Saturday, September 9, 2006

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey, who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes, and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short, since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's important.

Just like to thank you, from some undisclosed (for operational security reasons, doncha know) location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, for keeping my sanity. I'm in the US Navy, and my ship got surge-deployed without warning a couple weeks ago to "help" with the situation in Lebanon. On a ship underway, there's no room to keep books -- unless they're the ancient, creaking John Grisham paperbacks in the ship's library - and no time to get some anyway if you're scrambling around for the couple days of warning you have trying to get your bills set up to pay themselves and telling your landlord you're vanishing for an "open-ended" period of time. So, the ability to download your stuff from craphound has permitted me to feed my addiction to the printed word without having to have someplace to store the physical artifact of the books. Of course, I actually printed out Someone Comes and Down and Out, the two I don't own dead-tree copies of yet, and stuck 'em in a binder, where they've been passed from person to person in my department, helping keep the other sci-fi junkies similarly sane.

[three days later]

Thought you might like to know that what started as "Jamie feeds his print addiction" has turned into something else entirely. The sci-fi addicts rapidly finished off the two novels I'd printed out and bindered, and I had the binder with me in the engine room, reading to pass the time, when one of the other guys asked what I was reading.

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey, who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes, and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short, since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's important.

I spent about two hours last night as I was reading glancing up every so often, and grinning like an idiot every time 'cause there were five guys whose talk usually revolves around how drunk they were this one time head-down in some pretty intense reading.

Thank you. This is really something else.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

That was a unique time because the amount of money it took to get in the business was the cost of buying a personal computer and the time to learn what to do with it. For $5k, an IBM XT and copies of a basic interpreter, compiler and application software like DbaseII was yours to start your own company with. And for those of us who couldnt afford to buy them, we borrowed them :)

Back then, the meat of the business  bellcurve was in proprietary applications. Every mini or mainframe had apps that were exclusive to it. The long tail opportunity was in using the new development tools to create custom, PC based apps that provided businesses with new productivity and profitability opportunities that hadnt existed before.

Today, a comparable environment exists. Computers with power and storage unheard of just a few years ago, are available for under 1k dollars. Heck , under 500 dollars.  Has anyone noticed that we have been stuck on 3.xghz speed equivalency from CPUs in PCs for going on 2 years now ? Prices come down, cpu speed has stabilized, storage and memory and specialized processors keep on expanding.  Its amazing the things people can do with a PC/Mac these days and the price points they can do it at.

Which has created a boom of individuals developing web based interfaces and applications. Some like to call this Web 2.0.  Others are calling it the AJAX boom.  Buzzwords and new development frameworks are coming at us faster than we can think of them all. Ruby on Rails, Mashups, RSS, WML, Flash 8  and tons more. The great thing about all of these is that all it takes is one or two smart people  on a computer to put them together. Have a great idea on a new user interface or application ? For under 500 bucks, and 10 bucks a month to a hosting service, you can be up and running and taking on Google.