Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sacha,
New Zealand public intellectuals
ahaha
Why the laughter? We do have some tradition there.
Keith Sinclair, Bill Pearson, Michael King, Fairburn, Sutch. for a start.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Can anyone name a local philosopher who carries similar weight?
"Similar weight" is a subjective call, but I think you'll find that Mr Dentith of Auckland University's Philosophy department is the kind of public intellectual you're looking for. He's both a stimulating teacher and a useful expert voice for the popular media. All while completing his PhD thesis.
That said, I was asked to review a book on New Zealand public intellectuals a while ago, and I did find that the most compelling parts were by or about people like Easton. I had less use for offerings that endlessly cited Foucault and Gramsci, because they seemed to be principally about the author's own dance.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
To be slightly fairer, I didn’t dismiss them as worthless – I quite laek that thar William Faulkner feller, etc – just questioned the wisdom of paying for people to dabble in them.
I'm not sure that "dabbling" is actually specified in the employment contract.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
The hysteria speaks for itself. If you ask professionals or scientists what society gains from their training then they just laugh, because the answer is so obvious. If you ask people who study philosophy or literature why the rest of us should fund their studies then they fly into a rage. Philistinism! Egotism! It’s hugely important! In abstract ways that can never be quantified! But nevertheless put our entire civilisation at risk if they are ever questioned!
To be fair, you didn't ask as such, you merely dismissed the humanities as worthless. Not quite the same thing.
FWIW, I seem to recall quite a bit of anguished defence of science lately, with the Ken Ring thing and all.
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Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
First Russell you might take your own advice re: Tizzard-mania: Get a grip. First, Tolley isn’t responsible for the headlines in newspapers not exactly know for pushing the hyperbole button, hard.
I know she didn't write the headlines. But I was genuinely fascinated by the language of the headlines and intros: so many combat words.
And I also think she looks headline-driven at the moment. Suddenly promising changes to the Education Act about search and seizure -- which has been explicitly on the table for months, but is apparently now urgent -- without being able to say what the changes would look like, only offer "guidelines" to schools, which she doesn't have either, but she'll get back to us on that ...
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Robert Fox,
Correct, someone with Henry’s political background could get a Kilroy-Silk type gig in the UK but they would never be considered for the position he managed to hold down with the state broadcaster here for far too long.
Ah. Gotcha.
But still, he was an unsuccessful candidate, once. I'm really not sure you can deny him the rest of his professional life on that.
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to Aidan,
Looks like there are untethered hacks now. I’d be taking a peep at plex and it’s media server, but if you’re in the iTunes ecosystem I guess there wouldn’t be much point for you.
I'm not, really. The only iTunes content I watch much at all is video podcasts, which the Apple TV handles well enough.
OTOH, I've tried other media servers -- Vuze and the open-source PS3 one -- and they weren't great enough over WiFi to beat walking around with a flash drive.
But ... the Cat 6 cabling that was supposed to be done in December with the rest of the house was finally finished last week. I think I need someone to tell me what to do now.
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Radiation: Signing off, moving on, in reply to Emma Hart,
Dude, I haven’t seen anything that makes it look as bad as it is.
That was what our studio director told me in week one, after he'd been down directing live coverage:
September earthquake: Not actually as bad as it looked on the telly.
February earthquake: Way, way, way worse than you can see on the telly.
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to TracyMac,
If it’s HTML-5 that has this functionality, then surely it’s available to any class of device/media player with the right hooks? (I’m not going to delve into what “Airplay” does right now at work).
AirPlay is a proprietary protocol, but it seems that PulseAudio in Linux can already use AirPlay devices:
The AirPlay protocol was reverse-engineered by Jon Lech Johansen in 2004[6]. It uses UDP for streaming and is based on RTSP[7]. The streams are encrypted with AES[6].
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But Apple have a habit of branding up common technologies in a certain way – for example, an Airport is not a better router, despite what many people seem to believe.
Apple got a name on the protocol because they were the first company to ship it in personal computers (“WiFi” hadn’t been coined then). I was actually at the Macworld Expo where they debuted it – Steve picked up an iBook playing a streaming video and walked across the stage with it, video still streaming. It took a moment to register what he’d done.
But nah, I don’t use AirPort routers. Although … we now have a house full of Cat6 and I’m looking to get some media hub action going.
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to Matt Crawford,
What’s the point of Apple TV? I’m just trying to get my (windows-based) brain around it. Is it just a networked media player linked to a subscription service?
Its major utility to me is as a YouTube player for TV. It helps to use your account and subscribe to the channels you might want to watch -- you can enter text, but given that the remote is tiny and has three buttons (and there's a lot to be said in favour of that) it's a bit of a pain.
Ever get frustrated at the lack of capability playing the higher definition video?
I can hire/buy and play 720p movies, which is good enough. And, er, better than TiVo ...
What do you output the audio to? What the hell do you do when you want to run an actual desktop on your tv – say to get a browser up?
HDMI. It's not a computer -- it's not priced like one and it's only 10cm across. For NZOS, Vimeo et al, I just use my iPad and hit the AirPlay button when I want to watch a video.
It's an iOS device -- an appliance, basically. The future strategy seems likely to be an App Store (with games!) but presumably they aren't ready for that yet.