Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Flaming Lips or Microsoft Paint? You decide.


If you couldn't see the title of the YouTube video, this would be harder than you'd think.

That says something right there.

Yep, what we have here is MSPaint.exe, as opened in an audio-editing program. The Flaming Lips could have saved so much time and effort . . . and come up with pretty much the same thing as their latest release.

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

'Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?'

If a radio station doesn't make a sound because the computer crashes, will anybody be there to not hear anything?

Or whatever.

We're getting closer and closer to an answer we radio-lovers don't want to hear, I'm afraid, in this world where technology can replace human beings but has no power to replace itself when it dies.

Back in the days when Neanderthals roamed the earth and played vinyl records in broadcasting studios powered by vacuum tubes, the only thing that could keep a radio station off the air for a day and a half would be a transmitter failure, a fallen tower or the death of the mastodons running inside the giant mastodon wheels powering the generators at the electric plant.


NOW, IN OUR modern, technically advanced times, all it takes is a little computer crash to bring down a radio station like KRNU at the University of Nebraska, according to the Omaha World-Herald:

A computer error originally made it look as if the station, 90.3 KRNU, had lost everything over the weekend, said Rick Alloway, a UNL broadcasting professor in charge of the station.

While the first check of the computer system that holds all of the station’s files suggested a hard-drive crash, the error was later attributed to a more minor hardware failure.

IN RADIO, at least, progress means willingly turning oneself into a technological quadriplegic, as it were, one dead battery away from being trapped, helpless, in a marooned wheelchair. Or studio, as the case may be.

God forbid we give a live DJ a stack of compact discs, tapes or records and tell him or her to create some magic. What, did the HAL 9000 running KRNU eject all the staff out the airlock and into the man-killing Nebraska cold?

"I know I've made some very poor decisions recently," the automation probably told Alloway, "but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you."

THAT'S just what it told every other station as the bodies piled up outside the airlock.

"Daisy, Daisy . . . give me . . . your . . . answer . . . do. . . ."

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The trouble with translators


It started in 2006 out of necessity for American soldiers in Iraq.


They needed a microphone and a clunky laptop running a new speech-translation program to tell scared Iraqis "THIS IS A RAID! WE'LL TRY NOT TO KILL YOU!" in the middle of the Babylonian night.

Now all you need is a Google Android phone to live dangerously and
"presione 2 para español."


ONCE AGAIN, we have achieved Star Trek.

We are on the verge of the "universal translator," and it will lead nowhere good. Klingon opera, anyone -- in English?

College radio awaits.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

I couldn't have said it better myself


Do you think the National Organization for Marriage just might have been reading this blog?

Reading this MSNBC story and watching the above video, I would have thought that I couldn't have said it better myself . . . if I hadn't remembered that I already did.

I don't care what you think on the gay-marriage issue (obviously, as an observant Catholic, I'm against it), and I don't care what you think about "big government." But I do think that before people get all paranoid about the power of big government and its potential to sow tyranny, they need to realize that big business is just as capable of reducing us to serfdom . . . and perhaps far more likely to try.

Friday, December 03, 2010

Christianity gets Jobs-ed

Forget Julian Assange.

The most dangerous man in the world just might be Steve Jobs.


Why? Because knowledge is power, communications is the conduit, and Jobs is trying to position Apple -- via the iPhone, iPad and ITunes marketplace -- to be the premier gatekeeper in what he envisions as a "walled garden" of information technology, one micromanaged by himself (Himself?) and his techno-nerd corporate minions.


AND APPARENTLY, Apple just has declared mainstream, orthodox Christianity offensive and banished it from the iTunes app store. From the Catholic News Agency:
After Apple Inc. removed the Manhattan Declaration application from iTunes over complaints that it had offensive material, signers are urging the corporation to make it available again.

The Manhattan Declaration application for iPhones and iPads was dropped last month when the activist group Change.org gathered 7,000 signatures for a petition claiming that the application promoted “bigotry” and “homophobia.”

The Declaration – a Christian statement drafted in 2009 that supports religious liberty, traditional marriage and right to life issues – has nearly 500,000 supporters.

The iPhone application, which was previously available for purchase on iTunes, was removed around Thanksgiving.

CNA contacted Apple Dec. 2 for the reason behind the pull. Spokesperson Trudy Muller said via phone that the company “removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people.”

When asked if Apple plans to release additional statements on the matter, Muller said she had no further comment.

CHRISTIANITY has its truth. Apple, and all the mau-mauers yelling "Hate!" in a crowded app store have theirs. And in a world where truth is relative, and often mutually exclusive, the only currency we have left is power and the ability to subjugate the competition.

It seems I was talking about that
just yesterday.

In this kind of an environment, that makes Jobs a really cool Big Brother. It pains me to say this, but "Give me Windows, or give me death!"

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Fight the last war, lose the next


Fall 1983.

Apple and its co-founder, Steve Jobs, have massed it forces for a frontal assault on the Evil Empire, otherwise known as IBM. The Macintosh attacked the Empire early in 1984, then fell back under a withering assault from . . . Microsoft and its new Windows operating system.

Jobs left Apple in 1985, victim of a botched coup d'etat against the CEO he hired, John Sculley. Apple was nearly broke by 1997 . . . at which point Jobs came back to lead a renaissance of the company, which began to dominate in products not Macintosh.

Now behemoth Apple girds for battle with behemoth Google as behemoth Microsoft continues being Microsoft but can't compete with Jobs in anything except the operating-system market. Right now, Apple looks unbeatable.

And it will until it is.


There's a moral in that -- not that anybody ever pays attention to it.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Before there was AOL. . . .


Long ago, in a universe far away, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web.

There was a primitive Internet in this primitive universe, and there were extremely slow telephone modems, and there were Commodore 64 computers, too. Likewise, there was a service called Quantum Link.

A few years later, you would know it by a more familiar name -- America Online. Which is now AOL.

Which is kind of peripheral to what we do on the Internet.

Once upon a time, though, this promotional video was selling us what we imagined to be a George Jetson world, and today was barely imaginable.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Your Daily '80s: The computer for the rest of us


In 1983, this was personal computing:
C:\>dir

C:\>dir "C:\audio files"

C:\Audio files>dir "revolution 21"
THEN CAME the Macintosh in 1984. It had something called a "graphical user interface." It also had something called a "mouse."

You could click on an icon representing what you wanted or where you wanted to go.

It was a miracle.
Look!


TECHNOLOGY. What would we do without it?

That's a great question. Just don't ask Steve Jobs.

Twenty-six years after he made the world safe for personal computing, he'd rather that you just don't bug him.
Or Apple.

A college journalism student learned this the hard way when Apple media relations screwed her around, and she sent an E-mail to the top of the pecking order.
That would be Jobs.

After the Apple boss deigned to send her back a snotty-tot reply, a brief exchange ensued, and then Jobs got the last E-word:
"Please leave us alone."

In a market economy, that can be arranged. Sigh.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Your Daily '80s: It's a modern miracle, I tells ya!


Behold the Tandy 4000, available only at Radio Shack!

It's a price breakthrough for a business-class personal computer! Just $2,599!

A powerful 386 processor!

Runs at a blazing 16 MHz!

Ready for next-generation operating systems, like OS/2!

Will wonders never cease in this George Jetson world of 1988!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The big Mac attack


You know, it's said that if you hold on to something long enough, it will come back into style.

World, meet my ubercool, old-school Mac.

This is it in the bottom of the basement closet, where it's been sitting for years. In fact, the 1993-vintage Performa 450, with a whopping 32 MB of RAM and a massive 120 MB hard drive, hasn't been hooked up and turned on in eight or nine years.

Ever since we got . . .
ahem . . . a Windows machine.

Mac didn't mind, however. It was in the closet plotting world domination. And, lo, it might just happen.

When nobody was looking -- or at least looking at iPhones, iPods and iPads -- the cool but hopelessly niche Macintosh computer was getting popular.
Really popular.

And now people are saying Microsoft may be in trouble.


IT STARTED with this little article in The Washington Post:
Shares of Microsoft Corp. edged lower Wednesday after Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry downgraded the software giant in part due to increased competition from Apple's Macs to its Windows operating system.

THE SPARK: Chowdhry, who downgraded Microsoft to "Equal Weight" from "Overweight," said in a note to investors he does not expect the company to see any upside to his estimates for the next 12 to 18 months.

Increasingly, companies are giving their employees a choice to either use Microsoft Windows PCs or Apple Inc.'s Macs, the analyst said. And, increasingly, employees are choosing Mac over Windows. To boot, Chowdhry said 70 percent of college freshman are entering school with Macs, up about 10 percent to 15 percent from a year ago.
AND THAT got picked up by the tech media. The Mac blog OSXDaily was downright giddy:

I hope the raw statistics and research data is released so we can get the precise details, but speaking from experience I can definitely say that Macs and Apple hardware are overwhelming college campuses. Sure you’ll see other computers and electronics around too but a clear majority of people are using at least one of Apple’s signature products, whether it’s a Mac, iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

So Apple is pretty much taking over, dominating college campuses, the USA, and reaching to the highest levels of power with President Obama and the White House staff all using Macs and iPads. Amazing.

THEN TOD MAFFIN, lecturing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, decided to do his own college computer survey. He asked the students to hold up their MacBooks. The lecture hall was awash with glowing Apple logos.

He then asked the students to hold up their PCs. One student held up a lonely Windows machine.


SENSING the time was ripe, I dug the old Mac out and set it up. After nearly a decade in the closet, would it work? Could it work?


IT WORKED. Started right up. Now we're partying like it's 1995.

I think my next computer is going to be a Mac.

Again.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Triangle Shirtwaist model of modern media


Imposing the ethos of prime-time network TV (not to mention the ethos of the sweatshop) onto the business of journalism in an age of instant gratification and societywide ADHD will not end well.

Not for journalists.

Not for their Internet-startup employers.

And, most of all, not for the audience, which has become a digital crackhead expecting journalists to give it a quick fix next fix of titillating tidbits that . . .
HOLY S***, DID YOU SEE WHAT MEL GIBSON SAID ON THAT TAP . . . GLENN BECK CALLED OBAMA A SOCI . . . THAT DAMN PELOSI . . . LINDSAY LOHAN IN JAIL! . . . SQUIRREL!

WHAT WAS I saying? Oh, yeah. The story in The New York Times the other day. Won't end well. Read on:
Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages. Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles.

Once only wire-service journalists had their output measured this way. And in a media environment crowded with virtual content farms where no detail is too small to report as long as it was reported there first, Politico stands out for its frenetic pace or, in the euphemism preferred by its editors, “high metabolism.”

The top editors, who rise as early as 4:30 a.m., expect such volume and speed from their reporters because they believe Politico’s very existence depends, in large part, on how quickly it can tell readers something, anything they did not know.

“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.
BUT NOT ANYMORE, boyo. Every single second is deadline now. And not just for the big, important stories that we need to know about and need to know about now.
At Gawker Media’s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall displays the 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker’s Web sites. The author’s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and over all are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the “big board.”

“Sometimes one sees writers just standing before it, like early hominids in front of a monolith,” said Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder. Mr. Denton said not all writers have warmed to the concept. “But the best exclusives do get rewarded,” he added, noting that bonuses for writers are calculated in part based on page views.

The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. Departures at Politico lately have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. At Gawker, it is not uncommon for editors to stay on the job for just a year.

Physically exhausting assembly-line jobs these are not. But the workloads for many young journalists are heavy enough that signs of strain are evident.

“When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,” said Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of the digital media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I worry about burnout.”
NOT GOOD. What's the solution? Got me.

I fear this is one of those dilemmas that solves itself -- for journalism and the consumers who gorge on the Internet
(and everything else) -- when the whole societal ecosystem collapses from the weight of its sheer unsustainability.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

'All right, Mr. Jobs, I'm ready for my close-up'


OK, the iPhone 4
may suck as a cell phone, and Steve Jobs may well be a jerk, and the whole friggin' company that is Apple may specialize in arrogance and overpricing,
but. . . .

Damn!

What before would have required lots of high-end equipment, crews of technicians and a cadre of special-effects geniuses now can be accomplished by a plucky --
Did I just write "plucky"? -- little crew of young filmmakers.

With an iPhone that costs much, much less than a color television did when I was in college.

Now, whether "cool" actually intersects with "necessary" (especially in light of the team of trade-offs and unintended consequences we hitched our wagon to on the trail to high-tech Nirvana) . . . that's another conversation entirely.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Design . . . by Apple


Call it Design by Apple.

If you hold the new iPhone model wrong, your calls get dropped.

And then, if you drop your iPhone -- and really, it's a blinkin' cell phone . . . all God's people drop their cell phones -- this happens:



THERE IS a term for this. "Really bad design."

It may be pretty, but it obviously isn't practical. Practical is important. Epic fail for Apple.

Of course, it could be that Apple was aiming to create a metaphor for the Age of Consumerism. If so, brilliant.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Oh, crap.


Steve Jobs thought he had a Gizmodo problem.

What's he gonna do about this Vietnamese website that's come up with an iPhone 4G and Apple's newest MacBook? Insist that American authorities rekindle the Vietnam War?

Come to think of it . . .
oh, s***.

AS YOU consider the prospects and tremble, here's the latest from Mashable:
A Vietnamese website — the same one that got hold of another Apple 4G iPhone last week — has posted a video and details about the new entry-level MacBook 7.1.

The machine’s CPU was upgraded to a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, increased from 2.26GHz in the previous generation, and graphics were given a shot in the arm with a NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU. These updates will be the first for the MacBook since October 2009, when the notebook got a longer battery life and overall design reworking.

Apple’s recent round of laptop refreshes has thus far included upgrades to the MacBook Pro, including a standard 4GB of RAM and a choice between Intel’s i5 and i7 processors on larger models. Similar CPU and graphics changes appear to be trickling down to standard MacBooks, as well. Upgrades to the MacBook Air were also rumored but have yet to surface as fact.
AND I'LL BET that for a Vietnamese website, getting a scoop on what Apple's doing next is as easy as driving to the southern Chinese factories that make all this stuff and slipping a little somethin' somethin' to somebody who's more than willing to make a premature sale.

I guess, while Steve is at it, he could have American authorities declare war on China, too. But in the event we didn't get our clocks cleaned in trying to make the world safe for Silicon Valley capitalists, where then would Apple make its premium-priced products?

In American factories? Paying American workers living wages?

That would sooooooo screw with Apple's profit margins and "shareholder value," don't you know?

I guess it's better to just keep kicking around the little guys, then.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Just one question. . . .


Why wouldn't I just buy a laptop instead?

A laptop, after all, can multitask, unlike an iPad. A laptop also can run lots more programs than an iPad, and it has a full-featured operating system.

Why, given all this, would I try to turn an iPad into a really lame fake laptop?
Instead of buying the real thing.

Monday, April 05, 2010

I got an iPad!


I got my new iPad today!

Thing is, I don't understand what all the fuss is. And why did people have to wait until Saturday to get one when it would have been easy enough for them to make an iPad anytime they wanted?

That said, I'm glad people are so excited over the iPad. I'm fond of mine, and I find that it's infinitely customizable.

But could someone explain to me why all these tech heads and yuppies are paying $499 and up for something you can get at the grocery store for under a buck?

Sometimes, I just don't understand this country at all.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Everything's a critic


It's a bad thing when even your keyboard begins to rebel against what you type on it.

I made this unfortunate discovery last night, when I happened to look down upon the aforementioned keyboard -- the one on the studio computer -- then noticed exactly what it thinks of me. Or of my blog posts, at least.

Just when you think you're on a bit of a roll . . . just when you think something you've written may, just may, have made a little sense, comes a rebuke from an inanimate object?


THE RIGHT shift key worn just so that "shift" is turned into crude and blunt commentary on he who shifts? Really?

What gives a cheap Dell keyboard the right?

LISTEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH! TELLING ME WHAT I DO IS S*** WAS MY OLD MAN'S JOB!

And he's dead.

No, that's mighty big talk for a half-worn, dirty keyboard. Mighty big talk.

Perhaps someone with more keyboard credibility than myself would like to inform Dell-boy that the Douglas County landfill is chockablock with his kind.


Punk.