On Aug 30, 2009, at 9:01 PM, Nestamicky wrote:
> And I also saw that the washing machine, dish washer, automobile, > atomic > bomb, train, Intel macs, airplane, were all sold to the public as time > savers, among other features.Yet, time remains the one of the most > highly desired component of our lives today, decades after some of > these > technologies were sold us. When you consider what we used to do > without > all of the above, you wonder, don't you, where the heck time has gone > to. Consider how much less we did in those days. I personally spend a LOT less time washing clothes and dishes than I did before I had a washing machine and dishwasher. I can (and did, this weekend as a matter of fact) wash clothes, wash dishes and edit vacation photos in photoshop all at the same time. If you doubt the deep, profound changes wrought by the airplane, I suggest to you that you consider taking three months to travel from China to England <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Tea_Race_of_1866 > was not slow, but an astonishing feat of speed. London to Shanghai is what, 12 hours by jet? In 1960, how many people considered editing their home movies into features, complete with transitions, credits and FX? How many people could edit color photographs. How many people could write, and rewrite, and rewrite with ease? Just as an example, the transition from film-based photography to digital photography. Photography used to be an expensive, time consuming process to learn and master. You took your picture, you had to go then either develop the film and make prints yourself or send the film off; by the time you saw your picture it was weeks after that perfect lighting moment that you realized that your thumb was in the picture. Today, feedback is instantaneous, and the real cost of taking photographs has dropped to nearly nothing. Vastly more people can take enough photographs to improve as photographers, and have. We also have vastly more out of focus, poorly composed photographs of people doing doofus things than ever before and what's more, we all get to see them. (There as an article in today's paper about the 40th birthday of the Internet...it was in 1969 that two computers at SRI international first talked to each other over a network: about 15 feet of thick gray cable.) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Books, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
