It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Google has relaunched its Google Answers service. Originally, Answers used a staff of paid researchers to answer questions posed by visitors who ponied up a buck for the privelege. This model is pretty obviously non-scalable.
The new Answers is much, much neater. Google is hosting a marketplace for answers. Visitors post questions and offer up a sum between $4 and $50. Any registered user can proffer their opinions on the question (which the poser gets to look at for free), and the researcher distills the wisdom and provides a definitive answer.
The next step, I hope, is cutting in kibbitzers for a share of the bounty if their input is used in the answer. It's amazing how systems that rely on blessed "experts" are hard to scale, while systems that just provide a place for people to do their thing and figure out a way to extract some cash (i.e., eBay) scale fantastically well and make giant oodles of money.
Can't wait to see where this is going. [BoingBoing]
Hey Cory! You do realize that you just reinvented Idea Futures Markets, right? With the OpenCola connection, I figured you'd be familiar with the E language and thence Idea Futures.
Helluva idea, ain't it?
9:13:20 PM
maze practice. I drew most of a new maze when I took Kyle and Ian out to dinner.
I'm out of practice, but this one doesn't suck despite a 30 year lapse.
The original is somewhat smaller than a standard CD cover in width.
I drew it freehand in ink using an extremely fine point drawing pen.
Maybe I'll get better at design and regularity in maze path size later.
The lines here are about twice as thick as the originals, and fuzzy.
After I scanned it, I upped the contrast to make the lines more solid.
If this is hard on your eyes, imagine what it was like in low contrast.
I believe there's at least one path through this maze. Tell me if not.
Can you guess where the entrance and exit are located? Go for it.
If I had time what I'd do next is turn this into a piece of visual art.
I'd use a technique I've done before, using variable width for lines.
The result would be a halftone image composed of darkness in lines.
I wonder if Raph Levien knows of software for doing the halftones.
Two inputs would be a line drawing and a target image photograph. [David McCusker]
Wow, I'm very impressed! As a teen, I was fascinated with mazes and maze design. So much so that my wonderful parents, being the excellent teachers that they were by nature as much as by profession, took me to New Harmony, Indiana to visit the labyrinth there.
What Gamers want?. What do online gamers want? A good article about this fickle bunch.It would seem the only proven demographic is hardcore D&D nerds. [Flutterby!]
The only thing worth taking away from this otherwise fatuous article is the observation that Majestic forced people to play at the game's pace by waiting for e-mails and phone-calls. That lesson alone is worth the cost of the failed Majestic experiment.
Then out trots Alex St. John. Big, boistrous red-headed Alex. I met him while I was at Activision. He leaves Microsoft to found a company to do "rich content" distribution online, so what does he say the world needs? Rich content online!
Piffle. What the online gaming community needs is a world that has a rich, immersive story that they can sink their teeth into, and the best way to get people to sink their teeth into a story is to let them help with its unfolding.
Mark my words, and you heard it here first: someone is going to get filthy rich when they create an online world that has the story-depth of a Myst or better, the world-building tools of The Sims extended to support a full trade economy among multiple participants, and the open-endedness of an Everquest or Ultima Online. And the genre will not have to be sword-and-sorcery fantasy.
7:26:44 PM Google It!
Peter makes an excellent point. Modern C++ has evolved to become an increasingly multiparadigm language, as efforts such as Functional C++ and Spirit point out. Couple that with the "managed" aspect of the CLR, and you end up with a combo that's rather strongly reminiscent of some of the Algol-syntax-inspired functional languages such as Objective Caml or Haskell.
7:10:27 PM Google It!
Matt Pope found a mobile PC from OQO that costs 2x the iPod but has the same form factor and the same storage capacity. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
My understanding is that it's closer to 4x iPod's cost ($1500), twice the disk (10G), and I think the same RAM. Nevertheless, this is a device to watch: a 1 GHz Crusoe, 10G disk, 256M RAM, ultra-high-res LCD touchscreen, capable of running WindowsXP (and with that Crusoe and RAM, probably running it well).
My immediate question is: what are the possibilities if you put EROS on this device?
7:01:43 PM Google It!
