Friday, August 01, 2008

TV and gin

Seth points to this article, an excellent look at a new resources and how we handle them.
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects [the whole of Wikipedia] per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?"

4 comments:

Bert said...

Great article, thanks.

Anonymous said...

Great article, indeed.

But I must take issue with the author on this silly notion:
"A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken."

The invention of the mouse is a key reason why the computer industry has stagnated for more than 20 years. A mouse is a pathetic excuse for not being able to create a computer that performs automatic data processing. As opposed to the computer assisted manual data processing we now have.

Imagine the crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey operating HAL 9000 using a mouse.

Alex said...

With a mouse, at least they'd know Hal wasn't eaves dropping!

I guess a keyed microphone would work

From "Star Trek IV - The whale movie"

[faced with a 20th century computer]
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
[Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it]
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

The mike joke was used in Third Rock From The Sun also. Good one.