Context & Continuity

...and you're backing that up to a ...

And the point is...?

I found this eye candy on LifeHacker and followed the breadcrumbs back to the source, The University of California, San Diego.  It's an interesting study that was funded by AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology.  Seagate.  Right. 

Anyway, it's a theoretical question that's a bit interesting.  I guess Avatar takes up more disk space than Citizen Kane and Citizen Kane takes up more disk space than, say, the novel Gravity's Rainbow.   And so on.  So do we need more disk?  Personally, I'm up to about a terabyte of NAS for my family and that doesn't surprise me at all.  But on the other hand, we're rapidly approaching a new paradigm whereby one copy can be cataloged and accessed at anytime by anybody.  --Assuming infinite bandwidth.

By the way, I highly recommenced LaCie's NAS.  Has performed as expected over four years.  A dream.

One of the few people who really know what they're talking about...

... is David Strom.  Mr. Strom understands information technology from the bottom up and is a valuable person to know.  Mr. Strom writes a newsletter Web Informant which (and I'm giving away one of my trade secrets here) is an important missive to read to stay current on information technology's course and speed. 

Which leads me to his latest email newsletter that springs from an article published by the NYTimes on December 9 about the intersection of television  and the internet, something I wrote about here recently.  

So, the takeaway is this:  put David Strom on your reading list and watch with interest as television melds with computing.  Here's an ethical issue I'm dealing with this afternoon:  My daughter, a junior in high school, comes home and says she will receive extra credit for watching the move Dances with Wolves.  Do I pay Blockbuster to rent the DVD or download it from the blacknet for free?  It's a pretty good movie, but....   I guess since I've written this in public, I'll rent the DVD.  Besides, I'd rather not have that movie on my NAS. 

Roger Rees On Stoppard and etc.

As I've written before here, it was one of the great blessings of my life to see the original productions of The Real Thing in both London and New York.  In New York, the lead was played by Jeremy Irons who was still floating in the rarefied air of fame blown up by Brideshead Revisited.  I think he did a terrific job but thought Roger Rees in the West End was the better of the two.  Here's a story from the Times about Roger Rees' return to the West End in a production of Waiting for Godot. 

“I should have stayed there and become a big something,” he says now. “But what I like to do is work a lot and so I came back.” Success did give him the chance to play Hamlet for the RSC. He was a big enough name to be cast as the alter ego of Tom Stoppard in the original production of The Real Thing. “I remember my mum and me taking a photograph of the Strand Theatre. It said, ‘Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees in The Real Thing’.” All these years later, it seems that he can’t quite believe that his name was once in lights in the West End.

Most of the article focuses on Rees' leaving of London and his "twenty year exile in the  in the US."  --I know i was quite pleased when he became a recurring character on The West Wing.  Anyway, here's a link to the article.

Oh, by the way, this came up during our Chanukah party yesterday.  Someone described a situation as "waiting for Godot," and I chimed up that Beckett was James Joyce's secretary.  Wowed the crowd with that one.  One of those thrilling moments for English Majors. 

T/Economist: A giant sucking sound

The Economist is a must-read for anyone successfully braille-ing the zeitgeist and here's an excellent story from its November 7th issue about the $9.4 billion on-line segment of the $55 billion video game industry growing larger and larger and larger and...

Here's a link to the story. And you have to love the headline.

NYTimes: Slave to the internet.

And so, the New York Times observes, again, that living off-line can be uncomfortable.  It's a wonderful little story by Wyatt Mason that delves into what makes a relationship and a community. 

I did, I confess, begin to trespass variously against our new neighbors, in search of e-mail. I did drive with suspicious slowness down leafy lanes, laptop flagrantly agape in the passenger seat, pulling into driveways where I had no honest business. Idling in front of a house from which an unprotected network might be pulsing, I did master the art of holding a map in my left hand and squinting confusedly at its surface while pointing and clicking and connecting discreetly with my hidden right. Nor were my hunting expeditions always automotive. By the time July rolled in and I was gardening (with clothes on) and taking photos with my laptop camera of my proud crop of organic kale, I noticed the plucky, single WiFi-signal bar I’d not seen before, faint, but promising. Bearing the machine before me like some dowser of yore by modernity deranged, I let the machine lead me from the garden and deep into the woods, where I found, broadcast by what knotty pine I couldn’t say, the signal strength I sought. Did I get my e-mail? Yes. I also got stung by a hornet in the process. At the time it seemed like an even-enough trade.

Here's a link to the article.  

Nicolas Carr: The Price of Free.

Just in case you missed it in the November 15 issue of The New York Times Magazine, here's a fascinating article by Nicolas Carr, one of the prescient observers of the digital scene. 

A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a Blu-ray player. What I didn’t realize until I unpacked the gadget was that it does a lot more than just spin high-definition discs. It is, as they say, Web-enabled. As soon as I plugged it into an outlet in my living room, its built-in WiFi antenna sniffed out my home network and logged on. The Blu-ray player became a gateway between the Internet and my television set.

Ever since, and much to my surprise, I’ve been using the device more to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and movies from Netflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web, whenever I summon it, free.

For a long time, it has amazed me how much content is available for free, And I know that I haven't made up my mind about fair use and sharing and stealing and so forth.  But I do know that we're at the edge of an amazing new era and I'm sure we'll work out these issues as best as we can.  And creative destruction will be part of the price we'll pay.   Here's a link to the article. 

...and lock the door behind you, please.

Editor & Publisher has ceased publication. Megan McArdle at the Atlantic's website chalks it up as another moment in the the media death race.  If Editor & Publisher can go under, could Publisher's Weekly be far behind?