Someone asked me what I thought of the PSP Vita

To me it seems a physical embodiment of Sony's frantic desperation. As if they threw every controller/button/sensor/gizmo on to the thing that they could in hopes that SOMETHING would resonate with consumers & developers. All these things made the device bigger and pricier too, though. 


In the end the handheld device that the Vita best emulates is a shovel. One which Sony is using to dig themselves a tiny bit further into a hole.

Plus ca change

“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence,” he moaned. “The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.”

- W.J. Stillman (Journalist)

The above quote is typical of the panic we hear today on the subject of how the Internet threatens to destroy journalism (first off by way of destroying the newspaper business, but more fundamentally by destroying our attention spans and focus).

If you haven't heard of Stillman before you can be forgiven as he uttered the above quote in 1891. The doomsday technology at that time was not the Internet, but the telegraph. News was turning from something that traveled over days and weeks by ship, mail and carrier pigeon to something that traveled by wire in minutes and hours. People's focus was diluted as suddenly they had all the world's news headlines, not just local.

This piece in The Economist is a nice bit of history and a reminder that the basic need is still there, despite turmoil as the industry struggles to find new footing. More importantly, it's a reminder that these arguments are seldom new.

Book Review: Makers

I finished Cory Doctorow's Makers a few days back but haven't had time to post a review until just now, which has given me some time to mull it over a bit before doing so.

On the surface, Makers is Doctorow revisiting familiar territory: Distopian steampunk sci-fi, this time around the premise of the collision between personal fabrication and incumbent industry (something he already visited in short form in After the Siege).

The book has more to it than just this.

It's partly a parable of Lessig's Free Culture argument [Creativity and innovation always build on the past; The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it; Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past; Ours is less and less a free society].

It's also a story about Creative Destruction, and about how our legal and governmental systems impede it.

Mix in notes of Doctorow' attachment (and I'm guessing love-hate feelings) for Disney (which he also visited in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), an opinion on working at large corporations (the passage on page 403 rang so true it was painful to read), a commentary about shanty towns and peoples ability to govern themselves, some thoughts on obesity, consumerism, and other facets of the decline of American society, and you have the makings of a fun and thought provoking novel.

[One note: As some of the Amazon reviews note, there's a couple of pretty graphic sex scenes in the book. Not a big deal for adults, but for those that might have read Little Brother and might think this suitable to give to kids for reading, well, buyer beware. Personally, I think it's fine for a writer to stretch his wings a little as I think he's done here. I was surprised by the vitriole in some of those Amazon reviews. On another related note: It's kind of weird reading really graphic stuff like that written by a guy I've had dinner with a couple times :-/. ]