ESSENTIAL TECHNOLOGY 1

RobAng

ESSENTIAL TECHNOLOGY 1

Message in a Bottle
"Technology and 'really essential?"

Meaning: Computer Science without Computers
SUMMER READING

RobAng 10-July-2001

I left home, after the shipwreck of my browsing
Internet, or better, after my umpteenth attempt to "set" the PPP,
"connection" of the "modem" to "provaider" that I gave its
"TISSIPI'-IP. I had hoped until the last moment, to be able to
listen whistle connection failed, like that
I had heard from George, the legendary guru, the man who
had made the PC itself, picking up pieces of motherboards from all sides
and had a house full of monitors and "RAM" wrong. George was
been left by his wife. She was "broken" by dusting the cables
collected at the garbage. After his last fight because he had
"deliberately moved the cards with the vacuum cleaner and had" taken so
oxide on the contacts that allowed the video card to run the
3D video game, "had gone home. And she was not returned.
Under the old Castel S. Angelo, the one where my great grandfather was born, were the stalls of an exhibition of books. I was walking between stacked piles of publications, grouped by topic or
random order. You could browse through the turn and put on the shelves, feeling their weight and doing some physical exertion, other than a book to another.
See the books provoked in me the same feeling experienced by sailor, from the pulpit of the mainmast, he saw the horizon present front of the green earth, after the adventures past
during the stormy night.
Those books made me set foot again on dry land.
The computer will never be able to reproduce the weight of a book.
Each book has a color, and undergoes wear. No documents hypertext, no website can play the auricle of an old book.
Extinction in the information age are the "silverfish" that is, those insects which eat the long pages of books. These advantage? Culture becomes eternal? No, because the media electronic age so quickly and culture entrusted electronics fades quickly.
Furthermore, electronics flattens.
With the computer all the books are the same, seen in the same way, through a monitor 2 / 3, in "landscape" as a film fourth order, the wrong way, the most unnatural, wide and low, that a page must slide on video several times, so that it can see everything. Must lie down beside the monitor, as the "Pivot", which fits to the rotation set and rewrites the text to the new
direction, so if you draw using the horizontal, as a guideline;
but if you read or write a text, use the vertical. But not enough. The fact is, writing or drawing through a computer is uncomfortable. Read a book to the computer makes us blind and neurotic.
And with the cramp in the hand.
There are positions for reading, drawing and writing that the advent computer at risk of extinction, so to speak. Lying on sofa I can not write, move, shake, if I have a computer
hand. You say: "you want to put the benefits of the computer."
Which? Write an article directly in "fair copy" and send it in drafting in an instant. Result: you lose three times the text because I saved the changes and why the battery is discharged or is removed the current; text has not arrived, or accented letters have been replaced by missed
characters.
The text I'm writing is in pencil on a paper check. I intuitively clear what I want and do all operations a word processor I can do only after much study. And then, that important is having written the word "importance" in bold emphasized when the office then replace the characters with ones that suit Article by side?
As I write on paper does not necessarily have to burn energy electricity. It 'true that, using paper, destroy trees, but I can, then, delete the text and reuse the paper. You could invent
paper used for this instead of wasting time on the computer. Then finished writing, I could send the text to the office with a fax. Yes could invent a fax at high resolution, like a scanner, a
Phones: much closer to the phone and the computer, which needs have to be switched on, having to wait until the system starts operational before, you start the scanning program, etc.,
etcetera. People will say: 'Well, writing the text directly to your computer no need to scan anything! "
Yeah, but I have to go three hours or as long as it takes me to write and thinking what to write, with a monitor on his face, with tanning of electromagnetic waves, stunned fans by cooling.
Here's another thing that is destroying the computer, the noise of pen on paper. That scratchy noise that unites us, we mortals, to all the writers of the past and to all men or Women who write and who have left written testimony of himself, by the Egyptians, and even before.
The handwriting leaves the impression of themselves to posterity. As a photography. Computer will not stay us nothing personal, just electromagnetic pulses, and the text written by a jet printer ink.
Asimov narrated a story of a future not so far away where machines, designed as a computer, replace the result of account.
Not written more by hand, not multiplied more in mind. All was done by machine. And in this world of technology and militarized came a little man, who had invented something overwhelming, which was used to perform calculations for any complexity with a simple trinkets. This invention blown away by the technological world of unbelief and freedom.
The invention enables man to free himself from the car and survive without it. With a simple stick could lead to bill. That stick was a pencil. The inventor was overwhelmed.
You could not give the world so much freedom. That stick was like weapon. Freedom that everyone could use.

Lucubration mind. With a hasty gesture, my neighbor took off something from his pocket and brought it to your ear, beginning to speak aloud and by sharing things that nobody is interested.
Like the computer, there is another object that we can do without, but, through deception of total freedom, we are enclosing is the mobile.
And 'the subject more uncomfortable that they could invent. Probably we seeing only the beginnings of the technological era we face.
We are bombarded by advertising that wants to convince us that the phone laptop will give us true freedom.
To be monitored wherever we are, to be spied on, recorded.
Free to have a weight and a concern following useless definitely harmful to health. Because if it is not (and is) dangerous directly to the phone, they are certainly hundreds of thousands
antennas there are and will always be more. Why so we can send the photo of the grandmother who never go to visit. Why so we can hear, paying, the music we could feel free. Because that's how it goes toward the technology.
In a book, "IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black, about the use skewed that the Nazis did the statistical techniques automated writes as follows:
"The dawn of the computer age coincided with the decline of dignity human. Using advanced American technology, were killed millions of Jews. They were dug out with harmless Classification and Surveys. "
Technology changes. Today is cataloging not only individuals, but also insignificant actions they do. Many actions of a type assume statistical significance. Lots of calls to the same number,
many words on a topic. So frequent in places. Both fury on Internet pages.
If you connect a phone, we also have a television. So, if we require a telephone connection, there comes the demand to pay fee for a TV that do not have.
If we used a lexicon, we definitely have some skeletons cupboard. And so, again the statistics shows us that when numbers are large, the theories become reality conclusive.
Become a nation of cards, just when laws forbid create card file. And 'the State itself that we form, with hypocrisy to ask for permission.
We should not ever give it, the authority for filing, being put on lists. But not giving the authorization, have the means to check the existence of the list with our name, nor do we have to make sure the weapon to be removed from the list.
In the hands I had a wonderful book. Each page reserved a surprise. Opening it, the paper models of buildings unfolds, escaping from the pages. It was a history book architecture, containing 3D models. Those much-ballyhooed by Multimedia CDs, which most often contain only a sloppy ten pages, difficult to use on general topics, the all, however, presented as the maximum of the current culture possible.
Another book was done in the same way: one on the history of Inventions.
If any invention, there is a good thing, that it is invented, always outweigh the negative aspects, because they are more immediate and profitable.
So if the Internet and information technology should help us to move less, opposite is true, since the traffic is always increasing. Why? Because the Internet to fuel the car you need increasing energy and because the speed of information travel are increasing the need to move. Let a
example: something that has not solved the Internet commerce is the need to move the goods purchased. Contrary: the ease of purchase has multiplied the distances and energy consumption.
If before we went near the house to buy what we needed, now buy unnecessary to hundreds of miles away, thinking Save an auction of used things. The courier will make shuttling between those who sell items there and we consume much more energy required us to watch idly the windows.
Many times we would be content to see the object inside store: our need for contact would have stopped there before price. Now, however, we require VCR not working to professional fraudsters with the same ease with which we entrust our money from banks to investors ventured transvestites built by nothing. Who buys anything gets nothing, consuming their energy and their finances.
If, for example, we send a print job to a service center, the thing that we can avoid is to move us, as we send the document via email. What we can not avoid is the having to go to withdraw the press or those who travel there at the door home. Internet shortens distances, but it multiplies the costs.
What you need to do is to discern what is the use of helpful technology and what is harmful. Must know how to drive computing, for not risk being overwhelmed.
For this, we return to writing with a pencil, handing the letters to old postman drunk. Arrive late, but our posterity us read.
Another "beep-beep-biip-biip" blocking my thoughts. I arrived in one exhibition stand, which was a demonstration of a transmission by Morse code. A man of sixty years in his hands a stick with an electrical contact and two wires connected to an old transmitter, which sends messages with for help away. Three points, three lines, three points. S O S. Or they them. Distress.
Today, a wide and innovative technology has invented something hundred years old, recycles for new: SM S. Request Messages idiots. Uselessness that filled the air fooleries by idiots.
A simple language needed one button to longwave reach anywhere on earth, with a minimum energy. Morse biting world of intelligence, in clean air electromagnetic smog, in which the sound of 'SO S was collected as the message in a bottle. UTMS must scream high-frequency waves, which cause the electrolysis of the blood and spread of leukemia. We will live in cities increasingly similar inside a microwave oven, happy to become increasingly idiots, with neurons firing killed each day by mail, as well that lungs tar.
Maybe I was exaggerating, but the book I had at that time between hands did not help me. "The Middle Ages next venture" by Roberto Vacca. Strange, but the Middle Ages has already arrived and we were already inside. The coming has already come to a kind of Möbius strip where
front and back of a thing already elapsed.
I heard the curses come from the stand next. Boy their twenties trying to send a message from a computer. I characters on the screen does not match the keyboard. Ah Holy what the pen, with which you can write from left to right or right to left in the language they want, without having to lock your intelligence behind an incompatible address.
Suddenly, a muffled sound came from a loudspeaker was announcing a conference on new publishing technology. The darkness fell over the whole show. The lights went out suddenly,
blocked by electrical short. No more electricity. No more technology. No more voice.
Nothing more.
The court had taken everything. The entire area in darkness. The entire city. Complete nation. The entire Western world. The car stopped because could no longer be supplied by petrol pumps, electrical. Journalists could not tell anything about what had happened,
because you could not print anything without electricity. Even the pizzerias could make pizzas, because the electric furnaces would remain eternally cool.
In short, a planetary catastrophe, caused by unfortunate announcement of the electronic publishing revolution.
The little man looked at the microphone, remained silent and dark. There was only light moon, full, illuminating the exhibition of books.
People began to return home, to restore the fireplace in whose light telling stories to children, to make them sleep. Tell when a Once there was an object called television, which saw
something called "Carousel", where there is a reality that instead to exist.
I thought of George, one of the computer. Maybe his wife would back, now that the computer could not work anymore. In sinking of the technology, would have remained a desert island where read, if only by day, a good book.
I approached the edge of the river Tiber. I flashed this message enclosed in a bottle.

July 10, 2001 RobAng

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

( Translated into english by: http://translate.google.com )