A couple of days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran this headline:

Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups

Dozens are turning to venture capitalists, seeking to bypass Hollywood and reach viewers directly online

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Metaphors, Interfaces, and Thought Processes

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My post today is inspired by In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson, a strange little book that will probably be found in the “computers” section of your local bookstore. While the book does deal with human interfaces to computer systems, its deeper subject is the impact of media and metaphors on thought processes and on work.

Stephenson contrasts the explicit word-based interface with the graphical or sensorial interface. The first (which I’ll call the textual interface) can be found in a basic UNIX system or in an old-style PC DOS system or timesharing terminal. The second (the sensorial interface) can be found in Windows and Mac systems and in their respective application programs.

As a very different example of a sensorial interface, Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

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The Evolution of Money Part I: The Past

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The Chinese say that fish are not aware of water. We talk about and use money so often that we seldom think to stop and ask: What is money? Why do we need it? What function does it serve?

I think money is a type of information technology that calculates, stores and transmits information about the quantity of one good one must exchange for a certain quantity of another good.

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No Wires to Tap

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Instapundit links to an article by Melanie Scarborough that purports to show that either a telecom engineer or the Bush administration is lying about the domestic “wiretapping” with the clear implication that Bush is the liar.

Unfortunately, her premise is based on a complete misunderstanding of how modern telecommunication works. Both parties are telling the truth.

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PC Backup Problems Bleg

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For the past few years I’ve successfully used xxcopy to backup data to portable hard drives. However, a few days ago, while I was copying the contents of one portable HD to another, with both HDs connected to the same computer via USB 2.0 connections, something happened in the middle of a backup and the source HD became corrupted. (The first symptom of a problem was that the backup stopped and a Windows message balloon appeared indicating that a particular source file could not be read and that I should run CHKDSK on the source HD.)

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