You can't Facebook me: I quit.Yes, that's right, I've quit Facebook. After being a member for over three years--since its expansion to all colleges and...
Heard any Good Books Lately? Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB)When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007,...
XeePhotoshopLoader.m - xee - Google CodeBest. Comment. Ever. while([fh offsetInFile]+12<=imageoffs) { uint32 sign=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 marker=[fh readUInt32BE]; uint32 chunklen=[fh readUInt32BE]; off_t nextchunk=[fh offsetInFile]+((chunklen+3)&~3); // At...
F-Secure says stop using Adobe Acrobat ReaderI am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the...
the fiction circusMost small publishers only received letters from Google last week asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them...
Dear Chris: 1. It's "Whuffie." With an h. Term coined by Cory Doctorow in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. "Wuffie" is closer to "Wussie," which is what people call reporters who have zero familiarity with the subject upon which they are reporting. Or reporters who fail to proofread. 2. No, this was Marx's goal, not his belief. As your article all too clearly indicates, there are forms of economic activity that go beyond the monetized cash transaction people typically associate with capitalism. In point of fact, the new actors in the information economy do own the means of production, which might indicate that there is, in fact, a profound economic shift currently underway -- the ends of which Marx may have foreseen, albeit not the method.
Crap, my spam blocker ate up the response I wrote. I blogged that passage because I thought it would be a good way to start a discussion, and also because I wasn't familiar with the term "wuffie". Anyway, thanks for setting the record straight. A journalist's skill in making the important seem interesting and making the complex understandable does lead to oversimplification. I blogged that article because it tied together a lot of things I wanted to talk about in two different classes this fall, but as I look at it again, I see it cites no sources. That's never a good sign in journalism. Still, I can't help but love Wired. The article about an order of Cistercian brothers who started an online office supply store ("Monk ebusiness") cleverly makes the segue from "Dust to Dust" to printer toner. ANyway, thanks for setting the record straight, Mike.
Well, no other than Wired's Mark Frauenfelder had high praise for Doctorow's novel, and I gotta say, it's most excellent. And it's free. And even though it's free, I bought a dead-tree copy. Go figure. I don't know how much fun-reading time you have this summer, Dennis, but I think you might get a kick out of it, and I'd be curious to hear your impressions.
I'll see how big the "to read" stack is...