How The Post covered the ‘grand social experiment’ of the Internet in 1988
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I watched this TedX Talk from Tomi Ahonen and I think he may be right in his 'mass media' perspective.
1st mass media: Print (500 years old) including books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards etc
2nd mass media: Recordings (from 1890s) such as music records, videogames, videotapes and DVDs etc
3rd mass media: Cinema (from 1910s)
4th mass media: Radio (from 1920s)
5th mass media: Television (from 1950s)
6th mass media: Internet (from 1991)
7th mass media: Mobile (from 1998)
8th mass media: ?
He makes the argument that augmented reality will be the next mass media and I think he is right.
The ability to distribute printed matter by mail lead to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post being able to create a national identity in the United States.
http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2013/07/21/google-wants-to-i...
Any comment? I would rather have usenet like hierarchical database access to articles rather than weighty web driven portal that will not very parseable and has a tendency to change over time and often disappear. If there is an underlying protocol to save and distribute semantic data across the web and we could agree on that, that I think would be awesome. I heard of open data, but I doubt that can replace RFC based protocols of yester yore. IMO.
my 2d.
Aye, so would I. USENET was clunky and difficult to use compared to, say, reddit, but overall I think it was far more open, in a technological sense.
Barring karma & co. (which grown-ups probably don't care about too much), I'd say the rate of innovation in online communication between 1993 and 2013 is a joke compared to the one between 1973 and 1993. And I honestly a combination of blame lazy programmers and greedy wannabe-businessmen for for this.
What we have is something like 10x more good stuff, and 1000x more rubbish. Whether this should be described as degradation depends on what your idea of quality is... There are more and better gems to be found, but we've to sift through a lot more crap to get to them.
I think the most I'm comfortable saying is that the nature of discourse is different, and the AVERAGE quality is lower, but if we adjust our own behavior, we can reap the benefits and suffer less of the consequences.
Re: Hierarchical database, I'm totally with you. I've constantly been frustrated at how it feels like the best writing is never effectively, meaningfully aggregated.
Loved this!
Glad I'm not the only one :-) My last goto statement was in 1984, rejected by Code Review.
I haven't written a goto since. And I haven't cared much for Code Review since, either.
Last time I wrote a goto in a language that did have exceptions was the alignment portion of an unrolled loop implementation of a hash algorithm. Delphi doesn't support C-style switch statements where one case flows into the next; so the alignment switch did jumps into the unrolled loop body.
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.103....
EDIT: formatting
He's wrong.
>Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few `auto-increment' memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own. Indeed, the auto-increment cells were not used directly in implementation of the operators, and a stronger motivation for the innovation was probably his observation that the translation of ++x was smaller than that of x=x+1.
True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection. They may append a :-) if they are making a joke (turn your head to the left) or use :-( for an ersatz frown.
> Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll, the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson's computer....
There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars.
"It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at Lehigh University's computer center.