Pat York
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06-30-2002 02:10 PM ET (US)
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"The captive portal provides Web site redirection, which you may have encountered when surfing the Web from hotels that provide DSL access to rooms."
O.K. now that's already too much weird new vocabulary for a non-tech professional to deal with after a hard day's alligator wrestlng at my for-money job. Could I decode it with a little work? Sure I could. Do I feel any immediate need to do so? Nope, not now anyway.
This really refers back to the discussion upstream of Sterling's speech on ubiquitous computing. Some of us are finding ourselves out of the bleeding edge loop and content to be so until some really cool new app makes the climb up the learning curve worth the trip.
Frankly, that trip would be a lot more inviting if its apologists developed 'Plainspeak' when trying to sell it.
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| Cory Doctorow
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06-30-2002 03:19 PM ET (US)
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Pat, I think you're mistaken about the way that this stuff usually works. Rather than explaining the Internet, email, the Web and broadband without recourse to technical vocabulary, these concepts came to the laiety when info-civilians absorbed enough technical vocab through experience to understand.
PC Magazine -- and, for that matter, Boing Boing -- is generally directed at a technical audience. You can hardly fault Rob for using technical language in describing technical concepts to a technical audience.
Just why community wireless is fantastic is hard to explain with words. Like the Web, you get it through experience, and your odds of experiencing it increase with the number of geeks who work on making this stuff a reality.
As you've noted, you *could* bootstrap yourself into getting this. You don't want to, and that's cool. You'll get it eventually, anyway -- just like the Web, cellphones, email, etc -- once it percolates through to non-tech circles.
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| Pat York
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06-30-2002 10:23 PM ET (US)
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Edited by author 06-30-2002 10:25 PM
"...Boing Boing -- is generally directed at a technical audience."
Ah, that would explain the _Scooby-Do_ review and the bottom spanking.
Just kidding. I do see your point but must admit that the terms 'basic' and 'primer' threw me off for a minute.
What's more, for we, the mass of mundanes who follow the more esoteric of the Boingboing topics, the general wash of information really does get under one's skin even when one doesn't make an effort.
(revised some 'overwashed' language)
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