Lots of things going on, and if you call me I’ll talk about them. But for those without my phone number, the things aren’t bloggable. Anyway, here are some things that are, which I’ll go ahead and post because I’ve got windows upon windows open with links I’d like to post: Charles Tan asks whether .epub and .mobi ebook formats will go obsolete. I dunno, we’re still using .mp3 despite the obvious drawbacks. And for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler that Tan co-edited, and Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009 edited by Tan as …
Tag: technology
Books and Covers?
I think it says a lot about us, and about our approach to robotics (and to AI, likely) that we coo and wow over how much robots can be made to look like us: Not that I think the verisimilitude would be easy, but folks, these things are profoundly not-us, and the more we try to hide that away, the more it will become apparent, and bother us. In the long run, all this investment of money into research and prototyping suggests that robots are thought to be useful in some kind of economic sense–not that they ought to have …
“Is Internet Censorship Compatible with Democracy?”
It’s quiet in Seoul. Nobody seems to know whether we should be heading for the hills, or going back to work as usual. One thing Miss Jiwaku commented to me is that the quiet itself is scary. After all, when the media has been quiet in the past, it wasn’t always because there was no news. Probably every expat in Korea has heard stories of how news was controlled by the government back in the bad old days, and probably everyone who reads my blog knows that the status of censorship and control of online exchanges in Korea is, well, …
Getting an iPhone, Part I
Seems not to be as easy as some say, though I’m not sure it’s quite as impossible as others claim. In short: I tried yesterday. I wasted a good bit of time.
The Law of the Handicap of a Head Start
Flipping through Shine, I ran across an interesting mention (in the introduction to Lavie Tidhar’s contribution) of Jan Romein’s notion of Wet van de remmende voorsprong, or, in English, the “Law of the Handicap of a Head Start.” It struck me that the Korean internet (a subject about which I recently posted) is a wonderful demonstration of both sides of this notion: the benefit of a late start, and the handicaps that a head start can introduce into a system. The link above details several of the handicaps: the dependency on Windows, ActiveX, and even Internet Explorer 6.0, as well …