ikhom: переводы

→What this means is that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the most important means -- the most important components of the core economic activities -- remember, we are in an information economy -- of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the Industrial Revolution.

→What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive, that there's less money that's required, but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these (grabs nearby computer), or something rather like it -- a computer. They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage, and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person -- and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge, and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet.

→4 and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.

→Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer -- the NEC Earth Simulator -- taking the primary from the US, and about two years later -- this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating point operations per second that the computer's capable of running.

→(graph: "Top 500 Supercomputers", supercomputers as of June 2002 graphed by teraflops, NEC Earth Simulator, HP ASCI-Q, and Linux Network, in descending order of size)

→Now, let me tell you a different story.

→Now, the term "information society," "information economy," for a very long time, has been used as "the thing that comes after" the Industrial Revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. It's just been industrial. Which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those 2 and a half million dollars, and later more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years.

→Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge, and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers, who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization; and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce.