I live! / The "It" Guy
Dec. 1st, 2001 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterAnd so does my Internet connection. For the moment, at least. However, I notice that name resolution--that's the function of the Internet service that translates addresses such as "www.livejournal.com" into the series of numbers (in this case, "66.150.15.150") that the computer knows how to connect with--seems to have vanished.
Fortunately, it's simple enough to set a nameserver manually in Windows, so I simply changed the option from "receive DNS automatically" to a DNS server from another site that I know of, and now it works fine. But it makes me just a little leery about shutting down or rebooting until I know what's going on--I might not be able to get back on-line again. :)
There's an awful lot of buzz online just at the moment about "It." No, not Stephen King's "It" ("We all float down here."); Dean Kamen's "It," otherwise known as "Ginger." For those who don't know what "It" is, it's a new invention that he announced very mysteriously in January, that was supposed to "sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking." Sounds pretty modest, huh?
Speculation has run rampant as to what Ginger actually is, and the most likely option seems to be a small, two-wheeled, motorized scooter--but of a revolutionary design, with the wheels side like on a two-wheeled dolly or the back half of a four-wheeled car, instead of one behind the other like a bicycle. It's rumored to use a Stirling engine--a highly efficient type of motor that's been around in theory for almost two centuries, but nobody has ever been able to perfect yet. Perhaps Kamen has.
One thing's for sure--it's completely stunned everyone Kamen has shown it to, including Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, inspiring them to heights of hyperbole like that quote a couple of paragraphs back. Now these are reasonably rational, down-to-earth people, who run successful businesses (for some value of successful, anyway) and presumably are not given to babbling inanely about other peoples' products than their own. For something to come along that makes them say things like that...it must be something pretty amazing, huh?
One has to admit that, if cheap enough, a small, fuel-efficient motorized personal transportation device could change a few things. People might drive cars less, use less gasoline. Cities might have to put in more bicycle lanes, and declare them "bicycle/Ginger lanes," so that whizzing scooters aren't a hazard to pedestrians. All the same, it's a little hard to get from that to "change the world"--unless Ginger turns out to be amazingly cheap, too, and I don't know that I see that happening.
Still, it's nice to see something like this happening. I don't know about you, but it sort of feels to me like the era of "amazing new inventions that will revolutionize the world" is over. No more amazing new devices, like aeroplanes, transistors, integrated circuits, nuclear power, and so on. Instead, what we get these days are mostly incremental improvements on prior technology. Moore's law doubling computer processing power every 18 months, and continuing to double it in spite of all expectations as the chip fabricators come up with new, smaller fabrication processes. People building better aeroplanes, nuclear power, and so on. If there are new inventions that will revolutionize the world, most of them are fairly invisible--things like nanotechnology, that get gradually invented, and may show some promise sooner or later but won't change things overnight.
It just feels kinda neat to see something come along that promises to change the world immediately with its introduction--even if the hype turns out to have been overexaggerated when it is introduced. It feels like I'm finally getting the chance to experience something I missed out on by not being born a few decades earlier. Even if it's only once in my lifetime, it's pretty neat.
Anyway, we're going to find out what it is on Good Morning America on Monday. I don't know that I'll be tuning in--I'll probably be getting ready for jury duty at about that time--but I'm sure it'll be on all the news sites later that day.
I wonder if there's any hope of me getting one for Christmas--or my birthday, since it'll apparently not be out until next year?
Fortunately, it's simple enough to set a nameserver manually in Windows, so I simply changed the option from "receive DNS automatically" to a DNS server from another site that I know of, and now it works fine. But it makes me just a little leery about shutting down or rebooting until I know what's going on--I might not be able to get back on-line again. :)
There's an awful lot of buzz online just at the moment about "It." No, not Stephen King's "It" ("We all float down here."); Dean Kamen's "It," otherwise known as "Ginger." For those who don't know what "It" is, it's a new invention that he announced very mysteriously in January, that was supposed to "sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking." Sounds pretty modest, huh?
Speculation has run rampant as to what Ginger actually is, and the most likely option seems to be a small, two-wheeled, motorized scooter--but of a revolutionary design, with the wheels side like on a two-wheeled dolly or the back half of a four-wheeled car, instead of one behind the other like a bicycle. It's rumored to use a Stirling engine--a highly efficient type of motor that's been around in theory for almost two centuries, but nobody has ever been able to perfect yet. Perhaps Kamen has.
One thing's for sure--it's completely stunned everyone Kamen has shown it to, including Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, inspiring them to heights of hyperbole like that quote a couple of paragraphs back. Now these are reasonably rational, down-to-earth people, who run successful businesses (for some value of successful, anyway) and presumably are not given to babbling inanely about other peoples' products than their own. For something to come along that makes them say things like that...it must be something pretty amazing, huh?
One has to admit that, if cheap enough, a small, fuel-efficient motorized personal transportation device could change a few things. People might drive cars less, use less gasoline. Cities might have to put in more bicycle lanes, and declare them "bicycle/Ginger lanes," so that whizzing scooters aren't a hazard to pedestrians. All the same, it's a little hard to get from that to "change the world"--unless Ginger turns out to be amazingly cheap, too, and I don't know that I see that happening.
Still, it's nice to see something like this happening. I don't know about you, but it sort of feels to me like the era of "amazing new inventions that will revolutionize the world" is over. No more amazing new devices, like aeroplanes, transistors, integrated circuits, nuclear power, and so on. Instead, what we get these days are mostly incremental improvements on prior technology. Moore's law doubling computer processing power every 18 months, and continuing to double it in spite of all expectations as the chip fabricators come up with new, smaller fabrication processes. People building better aeroplanes, nuclear power, and so on. If there are new inventions that will revolutionize the world, most of them are fairly invisible--things like nanotechnology, that get gradually invented, and may show some promise sooner or later but won't change things overnight.
It just feels kinda neat to see something come along that promises to change the world immediately with its introduction--even if the hype turns out to have been overexaggerated when it is introduced. It feels like I'm finally getting the chance to experience something I missed out on by not being born a few decades earlier. Even if it's only once in my lifetime, it's pretty neat.
Anyway, we're going to find out what it is on Good Morning America on Monday. I don't know that I'll be tuning in--I'll probably be getting ready for jury duty at about that time--but I'm sure it'll be on all the news sites later that day.
I wonder if there's any hope of me getting one for Christmas--or my birthday, since it'll apparently not be out until next year?
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Well...
Date: 2001-12-01 07:18 pm (UTC)It's not an epochal thing as much as a cyclical thing: extensive progress vs. intensive progress (to steal Virginia Postrel's explanation). New inventions get introduced and wow everyone, but then people other than the inventors make those inventions far more useful. The Wright brothers gave us the airplane, but it took a lot of other people to make the Cessna or SR-71. You could say the same about Marconi and the cell phone.