Links
A bunch of us architecture students getting together and making clever stuff.
Modos 2006
Project website for a finished side-project I was helping out with at the Architecture School. I cobbled that site together using Microsoft Word, of all things. For that, it's not bad.
http://www.simonchui.orcon.net.nz/
This is my old website from back in 2003. Built it with Dreamweaver. It's kinda sad: two entries on the news page. Unfulfilled promises. To be honest though, I didn't have much to say back then.
Wikipedia
This thing has potential. Well, it's actually a very good encyclopaedia as it is, but the idea of it has much greater potential. Free knowledge.
Sourceforge
Open source software. It's surprising how much good stuff is free, and how much of the stuff you pay for is actually really bad.
Blender
Professional open source 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, AND interactive content creation. The Windows build weighs in at a tiny 14.8 megs installed. Amazing.
posted by sckChui at 11:13 pm
3 Comments:
What do you think should be bought if not knowledge?
Do you care that you may be the only person that is so committed to these things and that others may be just trying to get by?
Just trying to get by? We all have to get by one way or another. I think I'm going to save the big explaination about my attitude towards the buying and selling of knowledge till later. It'll be a fairly long rant.
For now, I suppose I'll briefly say something about what I know of resources and production. The world as we know it has a finite amout of raw materials, and that's why they have a cost. If you use up a material, it's gone. That's the cost of materials. Time has a cost as well, because we can't time travel and because we don't live forever. If we spend some of our time doing something, we can't spend that same time doing other things. That's the cost of time.
I believe knowledge is different. Knowledge can be used, but it can't ever be used up. If I apply my knowledge to something productive, I don't lose the knowledge. If I give you my knowledge by teaching you something I know, I don't lose that knowledge for myself. Knowledge, in itself, has not intrinsic cost. It takes time to generate knowledge, and the application of knowledge to a process may use up materials, but that is the cost of time and materials, not the cost of knowledge. The main point is that, with time and materials, it's a matter of trade, a matter of give and take, but with knowledge, we can give and give and give and the only cost is the time and materials spent in distributing the knowledge.
The adjunct to this is the fact that the distribution of knowledge has been getting cheaper and cheaper. A while ago, books had to be written by hand, and paper was expensive, and so the transmission of knowledge was prohibitively expensive. Most people couldn't afford to be educated. Then we invented the printing press, and all of a sudden it was cheaper to get smart, and consequently people got smarter. People began to have the opportunity to work smart instead of toiling away at manual labour. The monarchies found it more and more difficult to contain ideas and suppress change, and eventually they were overthrown and replaced by republics and democracies. People wern't dumb anymore.
And now, we have the internet, which is another revolution in knowledge transmission again. The internet is much faster, and much cheaper, and much more versatile than anything we had before, to the point where the costs of the transmission of knowledge can be negligible. Case in point: look at what we're doing now. Blogging? Pyra and Google offers everybody in the world some space on their servers to publish their rants? Because they can! Because it's that cheap.
So, if knowledge is never spent, and thus has no intrinsic cost, and we now have the technology to transmit knowledge at negligible cost, then why shouldn't knowledge be free? Consider the benefits. Everybody can be educated and informed.
I understand that quite a lot of people make a living from buying and selling information, be it knowledge, entertainment, advertisment, or whatever. But I consider this to be a false economy, or at least an artifially inflated economy held aloft by the overuse of patents and copyright. I think that the point of an economy is to be economical, meaning it should allow us to derive maximum benefit from minimum cost. That's why we specialise and trade. But when knowledge is not free, then the benefit of knowledge is withheld from those who need it for the profit of those who hold it. I see this as a sort of knowledge mercantilism which makes us all poorer in the long run.
That's what I think.
Sorry about the rant, I did say I'd save the big one for later. Whoops.
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