Opinions are divided among Western authors and publishers as to whether free fiction available online boosts or damages the sales of physical product – witness Pixel-stained Technopeasantry. Wired reports that the book business in China is in fact undergoing a renaissance thanks to the increasingly popular pastime of reading novels online, and that the stories go on to be used in other media like television and computer games. The question is, will the same model work in the West?
Monthly Archives: August 2007
$100 desktop, and green too!
Forget the $100 laptop, here’s the $100 desktop, and it uses four times fewer chemicals and fossil fuels during manufacturing. It stores everything on a flash card, and uses networking to keep permanent files. Worldchanging has the scoop.
Lo-fi high-tech – scrapheap 3D printer from Russia
3D printing, fabbing, rapid prototyping … call it what you will, it’s a pricey cutting edge technology, right? Well, not necessarily – Bruce Sterling has spotted this Russian-made 3D printer built from lab junk. Looks like a similar idea to the Rep-Rap project.
Microfluidics – chemical electronics?
Wired has a report on the growing field of microfluidics – tiny devices that can sort and manipulate tiny droplets of liquid in ways analogous to electronic logic circuits, which have the potential to accelerate pharmacological research and the development of new medical treatments. [Image ganked from website of RainDance Technologies – please contact for take-down if required.]
Drugs aren’t just used for curing disease, though – one can only imagine the sort of illicit recreational substances that this technology will create once it becomes more common, and it will surely speed us toward the time when sports prowess is as much to do with the chemical augmentation of the participants as any inborn skill.
Simulations – from guns to festivals
Via reBang, here’s an article on the ironically named Zen Technologies, an Indian company that specialises in training simulators that can teach everything from driving a truck to crack-shot sniping with an AK47. When you add this selection to other training devices like the virtual chainsaw, you realise we’re rapidly reaching a point where almost any high-risk activity can be experienced virtually.
But low-risk activities are catching up fast now the technology is more accessible; as soon as people get access to virtual worlds, they start recreating objects and events from the real world (even major festivals, like Burning Man’s SL incarnation), and fabbing technology means that objects that start their life as virtual can be made real and solid in meatspace … so how long before we need the equivalent of Customs and border controls between reality and everywhere else?