Interviews: Ask Technologist Kevin Kelly About Everything 135
Kevin Kelly has for decades been involved in some of the most interesting projects I know about, and in his roles as founding editor (and now editor at large) of Wired Magazine and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has helped spread the word about many others. Kelly is probably as close to a Rennaisance man as it's possible to be in the 21st century, having more-than-passing interest and knowledge in a range of topics from genetic sequencing and other ways that we can use measurement in pursuit of improved health to how technology is used and reused in real life. Among other projects, he's also the founder of CoolTools, which I consider to be (unsurprisingly) the closest current equivalent to the old Whole Earth Catalogs. (Disclaimer: I've had a few reviews published there, too.) (He's also one of the founders of The WELL, now part of Salon.) Kelly is also Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Long Now Foundation, the group which for years has been designing a clock to ring on 10,000 years in the future. Below, ask questions of Kelly, bearing in mind please the Slashdot interview guidelines: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. He'll get back soon with his answers.
DEC patents bloooming after Intel stole/bought. (Score:1, Interesting)
I was looking at my DEC Alpha today and this story came up, and I pondered on how Digital could have ever been replaced by Intel and AMD after being aquired and stifled by not one but two aquisitors in the likes of Compaq and HP. Here was 1997, and Digital already had a 64-bit 1GHz DEC/Alpha on the EV6 line of lab test and despite being an American-fabricated semiconductor from an all-American company then how was it that now the industry is destitute to ever again fabricate it's own semiconductors ever since The United States brushed udner the rug all the property theft and anti-Trust activities of primarily Intel and HP? Intel was the most un-original chip manufacture, most of it's technology bought since it was founded as an investor-startup to muscle it's way into the market like how Microsoft used XBox at a loss to enter an unrelated market.
My point being is that the heavy hitters of the industry are all prime examples of when superior American work was destroyed, and in the occasion of the DEC/Alpha it was so-far advanced that Intel slowed-down the industry using Moor's Law so they can reap the profit of every chip revision that is nothing more than the re-implementation of a crippled inferior design.
Digital was responsible for many of the ARM embedded chipsets, the greatest of Ethernet LAN chipsets, multi-processor scalability, was first to have a retail 64-bit 1GHz processor for sale in 1999 despite being in the rounds since 1997 to developing engineers, and we get stuck with foreign-made non-American monopolies. Do I need to remind everyone that Intel puts STATE OF ISRAEL on the map like what the musical-band U2 does to put Ireland on the map? Who is destroying America supremacy to push our technology into foreign countries that have never done any good to mankind? It stinks of pay-offs.
And now that The United States is in charge, America is being liquidated.