Rob Hyndman has the sad story, very well put on his blog today: Patry No Longer on Copyright
How wireless and mobility is changing architecture
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces†such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspacesâ€. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.
The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will “make spaces intentionally multifunctionalâ€. This means that 21st-century aesthetics will probably be the exact opposite of the sci-fi chic that 20th-century futurists once imagined. Architects are instead thinking about light, air, trees and gardens, all in the service of human connections. Buildings will have much more varied shapes than before. For instance, people working on laptops find it comforting to have their backs to a wall, so hybrid spaces may become curvier, with more nooks, in order to maximise the surface area of their inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is becoming affordable because computer-aided design and new materials make non-repetitive forms cheaper to build.
I love these ideas of the sometimes unexpected or unintentional consequences of mass media/technology. The semi-deliberate semi-chaotic long term evidence of technological determinism (the flavours of media) as they become embedded cultural, habits, norms, and even architecture
how does wifi change cubicle culture? how will mobile broadband as accelerating this trend of the new nomadicism.
File under: pls put more electric outlets in your airport terminals, lobbies and public spaces [for the love of god, k thx]
Posted in architecture, Archive, flavour, opencities
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Smartest idea they’ve had in a while
The Motion Picture Association of America has tried any number of tactics to fight piracy, but its latest scheme might actually prove useful to movie consumers on the Internet. The group is supposedly working on a new website that will offer information on how to find legit sources of movies so that users won’t have to resort to copyright infringement.
The site, which does not yet have a name, would allow users to search for film titles, and in return it would provide links to places to buy movie tickets, to locations where searchers could buy or rent a DVD, or to sites where they can buy or rent a download from an online source. All of the major movie studios are behind the initiative, an anonymous movie studio source told Variety, and all legit “partners” would be linked on the site.
I’ve long argued that if the movie and music industry spent half as much energy into competing with the “pirates” as they do trying to criminalize their customers they’d be much further ahead. If only rights holders would make their content digitally available, findable, in a reasonable/usable format (this almost always means DRM-free) at a price that’s affordable, and not just available in the US we’d all be better off.
Business idea #63. Go build a for-profit version of this service for the music that lets user discover and price shop DRM-free sources of music for any band wherever they live. Hypemachine sort of acheives this. But not really.
Posted in Archive, copyright, media
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