There is an interesting Xbox plexiglass modification here, which turns an unassuming black plastic cuboid into a horrid display of light and sound.
Taiwanese manufacturer of optical drives, Lite-On, is estimated to ship 1 million drives next quarter. Given that their technology ranks among the cheapest, quietest, and most reliable equipment I’ve come across, I can’t say I’m surprised.
Finally, Umberto Eco has a long and interesting paper about the evolving modes of information storage. He contrasts paper, electronic, and vegetal (organic) -based technologies and examines the way in which authors are influenced by the semiotic system in which they write (and the structure of constraints imposed by the medium of writing). The article makes a few interesting points, such as the idea that digital and print mediums aren’t so different as they initially seem:
Certainly, a computer is an instrument by means of which one can produce and edit images, certainly [scil] instructions are provided by means of icons; but it is equally certainly [sic] that the computer has become first of all an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there run words and lines, and in order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read.
His structuralist analysis of hypertext systems is also very interesting, if you have the time to absorb it in full, though a little laboured in parts. Note especially his rejection of radical deconstructionist interpretative theories, and adoption of a pseudo-Fishian ‘three-dimensional’ interpretative framework. In the context of the internet (a collaborative ‘work’ shaped by a large interpretive community) such a model seems very accurate.
Eco’s argument that the electronic medium will (owing to its non-linear mode of information retrieval), replace traditional vegetal reference materials is rather ironic, as his example to contrast the two mediums demonstrates:
For instance, if I want to know whether it was possible or not that Napoleon met Kant, I have to pick up the volume K and the volume N of my encyclopaedia: I discover that Napoleon was born in 1769 and died in 1821, Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, when Napoleon was already emperor. It is therefore not impossible that the two met… All this will cost me painful physical labour.
[…] Yet, with hypertext instead I can … do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes.
While true (after all, I can’t remember the last time I’ve looked up a word in a paper dictionary), these same properties of electronic information access may be used to highlight Eco’s own intellectual forebears (note that this was first discovered by an observant Slashdot reader).
Namely, a quick Google search reveals that Eco’s article is a rework of a lecture he gave in 1995, and again in 1996, 1998, and 2000, at various academic conferences. Going back a little further (and already onto the second page of search results), we find that the Napoleon example was earlier used by Bertrand Russell in 1935. Of course, the ease with which this information was all accessed just goes to show how correct Eco actually is.
