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 …
The Hub of… Outmoded Software Shackles?
In one of her essays, Ursula K. Le Guin described a Native American culture (I think it was) in which the metaphor for moving in the future was of people walking backwards — looking into the past, which can at least be seen, if not always so clearly, and walking blindly into the unforeseeable future. This metaphor came to mind today as I logged onto my Gmail account on one of the computers at my department office. At the top of the screen was a note informing anyone using the PC that Google was discontinuing support for the browser I …
An End to Passwords?
Yeah, the French government apparently wants to do away with Internet passwords. They’ve teamed up with a bunch of companies. The idea seems to be that you could use a digital certificate instead. Which sounds curiously like a system thought up by people who are scared of and vaguely uncomfortable with the Internet. Hey, wait, that’s exactly how Korean Internet Banking works! (Except with outdated ActiveX controllers which I hope the French government isn’t foolilsh enough to get tied up with.) Mind you, the 공인인증서 — the Korean equivalent of this kind of certificate that is basically a domestic online …
Clean Reinstalls? What?
Today I went to the Woori Bank to get my 공인 인중서, which is, basically, a little electronic certificate that I need to have in order to file my taxes. (Which I can only do on paper now: the electronic tax filing through my workplace closed a week ago, and the office assistants either didn’t know, or assumed that foreigners couldn’t do it, or forgot to tell me when it was announced. After a little discussion in which I mentioned I’d done it before (with a different office assistant who is now gone), and it’s much easier with a 공인 …
Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews
So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever. The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …