SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the put-on-the-special-glasses-to-see-through-their-disguise dept.
Daniel Wilson, the author of Robopocalypse, has a new book out on the shelves called The Clockwork Dynasty.
There's a great moment in The Hobbit when Bilbo Baggins is exploring a stinking troll cave and finds an ancient Elven short sword, lost for centuries, buried under the muck. It's Sting, baby. And nobody wonders whether Sting will be less powerful than all the flashy new swords on the market. They assume that it's more powerful.
In some of the most engrossing worlds ever imagined—Star Wars, The Hobbit, and even Dune—the older something is, the better. The characters in those stories respect the achievements of their long-disappeared ancestors, and they honor the technological feats of heroes whose deeds have turned to legend.
Maybe we're drawn to these stories because they're so different from our own society, where we're obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it's off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date. If Bilbo had found an iPhone in that cave, I highly doubt it would have been worth wielding for the rest of his adventure and then passed down through his family.
In my latest novel, I wanted to capture that feeling of awe for the past and bring it into our present. The Clockwork Dynasty acknowledges that our ancestors had incredible technological triumphs—and imagines that some of them are still walking among us, machines disguised as people. Older than cities, these avtomat (a Russian word that can mean robot) fight their own ancient wars in the shadows, even as they quietly go about shaping our civilization in the image of a world they lost millennia ago.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/how-to-build-an-ancient-robot-overlord/
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 04 2017, @08:10PM
So get a mechanical keyboard with silent Cherry switches or any of the many alternatives. Unlike when the Model M was new, we have many, many options these days.
Personally I much prefer the keyboard on my T450 Thinkpad over the one they had on the T400s. And my System76 Bonobo has a pretty decent keyboard too, I particularly enjoy having a full numpad on a laptop for the first time. And you seem to have missed my point anyway -- most people think cheaper *is* better. And in many ways it can be. You can get a better keyboard if you're willing to pay for it, but most people just want the cheap one, and that's still an improvement because it's much, much cheaper.
People have referred to Gnome as a "Fischer-Price UI" since long before Gnome 3, and there's good reason for that. Personally I prefer to use Enlightenment. Not many others do, which is fine. You are complaining that most PC users aren't PC experts, but PCs aren't just for PC experts anymore. We still need farmers and secretaries, and they need computers they can use too. If you want a system designed for experts, it's right there in the repos, go pick one!
Businesses...yes, that's a valid issue. But that's just a matter of inertia. Large corporations aren't particularly agile things, they're going to take some time to adapt to the changing software landscape. But they'll get there. And we're the kind of people that need to drag them forward on that. Also consider that even Windows 10 is practically state-of-the-art compared to the companies still running COBOL and FORTRAN code. Plus, businesses don't want to train people, so if their secretaries prefer Windows 10, they're going to stick with Windows 10. Us techies can adapt much easier than the rest of the workforce, so we get screwed. But again, that doesn't mean the entire world is falling apart. Just sucks for us that we aren't the rulers of this domain anymore.
I would say "Good mass-market music" is not a good thing, it's a symptom. Firstly, "good music" is rather subjective...but I think what we're really talking about here is "skilled musicians", right? But that's not the point of "mass-market". Mass-market music is music that's being pushed by the record labels or the radio stations or whoever else. It's not much better than an advertisement. In the past, that was the main way to discover new music, so the people who were interested in skilled musicians would naturally all be supporting the same musicians, because those were the only skilled musicians the labels would put out. Today, we don't have to rely on the labels. The artists I'm adding to my MP3 player lately are often just some guy in his garage on the other side of the country -- or even the other side of the planet. I'm listening to guys where the artist and also the record label have neither a website nor a Wikipedia page. Twenty years ago a band like that *never* could have gotten on the radio, and I never would have known they exist. Today, they'll get a few thousand fans almost instantly off their first album. Diversity is not decline; the fact that the whole world isn't aligning behind your personal preference doesn't mean everyone is having a worse experience. Most people want something slightly different, and today we can actually get it. And that's an improvement.
Well as I said, I think the Thinkpad keyboards have actually approved...I do miss the old 1600x1200 CRTs though. On the other hand, multiple monitors are getting *very* cheap, and we've got 4k coming up...hell just last night I watched a YouTube video of someone gaming in 16k. Better resolution is certainly possible. When I was in highschool I remember saving for months with my brother to save up $800 for an pretty poor Dell PC (one step up from the cheapest thing they had...I think it was a Dimension 2100)...but it *did* have that 21" 1600x1200 CRT. Adjusted for inflation the cost was around $1000, which today would buy you a gaming rig ($750 for a Dell XPS tower), a 24" 4k display ($180 for the LG 25UM56-P) and probably a Model M or equivalent keyboard too. How is that not better?