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Today, there are over 7 billion people in the world. Given the average age of 30, humanity has lived a total 210,000,000,000 years of age together. That’s 210 billion years of experiences, emotions and memories. And every year, we add several billion years to this number. At the same time, our whole universe is only 13.75 billion years old.
That’s how old we are.
Hmmm… There’s a whole lot I’ve promised to others and myself lately.
It’s about time to act on those words, don’t you think?
Just a reminder to the world and myself that rising early and going through the empty city is immensely fun and inspiring. You get to see things you’ve never seen before and get to do things you’ve never thought of doing. This time of day makes one feel so vigorous and creative. Too bad I’ve missed it for so long.
Music: Fever Ray – Keep the Streets Empty
by Ray Bradbury
When the sun set he crouched by the path and cooked a small supper and listened to the first crack while he put the food in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. It had been a day not unlike thirty others, with many neat holes dug in the dawn hours, seeds dropped in, and water brought from the bright canals. Now, with an iron weariness in his slight body, he lay and watched the sky color from one darkness to another. Continue Reading…
Hi. So I finally got into this Google+ thing.
Well, there are already thousands of reviews devoted to G+, so let me only voice my first impressions, cause the rest can be easily found online.
After having a look around you understand that a lot of thought and design was put into this new service, a lot of stuff was thought out carefully. Although G+ is essentially nothing revolutionary, it sure looks and feels like a formidable competitor to those other guys out there. Clean, snappy, relatively well-organized. So far so good.
What’s really cool is that FINALLY Google has managed to put all of its services like Picasa, Chat, Voice, etc. together. All I hope for is even more integration – both between Google’s services (Docs, Groups, Calendar, etc.) AND third-party stuff like Twitter (dreaming of syncing my albums on picasa and flickr), twitter (twitter-google+-facebook-vkontakte status sync would be a blessing) and so forth.
Not a lot of people are on yet, so right now it’s hard to say what the real day-to-day operation of G+ is going to look like. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see about that. By the way, if’ you want in but need an invitation, feel free to leave your e-mail in the comments form below.
Recently, I realized that I actually like people with little vices, tiny pet addictions (like coffee or their old Nintendo) and imperfections . That’s mostly because the ones who seem perfect from the outside are often hiding something really big and ugly.
Sometimes, you just need a vacation from everything and everyone.
Leave the city, get off the Internet, forget your cell phone, travel light, see places, meet people, speak easy, drink hard, take lots of pictures, but not drugs, reunite with nature, sing those forgotten songs, wake up with joy, bathe in mountain springs and take showers in waterfalls, make notes, gaze at stars, talk about art, the universe, and the brighter things in life, get into a fight…
…and come back only after you get to taste life at its purest. Trust me, you’ll know when that happens.
Here in Ukraine, file sharing is on the loose. Everything is downloaded for free from torrent trackers, local and web dc++ hubs, or distributed via offline media. Additionally, we have a very long-standing culture of file-sharing, and, shall I say, piracy. The users originating from the ex-USSR are simply *not* used to paying for any digital content. Besides, why pay if you can get it for free anyway? We have had some attempts made by our authorities to crack down on file-sharing, but for the most part those have been negligible. The only people who do get persecuted are the ones who produce, share, store and sell child porn.
As for the future of file-sharing, I believe that it is here to stay, and that neither the state nor the content owners have the resources or technical possibility to shut it down completely. Right now they’re going after the trackers, but the file-sharing community is developing trackerless sharing. The opponents of file-sharing try to collect IP addresses to initiate mass lawsuits, and the file-sharing community seeks to anonymize their net presence. The cat-and-mouse race will doubtlessly continue until the content owners realize that they will *have* to adapt to this new reality.
Content *will* be copied. DRM *will* be circumvented. Sharing *will* continue. But what shall the media creators do then?
I believe that they only need to change their business model in accordance to the reality of this new digital age. How can this be done?
Musicians could let their records be distributed freely and make money off concerts and shows, public appearances, merchandise and advertising. I believe this is the fairest way because then they will earn money for actual work, and not get rich over endless royalties.
Video producers can earn ample income from demonstration of their films in theaters. Usually, the box office revenue of a good film far surpasses its budget, making it a profitable enterprise. Then, what’s the problem with letting the records be distributed freely after the film has run in theaters?
For software and game producers, moving into SaaS seems like an obvious solution and many have already understood this. In my belief, one of the best business models in software is offering the basic functionality for free and keeping the pro features for the paid users.
Such examples may be continued endlessly. The bottom line is, there are ways to reconcile the conflict between file sharing and the content proprietors – it’s just that both sides need to reach a compromise solution instead of continuing the race against each other.
My country has never ceased to amaze me. And although I don’t really believe that talking (let alone writing) about politics is a good idea, there are times when I just can’t help.
It didn’t amaze me at all when Nikolai Lisin, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, riding his Lamborghini Gallardo at 270 kph, hit a post and killed himself and his passenger. Ukrainian politicians (or their children, for that matter) do get into nasty car accidents on their high-end rides every now and then. No big deal.
What did amaze me, though, was the fact that even after his death, Mr. Lisin registered for voting in the Parliament and even voted on several occasions.
My point being, when you find out that your country is literally ruled by the undead, it is time to consider moving to Canada.
Doubtlessly, there is a deus in the machina. It is true that the darkest hour usually comes just before dawn.
But sometimes, the god descends just a few seconds too late, and there’s nobody left to save anymore.