#technology (77 quotes)
Here’s an example to give you an idea of what it would take to get a SHA-1 collision. If all 6.5 billion humans on Earth were programming, and every second, each one was producing code that was the equivalent of the entire Linux kernel history (1 million Git objects) and pushing it into one enormous Git repository, it would take 5 years until that repository contained enough objects to have a 50% probability of a single SHA-1 object collision. A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.
— , Pro Git 6.1 Git Tools Revision Selection Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.
— , The Vulture Transcript Coding is the Socratic method as an extreme sport.
— , Gunpoint: AI The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely… more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
— , Book Expo America Luncheon Talk For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users.
— , Broadcast Yourself Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head.
— , A Story Culture There is an interesting difference between the computer music presenter and a live act. While the centered tape operator has perfect conditions for creating the best possible sound, for presenting a finished work in the most brilliant way (which might occasionally even include virtuoso mixing desk science rather than static adjustment to match room acoustics), the live act has to fight with situations which are far from perfect and at the same time is expected to be more lively. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that generally rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable, while the attempt to reproduce complex studio works on a stage seem more likely to fail.
— , Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing We won’t need to spend all our time pounding keys and clicking mice inside our web browsers. Instead, we’re going to end up with the internet smearing itself all over the world around us, visible at first in glimpses through enchanted windows, and then possibly through glasses, or contact lenses, with embedded projection displays.
I’m hoping this will be the difference between old new media and new new media; real-world smeariness.
— , LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 If you are a sexy, cool charismatic brand, you will have a fairly easy life on social media – people would want to hear from you and be associated with you. They will create fan page for you on facebook, they will talk with their friends about you and share stuff about you on Twitter. They will probably take part if you ask them to submit something etc. If you are not one of these brands, you will have to work much harder to earn your social capital. I’m not saying it’s not possible but you will probably have to invest more. More time and money to help you be more fun, interesting, funny or useful. And you should also find those who love you and nurture the relationship you have with them.
If you’re an asshole kind of brand, you’re pretty much fucked.
— , Basking in Reflected Glory Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.
— , Guardian Open Platform leads the world Music’s metadata could once be ignored. The way we valued music in the 1980s and the 1990s is part of a world that no longer exists: when music’s economic value has to be reassessed, the way we reassess the music as a whole changes as well. The way we value music might be increasingly moving to metadata.
— , of music & metadata SEO is using deodorant instead of washing. SEO is masking bad coffee with sugar. SEO is cramming instead of studying. SEO is using pain killers instead of going to the dentist. SEO is taking weight loss pills instead of exercising. SEO is a comb-over. SEO is Scientology. SEO is Paris Hilton. SEO is the Zune. SEO is the morning-after pill. SEO is astroturf. SEO is not the real thing. SEO is cutting corners. SEO is not the solution. SEO is bullshit.
— , SEO is bullshit I knew giving the album away for free would be a good idea, but still, I’m pretty much unknown, and here are 500 people willing to take a punt. Why the hell should they, even if it does cost nothing? What the experiment proved to me is that there’s a significant amount of passionate music fans congregating around these so-called illegal download sites who are actually willing to take a chance on new music.
— , Reasons why outlawing P2P isn't good for everyone: a musician speaks I didn’t RTFA, but I for one welcome our new, naked Natalie Portman and grits overlords, to which CmdrTaco replied, “you must be new here.” He’s a Twitter sock-puppet, but so am I, you insensitive clod! In Soviet Russia, the only way to be sure is for orbit to nuke you with a beowulf cluster (yes, it runs Linux!). ??? Profit!
I am trying to condense Slashdot down to a fine extract. Anyone else want to see if they can perfect it?
— , Let's get this out of the way... Mix tapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they heard, in what order and at what cost. It liberated us from music stores and radios in the same way radios and recordings liberated generations earlier from the need to be present at the performance of live music.
— , Mix Tape Kids are time-rich and cash-poor and have an infinite supply of ingenuity and impecuniousness to apply to the job of getting music for free.
— , Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change. This is something that people in the media world don’t understand.
— , Gin, Television, and Social Surplus In the land of cutting out people in Photoshop, the bald man is king.
— Jess and Nick Even though print continues to cash in significantly more ad revenue than digital media, printed news will – from a purely economical point of view – undoubtedly fail.
— , Surfing the Avalanche In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter problems; he or she creates them in order to know them. Improving one’s technique is never a routine, mechanical process.
— , It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician - but what makes a true master? Possibility isn’t limited by technology. And it’s certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash.
Surely we just need to switch our bases from CONQUER to BUILD?
— , 10 Sci-Fi Techs We Could Build If They Weren't So Damn Expensive The damage is done. Beacon and tracking regimes like it violate the unwritten soc-site covenant: They don’t care who you think you are or who you’d like other people to think you are. They barely glance at your meticulously managed profile — Chabon on the nightstand, Beirut on the iPod, gut carefully sucked in. Instead, they tail you, dissecting you site by site, purchase by purchase.
— , How Facebook Exposed Us All as Freaks Google may have hired Hixie, but their code is atrocious and always has been. They may force you to run a gauntlet of calculus questions during your job interview, but it seems that basic knowledge of real HTML is never tested. The half-assed HTML these guys grew up with between D&D sessions in suburban basements is considered good enough.
— , Google can’t code Every time you touch something, if your security systems rely on biometric ID, then you’re essentially leaving your pin number on a post-it note.
— , Now for ID cards - and the biometric blues All attempts to inhibit the flow of information and make it work exclusively for the benefit of an organisation, whether it’s the government of China or Universal Records, are doomed. The genie is out of the bottle for good. Media owners talk wistfully of “owning” particular ideas or activities on the internet. They should stop. This is a mirage, glimpsed most often by those who spend little time on the web.
— , Don’t try to reinvent the web Via Russell Davies.