Scooterman: drunkard's chauffeur on a folding scooter [bOing bOing]

brilliant

Technology or Culture?.

TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL UNIFICATION: This blog is really transformational for me.  Just when I think I have heard all perspectives, I'm awakened to new viewpoints.  Case in point…  I was with a very respectable customer today.  It was clear that these folks get the value of  human interaction given the market they are in (PURE knowledge creation and subsequent value generation), but architecture somehow gets in the way. 

Halfway through our discussion, a very bright fellow in the crowd offers that “decentralized software disrupts the value that we, as a corporation, bring to the table.  These highly valued employees will just leave us, as teams, if we allow edge-based agility.  We give them POWER.”  Sigh…  Shrug…  Fascinating…

As we slog through the adoption of emergent technologies, it is clear to me that technology isn't the issue.  In fact, it is a complete NON-ISSUE.  I'm reminded by my anthropology buddies that technology is a mere tool.  Until the tribe adapts it's social viewpoint (read: culture, values, memes, networks),  technology is nothing but an enabler versus a real change agent.

[Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog]

Michael is spot on. If you want to see how powerful his insight is there is a gem of a book called “The Dynamics of military revolution” edited by Knox and Murray. They look at many epoch changing technical innovations in the military such as the introduction of longbows, muskets, rifles etc and show that it takes about a generation, or a bad war, to make the social adjustment. IE consider the rifle. At the beginning of the civil war, tactics demanded that men line up facing each other and pour it on. By the end of the war, everyone who could get into trench did so. BUT the Europeans missed the whole point and spent much of the first 6 months on WWI charging into machine gun and rifle fire. In WWII, the French and the Brits had in total more tanks than the Germans but they deployed them as infantry support weapons. The german, by losing the last war, had created an entirely new method – Blitzkrieg. The key is to make the cultural shift and then the doctrine shift. You deploy the new in a new way. if you deploy the new in the old way – 'we keep all the knowldge inside', you fail.

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

Culture always determines how tools are being used. Cultures that are unable to properly use them will fall behind cultures that creatively use new tools. TV was viewed as radio with pictures for years. The internet has been viewed as TV over a network. We are just beginning to get an idea of just how different it is. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

–+–

technology and culture are not separable, culture, and each of its little functions, is a technology, it developed over time, it has creators, etc. it is a technology. technology likewise is cultural, one culture does not necessarily have the same technologies and techniques as another. we cannot easily say that cultures can or cannot in the manner above because it is entirely unclear, because it is clear that there is certainly at least one person in nearly any culture that can, in short, one that is not bound a tightly to the culture, but yet is still embedded in it. likewise, to say cannot means that there is no possibility that someone in the culture, can, and that is unlikely unless the culture is more or less dead. cultures adapt, technologies do to, they operate the same way as the same set of techniques.

MoveOn's online primary starts Tuesday..

 

[aka propagandart]

[a klog apart]

A very interesting experiment in online democracy. The results will be interesting. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle's Weblog

that's tomorrow….

Girls and boys, today's concept is transduction. Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London: Continuum, 2002. Or see [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

I've been meaning to read this for a few months now

States Line Up to Woo Biotech. The Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual meeting is drawing state and local representatives hungry for a piece of the action, although some folks at home say they aren't getting enough information before labs are built next door. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News]

everyone wants a peice, no one gets any… this is the way it goes in the end.

Fawlty Towers of Video Game Stores?. The Gord is the Basil Fawlty-like proprietor of a video game store in Canada. He appears to be a real-life Comic Book Guy. More inside … [MetaFilter]

I must say that i spent about 3 hours on sunday reading this, some of it is a bit problematic, but much of it is funny.

defence description. Torill has posted a beautiful description of Lisbeth's defence, and Lisbeth describes it herself, too. There's even a video to watch of the actual diploma being handed over!… [jill/txt] and Torills account and the movie
—-
sounds nifty overall, but the movie is avi….. icky

so they are showing this at the university, channel 6, so i'm watching it down the hall from my office.

updates
airport extreme
804.11g standard ratified
compliance with spec
—-
ipod
3rd generation ipod
(i have the first)
shipping 1 millionth ipod
—-
itunes 4
music store
8 weeks ago today
5million songs sold
—-
safari
5M downloads
safari 1.0 beta be gone
releasing safari sdk
—-
updates over
—-
os 10
6000 native apps
jaguars over
previewing panther 10.3
100 new features
the most popular unix
x11 bundled
fast ufs
kerboeros
ipv6
linux api
nfs file locking
–winders interoperability–
newest smb
smb printing
smb home directories
ipsec based vpn
active directory integration
–new finder–
old was computer centric
everything you need in one column
everything right there
drag and drop modification to column
fastsearching
action button gives contextual commands
labels
dynamic network browsing
new open and save panels
shrinking, etc.
eject dvd's
looks like preindexed searching, it looks fast
—-
idisk
panther automatically sync files in both directions
distributed syncs
good for unteathered portables
autosyncing — i think it could be exploited for viruses
—-
expose
wow, it iconifies all open apps an
you can assign a key to do it
or a second button
or assign a screen corner, —- wonder if that is contextual
it will clear all windows by button
nifty toy
instantly see all windows
instantly see one apps window
instantly see your desktop
—-
file vault
secures yoru entire home folder
encrypts and decrypts on the fly
once you log out stuff is safe
—-
mail
alot faster
html rendering <–security?
addresses are now objects
view mail by threads
—-
ipsec-vpn
built in to server
—-
built in fax
—-
pixlet
breakthrough quicktime codec
studio-grade quality
pixar wanted it
pixar wavelet
film resolution high definition
48 bits per pixel/ source data
no noticeable visual artifacts
no inter-frame compression
hd/2 you can play it on an 1gh tibook
you can edit and scrub…
—-
preview
fastest pdf reader in the world
pdf is at the core for osx
searching is fast
—-
pdf
on the fly postscript to pdf
—-
fast user switching
password or not
rotates it through, nifty
i'd set up multiple users to have multiple windows open
—-
fontbook
pro font management
instant searching
categorization
—-
ichat
to
ichat AV
adds audio chats and video chate
video conferencing for the rest of us
video chat from the buddy list
no phone numbers or ip address
presence
any firewire camera
camcorders
56 modem for audio chat
broadband for video conferencing
talking to paris live on ichat av
free beta today times out dec 31
—-
isight
full motion video
1 single firewire
camera position
and presence
$149
—-
xcode
new set of developer tools
speed
fast compiles
gcc 3.3
distributed builds–nifty
make changes to apps as they are running
fast code navigation
compile on the fly……
fix and continue…
included in panther.
—-
premature specification

it was a mistake and its true

delivering today the worlds fasted personal computer.
chip, system, product

the chip
the g5
64 bit
runs 32 bit apps natively
up to 2 ghz
1ghz frontside buss
full smp
dual processor systems
215 in flight instructions
2 floating point units
2 integer units
2 load and store units
branch prediction logic

system
point to point architecture
dedicated bandwidth
8gbps of bandwiddth
12x the bandwidth of g4
6.4gb/s memory bandwidth
agp 8x pro graphics
133mhz pici-x
hypertransport
storage
serial ata
independent interface to each drive
digital audio in and out
product
up to 8gb mem
40x faster
contents of dvd in less than a second
4x superdrive
radeon 9600 pro
enclosure is aluminum
big, big fans
9 fans
for 4 different areas
35dba at room temperature
kept the handles
comparable dell is 4000
shipping in august
photoshop is 2.1 x as fast
solving a system of linear equations with 1 million unknowns
mathematica about 2x as fast. 198m vs 78m
emusic
more than 1000 voices

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT today upheld the use of affirmative
action in college admissions in two cases involving the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but rejected the way
Michigan actually carried out affirmative action in its
undergraduate admissions policy.

In a case involving Michigan's law school, the court upheld
the admissions policy in a 5-to-4 decision. The majority
said that the policy was narrowly tailored to further a
compelling interest in “obtaining educational benefits that
flow from a diverse student body.” In the undergraduate
case, the majority said that the university's current
policy, which is more formulaic, was not narrowly tailored
to achieve educational diversity.

Check our Web site throughout the day for updates on today's
decision and for the text of the opintions.

–> FOR MORE INFORMATION, including the full text of the
lower-court decisions, as well as background from The
Chronicle, go to
http://chronicle.com/free/2003/06/2003062305n.htm
______________________________________________

It is my opinion that anything other than a positive decision such as this would have had horrid backlash from the rightist invasion, which we already had to some extent here in Virginia, though it seems to have passed to some extent.

American Traveler International Apology Shirt. I want one…. [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

i should get a couple of these, seeing as we have a tendency to elect idiots.