Archives for April 2011

рассказал пейзаж

8 April 2011 | Culturology, Metaphysics, Religion, Science | No Comments

какой замечательный встретился дядя:

Most of [James] Gall’s work on religion was detailed in a book called The Stars and the Angels in which he not only argues for the existence of other inhabited planets but describes the view that Gabriel would have had on his way from heaven to earth to tell Mary that she would have a baby next Christmas.

вот цитата, например:

Christianity is the only religion that indicates the dignity of the material universe, by connecting it with man’s future existence in the resurrection from the dead. All heathen religions deal not only in worlds of ghosts but in ghosts of worlds.

  

вольно дышит человек

8 April 2011 | Geography, History, Photo | No Comments

снова о былых просторах.

  

life imitates art far more than art imitates life

7 April 2011 | Culturology, Politics | No Comments

найдите 10 отличий.

  

бороздят просторы Большого театра

7 April 2011 | Culturology, Internet | 2 Comments

ох, уж эти советские с их вечными посиделками на кухне.

смех, в общем, да и только.

  

о будущем слов и сюжетов

6 April 2011 | Literature, Technology | 1 Comment

издеваясь многим (включая и меня) вслед, Джеймс Варнер[1] озвучивает замечательные прогнозы касательно эволюции книг:

Future “books” will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don’t have to actually read the thing.

там же и про инструменты:

Novelists will start out designing their characters in the form of sets of vinyl figurines. If these generate enough buzz, fans will produce the actual novel collaboratively as a wiki.

и хоть многое, о чем говорится в заметке, уже давно и в самом деле так или иначе существует (или должно существовать), но текст все равно очень хороший, да и в каждой шутке все равно только часть шутки.


[1] — автор, вообще, получается, сплошь и рядом исключительно упоительный — вот аннотация к его последней книге:

Cal Lyte, a gun-loving venture capitalist, is tired of paying alimony to his ex-wife Tabytha. Plotting to blackmail her and derail her campaign for Congress, he enlists the help of their daughter’s boyfriend, British academic Reid Seyton, to unearth some Lyte family secrets. But the results turn out to be more than anyone bargained for, in an escalating cycle of revelations that will leave nobody’s life the same.

  

атака клонов

5 April 2011 | Apple, Google, The Great Game | No Comments

вот, кстати, хорошее, прямо в яблочко:

Google is a cool company. They make and have made some cool things. Obviously, the top two are search and gmail. There never was a search engine like Google before it and now there isn’t a search engine that isn’t like Google. Same with gmail.

But you can’t say that about some of Google’s other products. They are the ones following Apple in smartphones, someplace they seem to really be putting their energies. They’re not really anywhere on tablets. Their TV product was an abortion. So was their attempt to get into social with Buzz, which, after the reputation hit it caused was a total mental net negative. They need to quit Xeroxing other people’s stuff!

между тем, есть и другой подход:

Apple saved itself from the memory hole by coming out with products that made everyone copy them. First, the iMac. After that, you better believe Dell, Compaq, and all the other box makers were coming up with candy color options. To geeks, it seemed frivolous. But this isn’t a chess club election. Consumer dollars matter. Apple followed that up with Mac OS X, whose smooth lines were promptly incorporated into Windows, the iPod (Zune), the iPhone (Android, various Blackberries, Windows Phone 7, etc.) and the iPad, all of which everyone else is trying to copy.

а на самом деле все ведь просто, не так ли?

[C]reate a solution that someone like me can’t even think of. Hell, until the iPod came along I thought burning my own CDs was all I needed.

  

о платформах

5 April 2011 | Internet | No Comments

кстати, было бы просто замечательно, если LiveJorunal наконец бы загнулся[1].


[1] — показательно, кстати, что англоязычных новостей на эту тему практически нет.

  

о криптозоологии

4 April 2011 | Art, Humour, Literature | 5 Comments

к слову о носорогах — вот совершенно прекрасный.

а книга и в самом деле удивительнейшая — словно на бесконечном обеденном столе, в ней есть все:

The Cardinal feeds his guests with caramelised sheep’s feet, sparrow beaks ground to powder and rats roasted in honey and nutmeg. Cows’ eyes shiver in jelly. Lizards fried in cinnamon fill a tureen and black broth foams in its pot at the table’s end. Cardinal Medici presides above a banquet of cavaliers and idiots. Bad poets declaim and bad singers croon. There are clowns. The waiting brings them out, draws them to him: misshapen men, clots, and vainglorious fools. He smiles, chuckles, claps, weeps with laughter, howls with mirth; he loves them, he absolutely loves them. Hunchbacks and maniacs turn cartwheels gown his hall with his hiccups, farts, and gulps the air as though he might eat the merriment within it. It is a hunger he never satisfies. He watches the stomachs of his guests swell and sometimes burst with his spicy curiosities. Rivers of wine disappear down their gullets and their buffoonery is a playground of polity for him to practise lunges and feints, quick jabs and stabs to the back. The body of the Borgia blackens and swells in the pestilential airs of Rome while his Cardinal passes dishes of beech leaves pickled in wine, ginger concoctions, and pigeons’ feet in aniseed.

  

people who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway

3 April 2011 | Copyright, Economics | No Comments

в противовес иным, позиция Тима О’Рейлли, к счастью, все так же последовательна и неизменна:

Let’s say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let’s say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome?

<...> the exposure that you get from free content actually helps drive visibility and awareness for people who are unknown.

<...>

If people wanted 10,000 pirated copies of a book, the publisher and the author would be very, very well off. If 10,000 people are willing to pirate it, there’s a very large number willing to pay for it.

там же о мутациях печатнных изданий (“I look at news.me instead of the New York Times in the morning.”), ценовой политике (“[W]e don’t know yet what the right price for e-books is.”) и многом другом (“A computer is just a device that’s a front end to where the real action is.”).

очень хороший.

  

лучше, чем прежде

2 April 2011 | Copyright, Economics | No Comments

как и было известно, музыка ничуть не страдает от пиратства:

Another claim of the music industry, that piracy hinders the creation of new music, has now been debunked by Applied Economics Professor Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota. In a recently published paper he shows that there is no evidence that piracy hurts creativity or slows down the supply of recorded music.

<...>

Instead, the entire music industry has changed with more power going to the artists and smaller labels. Although this is hurting the majors, piracy is not to blame and music is more alive than ever before.

именно, piracy is the new advertisement.