Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Do we really need…

460 words

...more speed? Another mind-bogglingly detailed offering on microprocessors at Ars Technica. Everything sounds very sophisticated and exciting. Yet, I have the impression that it's a bit wasted in most cases. Even my two-year-old Powerbook does fairly well at everyday tasks. And when it's slow that's mostly related to slow disk access, virtual memory or grossly inefficient applications. Only the latter could be remedied by more processing speed (although I'd prefer better programs). The other thing, I'd like to have are better graphics chips. Then I could get a copy of Marine Aquarium and run it as a desktop background. Not very high prirority, though.

... free software? A question I tend to answer with 'no', whenever I curse my Linux box in the office when not doing what I wanted it to do once again. Or whenever I happen to use a badly designed open source application. Secretly, however, I like the idea and hope the programmers will sort those problems out. An interesting interview with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh on the topic of open source software was in the paper the other day.

... Zeitgeist? Yet another German-English word and feature of Google. Most probably we could do splendidly without but like it nonetheless. Particularly interesting in that Zeitgeist, is the visualisation of Las Ketchup's progress across the globe. An interesting way of analyising things.

... liberties? In fact we do. Except if we trust our politicians who's rather have us observed 24/7 and punished for anything they (whoever that is - probably some huge corporations in the future) consider inappropriate. All this, if possible, without any public scrutiny or right to appeal. As usual, the United States are at the forefront of progress, as Dave and, even more scaringly, our paper wrote and summarised about the forthcoming bits of the 'Patriot'. I am sorry to say that but it sounds more than the 'laws' of a rogue régime than an outstanding democracy.

... moving parts? Everybody goes on and says that the new iPod has no more moving parts. And that it's supposed to be an achievement. Why? It definitely is an anti-achievement screaming 'our engineers didn't manage to build this with moving parts in a way that it didn't break right away'. Moving parts tend to be nicer to touch and give good feedback directly to your fingers. Just think about using your computer keyboard and that at most ATMs and you'll know what I mean.

... company during lunchtime? Definitely yes. Not only is it a good opportunity to catch up with people and be entertained at the same time. It also keeps you from eating too quickly and feeling huge chunk of food in your stomach for the rest of the day.

May 17, 2003, 23:13

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