4 years ago, a 100Gb Hard Drive was around $100 which lead me to the observation that it was now cheaper to videotape a lecture than to print out the notes and bring them to class.
Now that prices for hard drives have now falled below $100 for a Terabyte, that same hour long lecture, recorded in high definition compressed video costs roughly the same as printing out a single piece of paper…
Every once in a while, I run into someone arguing that innovation and progress is now dead and the argument usually runs something like this:
Think of all the world changing “modern” inventions: Computers, the internet, cell phones etc. All of these things were actually invented over 40 years ago. We haven’t actually had any major innovation since then, only minor variations on a theme like Facebook and SMS. Ergo, we have already left the golden era of innovation.
However, this is a fallacious argument, if we were to go back 40 years, we could make the exact same claim. Telephones, rockets and the jet aircraft were the world changing modern inventions of that era and no world changing innovation has happened since then.
In the same way that it’s easier to see your hand than your nose, innovation also looks the most clear from a comfortable distance away. What this also means is that, if you know where to look, you can spot the shape of 2049. Innovations that will be considered world changing then are brewing right now and all it requires to predict it is a sufficient degree of insight about the present day.
After working for a while on my first non-web based ruby project, I’ve tried to integrate nicely with a number of different components which I was already familiar with within the rails environment like ActiveRecord. Having struggled a bit with the pure approach, I wouldn’t reccomend it.
Instead, what I’m doing is just spinning up an empty rails instance and just ignoring all the web based stuff. That is, I’m not spinning up a passenger instance, my app folder is empty but I can still access everything else inside Rails like:
So even though it’s a bit more messy, it ends up saving a lot of hassle in the long run. So much for modular design huh?
One small bright spot for media companies in this recession is the abundance of shovel ready content to fill the pages. Consider this article from the New York Times on the social effects of a recession.
I’ve been seeing more and more of these types of articles over the last few weeks and the great thing about them is that they require absolutely no journalistic content and can, thus be produced by the bushel.