Huh interesting- never heard of May First/People Link. Anyone have any comments on it? Concept seems appealing.
The Joy of Slow Computing
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Democracy" is the reason I hate most of the music I hear.
I would reply to that but it's easy to misinterpret a statement like that. What do you mean by that?
The popular stuff is what is frequently played which is what appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#13It was an interesting and different kind of article. I particularly loved his attack on companies' claims to democratize some function. I know there's two meanings to the word but we're better off using (verbally and as consumers) the more important one. They're just cheapening the concept for profit. The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I h…
"Democracy" is the reason I hate most of the music I hear.
And it's your friends who know you well enough to bring you music you do enjoy hearing.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#14Neat article. It's good to see non-programmers get some of the value that FOSS brings. I have a fancy aluminium unibody laptop and the latest shiny phone and all that, but I also keep a couple of netbooks at home on which I run archlinux + xmonad. I do almost everything in the terminal; I wrote a lot of my own tools to e.g. read twitter, my email, manage my todo lists, etc. In a high level language with a wide variet…
>Does the author realize that there is a non-negligible overlap between contributors to the software he praises and the rich kids from the Googleplex?
Probably not, but it shows how fashionable tech worker hate has become. You don't usually see digs like that at "rich doctors" in articles on our heath care system, despite American doctors being the highest paid in the world: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/02/amer...
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#15This article puts into words how I have always felt but never could explain. Slow computing, a nice term. It is indeed about awareness, and very much about taking ownership. When I got Nginx running HTTPS with a valid cert, or sent my first mail with postfix/dovecot/roundcube it felt like I did it and that I owned the server and the software. Getting it all working taught me a lot about the fundamentals of the internet. It was a long, slow process though. But very enjoyable and rewarding. Recently I moved away from Gmail/Google calendar for my own mail server and ownCloud, sadly nobody I know understands my euphoric feelings... this writer does.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#16Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#17\tangent There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. - Turing
Worse than built-in obsolescense, we are the agents of our redundancy... and the end of all our coding shall be to return to the place where we began, unneeded.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#18As much as I enjoy playing with my Linux, OS X, and Windows 8.1 laptops, I have thought of going the free and privacy enhanced mode of Linux, running my OwnCloud, etc. The thing that holds me back is that I really rely on my Android smartphone for being able to SSH to a server anytime, write, and generally work on most stuff, only slower. The problem is that smart phones track us, even with custimization and are not…
>smart phones track us
How do you imagine participating in a network such that it isn't tracking you?
- Identifying which port/antenna it's receiving you on (i.e. switching tables, tower pings) is tracking.
- Tagging your traffic with your unique identifier (i.e. MAC and IP addresses) is tracking.
- Figuring out where to send replies to your requests is impossible without extensive, persistent tracking.
How do you have network without these things?
It's true that carrying a smartphone entails being tracked more than not carrying electronics, but it's unclear how you could have a phone that doesn't track you while still functioning as a phone.
Perhaps a pager? They passively receive encrypted satellite broadcasts. But then, they are receive-only devices. You can't transmit things without facilitating the tracking of where you are transmitting from.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#19It was an interesting and different kind of article. I particularly loved his attack on companies' claims to democratize some function. I know there's two meanings to the word but we're better off using (verbally and as consumers) the more important one. They're just cheapening the concept for profit. The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I h…
For me "democracy" in this context is used as social equality and commonness (both are dictionary definitions).
As such, I think that "democratising" and "making cheaper for profit" are far from being mutually exclusive. Companies use the word democratising because of a lack of a better word I assume. Nevertheless, and this is apparent from the article, the biggest price to pay for Slow Computing is to consecrate it a bunch of your time.
Of course you can deploy your own cloud rather than use, say Dropbox, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn how stuff works, even more so if you are not a computer engineer. Most people don’t have time for that.
In my opinion, most profit is made when the goals of both parties are aligned. A company will make more money if the product they offer remains useful for their clients. The offer of these companies is "you will be able to use this stuff with ease" -> democratisation.
Re: The Joy of Slow Computing
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's your friends who know you well enough to bring you music you do enjoy hearing.
Actually, no, because there's only a small subset overlapping the music we enjoy.
all that means is your friendsmaking strategy could be optimized wrt music recommendation