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June 12th, 2010

Chester Wisniewski

Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.

lip service

How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune.

When TCP/IP was invented, running it was an honor reserved for Serious Computers--mainframes and high-powered minicomputers used in technical and commercial settings--and so the protocol is engineered around the assumption that every computer using it is a serious machine, capable of doing many things at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, a Unix machine.

Young Americans who leave their great big homogeneous country and visit some other part of the world typically go through several stages of culture shock: first, dumb wide-eyed astonishment. Then a tentative engagement with the new country's manners, cuisine, public transit systems and toilets, leading to a brief period of fatuous confidence that they are instant experts on the new country. As the visit wears on, homesickness begins to set in, and the traveler begins to appreciate, for the first time, how much he or she took for granted at home. At the same time it begins to seem obvious that many of one's own cultures and traditions are essentially arbitrary, and could have been different; driving on the right side of the road, for example. When the traveler returns home and takes stock of the experience, he or she may have learned a good deal more about America than about the country they went to visit.

We like plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America.

This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software package.