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a hungry brain
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
Gates's vision -- and failure thereof.
Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted
that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a
pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a
$0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all
the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet
space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of
powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty
and pretty credible.
In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't
be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's
because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he
can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of
blinkered thinking does Microsoft -- which could be capable of pursuing
lots of profitable strategies that don't involve fighting the future
tooth and nail -- no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is
this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it's time
for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect
and CEO.
I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.
Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be
like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while
before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by
limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with
danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of
the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite
this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate
delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified
platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond
that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and
keep international markets, governments, academics, and most
importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of
influence. But they won't .
Link
(via /.) [Boing Boing] 
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QuickSilver, better than OS X LaunchBar. 
The most useful OS X utility on my machine has been LaunchBar, an
application launcher that makes switching between apps and launching
new apps very fast and convenient.
That's changed. Today, I downloaded QuickSilver, a beta app that does
everything that LaunchBar does -- but more stylishly, faster and more
intuitively -- and also includes a clipboard manager that lets me store
the contents of the last 9 copy operations. It's also savvy to your
iPhoto albums, your iTunes playlists, your addresss book and your
Documents folder. I'm in love.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
[Boing Boing]
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Power-driver for Powerbook trackpads.
Sidetrack is a beta, open source replacement driver for the MacOS X
trackpad drivers that adds a lot of cool power-user features to your
trackpad:
* Vertical scrolling at left or right edge of pad.
* Horizontal scrolling at top or bottom edge of pad.
* Map hardware button to left or right click.
* Map trackpad taps to no action, left click, left click drag (with or without drag lock), or right click...
Link
(Thanks, Joel!) [Boing Boing]
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Reasons to switch from SourceSafe to Vault. Revision history:
- 30 March 2004 -- Revised for the Vault 2.0 release
- 14 July 2003 -- Originally published
A friend complimented me for not doing any "blatant merchandising" here
on my weblog. My reaction was one of surprise. Have I really been
forgetting to do blatant merchandising on my weblog? :-)
Seriously folks, this article will be the exception, not the rule. Skip
this one if you're not interested in windows version control tools. But
people frequently ask me why they should consider switching from SourceSafe to
Vault, and I would like to answer that question here.
Reliability
SourceSafe has developed a reputation as
an unreliable
product, often being referred to by derogatory nicknames like "SortaSafe" and
"SourceUnSafe". :-) Actually it's not really that bad, but for
many developers, data corruption by a source control tool is unforgivable.
Vault was designed from the beginning with reliability as the number one
priority. All repository data is stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2000,
providing the Vault server with a robust and trusted data store. We also
have an extensive and highly abusive test suite which verifies that the
integrity of the repository is preserved, even under pathological
conditions.
Remote access
SourceSafe just does not work well over the Internet. Its design
is not based on a client-server approach, so it can be extremely slow when
used over network lines with high latency or low bandwidth.
Our own SourceOffSite
product has become very popular as an add-on which solves this
problem. (BTW, a note to users of SourceOffSite: We
recognize that many people will remain with SourceSafe. We are not
abandoning SourceOffSite. In fact, we released version 4.0 in March
2004.)
Vault was designed for the Internet from day one. It was built
entirely in C# using the .NET Framework. The Vault server is a
collection of XML Web Services running under IIS. The communication
between client and server is HTTP, optionally with SSL for security.
Furthermore, Vault's client-server protocol was designed for the
constraints of the Internet. Instead of sending the full contents of a
file, Vault can usually save bandwidth by sending only the bytes which have
changed. This exchange of "deltas" is used in both directions, from
server to client as well as from client to server.
Painless transition
As far as we know, Vault is the only version control system designed
specifically to replace SourceSafe. In every way possible, Vault
presents a familiar interface with familiar terminology. Every major
SourceSafe feature is supported, including things like Share and Pin.
Our import tool will move your SourceSafe database into a Vault repository,
including all historical information.
Visual Studio .NET integration
Just like SourceSafe, Vault can be used within Visual Studio .NET.
This functionality is currently limited because Visual Studio's support for
integrated version control is rather poor. As a member of Microsoft's
Visual Studio Integration Program (VSIP), SourceGear will be one of the first
to provide improved integration when new capabilities become available from
Microsoft.
Folder-level Share and Pin
Vault offers some subtle yet powerful improvements to the Share
command. Just as with SourceSafe, a shared item is a single item which
appears in multiple places. But SourceSafe can only share files, not
folders.
When you share a folder in SourceSafe, what really happens is that every
file underneath that folder is shared, recursively. On a file-by-file basis,
the effect is the same. But if you add a file to the shared folder, it does
not appear on the other side of the share. The files themselves are shared,
but the system has actually made distinct copies of the folder in which they
reside.
In Vault, this share operation is implemented at the level of the folder
itself. Just like a shared file, there is really just one instance of a shared
folder even though it appears in multiple places. If you add a file to a
shared folder, the new file will appear everywhere that folder has been
shared. The same applies if you add a subfolder, rename something or delete
something. Regardless of what happens to that shared folder, it will be
exactly the same in each place that it appears.
This makes it much more useful to share entire libraries or modules between
teams. For example, suppose your project decides they want to make use of a
class library being developed by another team. You can share the folder
containing their entire code tree into your own tree. Using SourceSafe, when
the other team adds a file to their library, your build breaks. Using Vault,
any change they make will show up in your tree as well.
Pin works at the folder level as well. Suppose you have shared another
team's library into your tree but that team has since gone astray and begun
destabilizing their code. You can pin your shared instance of their folder to
the last revision that was stable.
Atomic checkin transactions
When you checkin a set of changes to the Vault server, the
operation is performed as a single atomic transaction. If one item fails
for any reason, then the entire transaction will fail, and the repository will
be left in the condition it was in before the transaction was attempted.
This important feature, unsupported by SourceSafe, prevents a
half-failed checkin from corrupting the contents of the
repository.
CVS mode
There are two primary patterns for working with a version control
tool. One way is to checkout each file before editing, often with an
exclusive lock that prevents others from editing the file. When you're
done with the file, you check it back in, releasing it for use by
others. We call this the "checkout-edit-checkin" style of
development. Most SourceSafe users work this way.
Another approach is often called the "edit-merge-commit" style of
development. In this style, files in your working folders are usually
left in a writable state when you retrieve them. When you want to edit a
file, you simply do so. The version control tool will automatically
notice that you have made changes. Your changes are submitted to the
repository when you "commit" them. However, you may not commit your
changes if anyone else has modified this file since the last time
you retrieved a baseline from the repository. In this case, you must
retrieve the latest changes and merge them into your working copy of the
file. After doing so, you may proceed to commit your edited version of
the file. The source control tool facilitates this process by helping
keep track of the versions and making the merge simple.
Users tend to have extremely strong and divergent opinions about which
style is better. Many users do not trust the "edit-merge-commit",
preferring the safety of knowing that a given file may never be modified by
more than one person at a time. In contrast, those who have used the
"edit-merge-commit" cannot imagine returning to the more tedious
"checkout-edit-checkin" approach.
Vault was designed to allow each user to make this choice
individually. The default behavior is "checkout-edit-checkin", which
will be most familiar to SourceSafe users. But those who prefer
"edit-merge-commit" are free to configure their client accordingly. We
informally refer to this configuration as "CVS mode", since the
"edit-merge-commit" style of concurrent development was made popular by
CVS.
Merging Features
The merge features in Vault 2.0 are much improved from Vault 1.x and
significantly more powerful than SourceSafe.
For file-level merging, we provide SourceGear DiffMerge, a standalone tool
which supports diff and 3-way merge with a graphical display. For those
who prefer to use other diff or merge tools, Vault allows the user to
configure an external application.
The Merge Branches Wizard makes it easy to migrate changes between folders
in the repository.
Blame
New in 2.0: Displays an annotated view of a file, showing which user
last modified each line.
Web Client
New in 2.0: Allows basic browsing of the contents of a repository
using any web browser.
Vault Client API
A source control system is not just a tool, it is also a platform.
Many users need the ability to build custom solutions which interact with
their source control repositories, for things like reporting
and automated builds.
SourceSafe frustrates in this regard, offering a subset API which is
incomplete and sometimes unreliable.
SourceGear provides the Vault Client API, which allows our customers
to build custom clients using the same API we use. We cannot yet promise
that the API is frozen. We can't brag about the completeness of the
documentation yet. But we do provide the source code for our
command-line client as sample code. And we try to answer every question
about this API on our public mailing list.
History Explorer
Building Vault on SQL Server brings other advantages besides
reliability. Using the query capabilities of SQL, Vault's History
Explorer offers powerful new ways to view what the changes that have happened
in your repository.
Obliterate
An important pillar in the philosophy of source control is that the
repository should include every change which has ever happened.
Destroying data permanently is equivalent to rewriting history, and should be
strongly discouraged.
SourceSafe makes this sin far too tempting by providing a "Destroy
permanently" checkbox in the dialog used for deleting a file.
Vault's design is safer. Anything which permanently destroys
historical information is called "Obliterate". These features can only
be performed from the Admin Client, not from within the regular user
client.
Integrated bug tracking
Source control and bug-tracking go hand-in-hand, but SourceSafe is
ignorant. Vault currently offers integration with FogBUGZ. In conjunection
with Vault 2.1, we will provide a .NET port of our own bug-tracking system,
supporting full integration with Vault.
Honesty and Openness
We try to be forthcoming about the areas where our product needs to
improve, to ensure that expectations are appropriately set. We would
rather lose a sale than obtain a disappointed customer.
Over and over, our customers tell us how much they appreciate this posture
of honesty. From our point of view, nothing else would make sense.
We know our customers are smart people who develop software just like we do,
so we give them the facts. If we can't win your business today, we'll
win it tomorrow.
SourceGear
SourceGear is now over seven years old Our list of satisfied
customers includes hundreds of names you know, from every industry, from all
over the world.
In October 2002 we were named #156
on the Inc 500, Inc magazine's list of the fastest growing private companies
in America. Microsoft itself was once a winner of this same award.
SourceGear is definitely still a small company. Many of our
customers are several orders of magnitude larger than we are. But
companies large and small continue to buy from us with confidence. We
are profitable and conservatively-managed, and we plan to be around for a very
long time. [Eric.Weblog()]
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New Uses for RSS in Education.
Two Rivers Mix: RSS and E-Portfolios
"I do not want to go out on a limb, but I think we have done
something for the first time- a combination of two technologiies I have
had my paws in this year, electronic portfolios and RSS....
Please do not give me an credit, this is all the creative programming of Audree Thurman, who was developed the Chandler-Gilbert MyEport tool that she has also installed on our server as the Maricopa eP.
She had already combined two other streams of technology into this
system, an electronic portfolio with a weblog capability. But now
another tributary joins the mix.
See the details in Aud's own eP weblog.
This syndication publishes updates from two different areas of an
e-portfolio, from the weblog entries (that makes sense), but also
updates any document or link added to what is called a 'collection'
page (a group of linked media, web sites, and descriptions). But what
is really cool is that there are two views of any RSS feed- one is
regular old, easily read in any capable RSS reader, RSS 2.0, but there
is also a web page view of the same content....
This is just out of the chute, and there are soem more features
coming iin the next few weeks. But consider what a tool RSS can provide
to teachers, advisors, etc to be able to use a RSS reader to check on
the status of a group of students' portfolios.
The rivers are coming together, full speed!" [cogdogblog]
You'll have to head over to Alan's site to click through the
examples to see this in action, but make sure you do because it really
helps show how little we've explored the full potential of RSS to date.
Tangent: I also love Alan's use of the term "serendipitic web!"
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How Do We Move Beyond Baby Steps?.
Big Ideas and Small Solutions
"Innovations are sorely needed for libraries to compete with Google
and Amazon. Big ideas can sketch out the future, while small solutions
can—in building block fashion—help develop that future.
By 'small solution' I don't mean trivial. Small solutions solve
discrete, well-bounded problems and can be pieces of larger solutions.
They can move us forward by mixing and matching available components in
new and previously unimagined ways.
A number of innovations, which at first glance are completely unrelated, can come together and create important synergies." [Library Journal, via Peter Scott's Library Blog]
Roy Tennant then goes on to list LibraryLookup, xISBN, OpenURL, and Library Groupware, while noting how powerful a combination this all could be.
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I'll Let Him Explain the Title.
After much cajoling, Aaron Schmidt has finally started a non-photoblog! Aaron works at a public library within SLS,
and he's one of those hip, young, upstarts who likes reference work,
people, technology, and the intersection between the three. That's what
he'll be writing about over on Walking Papers, where he's already musing about IM, virtual reference, and technology etiquette. Naturally, there is an RSS feed and it's full text. Happy dance time!
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Outsourcing anecdotes.
The pro-outsourcing arguments advanced by economist Daniel Drezner,
writing in Foreign Affairs, break no new ground. I was struck, though,
by this comment about anecdotal evidence:
When forced to choose
between statistical evidence showing that trade is good for the economy
and anecdotal evidence of job losses due to import competition,
Americans go with the anecdotes. [ForeignAffairs.org, via Dan Gillmor]
I just want to point out that anecdotes come in all flavors. Here's one
that you probably haven't heard. Last week, an Indian who runs an
outsourcing business in Texas wrote to tell me that somebody threw
stones through his office window. ... [Jon's Radio]
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Laszlo Explorer. Classes and Prototypes.
LZX is a prototype-based language: any attribute that can be attached
to a class definition, can be attached to an instance of that class
instead. This is handy in UI programming, where there are a number of
objects with one-off behaviors. It's also handy in prototyping and
incremental program development, where it creates the possibility for a
novel kind of refactoring. [Oliver Steele]
I didn't realize that the Laszlo Explorer is so dam cool.
Please everyone - go and check this out! Fully interpretive scripting environment. [Marc's Voice]
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Buckyballs are the new asbestos?. Buckyballs -- nanoscale new materials based on inspired by Buckminster Fuller's research
geodesics -- are theoretically inert in the environment, seeking out
other buckyballs and forming clumps that are too big to do any real
harm. Turns out they're not -- a Southern Methodist U researcher who
released buckyballs into an aquatic testbed found that they were deadly
to micro- and macro-organisms.
Oberdoerster kept young largemouth bass in ten-liter
aquariums filled with fullerene-spiked water at concentrations of 0.5
parts per million -- similar to that encountered with more common
pollutants in U.S. ports. After 48 hours, the fish were removed and
their brains studied for evidence of lipid peroxidation, a
tissue-burning chemical reaction that toxicologists use as a standard
of biological damage.
The level of brain damage was "severe," Oberdoerster reported
yesterday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in
Anaheim -- some 17 times higher than seen in fish kept in clean water
for comparison.
Link
(via /.) [Boing Boing]
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Berlin theme-hotel of great and magnificent weirdness. 
I've stayed in some pretty cool theme-hotels, like San Luis Obipso's magnificent and weird Madonna Inn,
but now that I've had a virtual tour of Berlin's Propeller Island City
Lodge (which styles itself an "art" hotel), I am quietly and
determinedly obsessed to pay it a visit. The 40-some themed rooms have
a couple of real standouts, like the Flying Bed and Grandma's. I'm moving to Europe in a week -- my first trip to Berlin (when it comes) is definitely going to include a night here.
Link
(via Geisha Asobi)
[Boing Boing]
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AT&T Rolls Out Do-It-Yourself VOIP.
AT&T rolled out its do-it-yourself voice-over-IP service on Monday,
allowing customers to add a VOIP phone to an existing broadband
connection. The service includes a quasi-"presence" feature that will
route calls to the appropriate phone. [Extremetech]
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New Fiction by Neil LaBute. Director
and screenwriter Neil LaBute ("In the Company of Men," "Your Friends
and Neighbors") serves up his customarily bleak world view in this new
piece at Nerve; if your Monday morning wasn't depressing enough
already, this should do the trick.
Neil LaBute, "Grand Slam" (Nerve) [Fleshbot]
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GDC 04. Back from GDC.
I didn't get the same vibe of angst and despair I got at the conference last year,
although I'm not sure I can say why; perhaps employment is up (probably
in massive teams), perhaps people have become resigned, perhaps
downloadable and mobile games are taking up some of the slack.
On Tuesday, I helped Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen
teach a workshop on social design for multiplayer games. At one point,
they had the audience divide into teams and design "offline massively
multiplayer games" using materials they supplied--the idea being that
you needed to produce a game all the attendees of the workshop could
play simultaneously. One group came up with a game that involved
spilling a bunch of marbles on the floor, with five teams each
scrambling to collect a certain type of marble against a time-limit.
Since it seemed unwise to play this in the conference room--to easy for
people to get hurt hurtling into tables and chairs--Eric and Katie took
everyone out into the conference center. There, security descended, and
told us we couldn't play the game. Outside, the same thing happened;
clearly, one of the first things you need to think about designing this
kind of game is "Consider the liability issues." Eric brought everyone
back in and said, "Well, you have to think about the social context in
which games are played, and how can we revise this game to deal with
that?", which I thought a clever way of recovering, and also getting
security off our back. I suggested adding a few new roles to each
team--people to block security--as well as a lawyer, and possibly
requiring the players to put up some money, which could be used for
bail, with any funds left over going to the winning team.
Microsoft
had a 'keynote,' scheduled with nothing against it--most of the
audience seemed to expect an XBox 2 announcement (which Microsoft had
previously said would not be made until E3). Actually, they announced
an initiative called XNA, which essentially involves pulling some of
the development tools available for XBox, and some available under
DirectX, and making both available on both platforms. In essence, it's
an attempt to reduce the time and difficulty of the development
pipeline (primarily on the code side, but potentially on the art side
as well), and therefore a Good Thing. However, they also showed a slide
that purported to claim that XNA would reduce the development cycle
from 80% content development and 20% polishing to 20% development and
80% polishing--which is, of course, bullshit.
I generally avoid
the show floor at GDC--the focus of the conference is the sessions, not
the booths--but I did spend a little time hanging out with the Themis guys at the Saga of Ryzom booth--it's a French-developed MMG that Themis is assisting with marketing efforts, now in beta. Looks pretty good.
The awards ceremony was fairly dull and predictable, but I was pleased that Masaya Matsuura, developer of Parappa and Mojibribbon, among others, was awarded. Mahk LeBlanc and Andrew Leker's Oasis, which I've mentioned before, won the IGF award. Later, I was in the green room, while Marc and Andrew were putting together the press release, which also announces that Pop Cap,
the largest publisher of downloadable games, will be releasing the
commercial edition. And good for them; Oasis has very different
gameplay from the puzzle games that typically work in this market, but
is quite accessible and a lot of fun; it will be interesting to see how
well it does. Dr. Blob's Organism,
from Digital Eel, also won two IGF award in lesser
categories--Innovation in Audio and Innovation in Visual Arts. I ran
into Rich Carlson, Ilka Keranen, and "Phosphorous" outside the
ceremony, and they were inordinately pleased. (Rich is a frequent
commenter on this blog, btw.)
Raph Koster, Warren Spector, and
Will Wright spoke at a session moderated by Eric Z. on designing a love
game; Warren took the topic most seriously, but as a result did not
come up with a game--more a discussion of why current technology makes
a love game difficult or impossible. Raph's game was, in essence, a
constrained-narrative romance-story title, and struck me as amusing but
probably not all that much fun to play. Will's idea was a WWII romance
played out (literally) in Battlefield 1942, with the 'love story'
players wandering around while the military gamers fight a
battle--essentially, two orthogonal games in the same setting. The idea
needs elaboration (e.g., some 'civilian' players might be partisans,
and legal targets for the wargamers if unmasked), but actually, it
strikes me as very doable--someone should do the mod.
The Experimental Games Workshop was, as always, something of a highlight. The Indie Games Jam,
always featured as part of the EGW, this year started with a codebase
supporting 2D physics. Essentially, they get a bunch of developers
together, start with some codebase, and give them four days to produce
something, generating a dozen or more "games" in the process. They
generally aren't polished, but are always interesting. Binaries and
source are posted to the site (but the ones for this year aren't up
yet).
The EGW this year was 3 hours long, which I think is a
mistake; yes, it's been rushed in past years, but it became somewhat
tedious over time. Among other things, two academics presented papers
without demoing original games--both speeches were interesting, but I
don't think they really belong in this venue. I'd suggest axing that in
future years.
On Friday, I spoke at a panel on mobile game technologies along with Adrian Sack of Ideaworks3d (note to Adrian: your pop-up doesn't work in Mozilla), Seamus MacAteer of Zelos Consulting, and Misha Lyalin of Reaxion.
We were fairly dull, I thought, which is too bad, since both Adrian and
I (at least) are capable of being pretty funny. (Last year, I
interviewed Adrian for a video to appear on the Forum Nokia site; while preparing, he said "So--what's my motivation? Oh that's right--I'm trying to get rich.")
GDC is not where you go to see game demos (E3 is better for that), but I was taken with a game under development at Harmonix,
the developers of Amplitude and Frequency. The title is Antigrav, and
it's a skateboarding game--but requires ownership of the EyeToy. You
control the character physically--leaning to turn, jumping (literally)
to jump, and so on. An attempt to turn the EyeToy into something more
than a toy, in other words.
A tad tired at present, but hey.
[Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Monday, March 29, 2004 |
RFIDs of the Beast.
The Snopes.com Urban Legends Reference has a great new page detailing
why radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are (for better or
worse) not the "mark of the beast" as prophesized in this passage from the New Testament's Book of Revelations:
"[The beast] causes all, both small and great, rich and
poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their
foreheads. And that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark
or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom.
Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it
is the number of a man: His number is 666."
Link
[Boing Boing]
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Disneyland jacks up admission at 190% of inflation. The price of admission to Disneyland is going up to $49.75. Frank Boosman points out that Disney is raising its ticket-prices waaay ahead of inflation:
According to Yesterland,
the price in 1972 for a 15-ride ticket book -- the highest-priced
admission back then and so the most apt comparison to today's unlimited
attractions ticket -- was $5.95.
Using this handy calculator
(thanks, NASA!), we can tell that $5.95 in 1972 dollars equals $26.19
in 2003 dollars. That means that Disney's ticket prices are now 1.9
times higher than if they had risen at the underlying inflation rate.
Put another way, if this trend holds, in the year 2035, it will cost
$94.50 in 2004 dollars to visit Disneyland for the day.
Link
(Thanks, Frank!) [Boing Boing]
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Sunday, March 28, 2004 |
Community Project: ArsMap 2004.
ArsMap 2004 is a community effort spearheaded by thrilll[h]o aimed at
giving people the option of placing themselves on a geographical map in
relation to other Arsians. [Ars Technica]
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Java RSS Aggregators.
There's yet another RSS Aggregator out there: JNN (Juicy News Network)
by none other than James Gosling. It's very basic right now but such is
to be expected for, as he calls it, a "weekend hack". In releasing this
aggregator as open source, he brought the wrath of John Munsch upon him
though. John has been working on another Java... (582 words) [Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]
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Saturday, March 27, 2004 |
Contextual Help. Call up the past!
"I found this in The Guardian, great for anyone touring London:
Handheld History is a
new service launching this Spring, which allows you to use your mobile
phone to access history based on London’s famous Blue Plaques.
The Blue Plaques which are on buildings all over London, commemorate
the achievement of hundreds of men and women who have lived and worked
in the city for all or some of their lives. By calling a designated
short code or dialling a number, you'll get either basic history by SMS
or a short voice biography.
Handheld history will also entertain you through your cell phone if
you're waiting in line to get into Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, with
some horrible facts about Vlad the Impaler, the original Count Dracula,
the death of Joan of Arc, the final days of Adolf Hitler or how
Princess Diana was remembered after her death." [textually.org]
Way cool, and an excellent use of handhelds, location-based
services, and text messaging. Someday libraries will make some of their
information available this way, too. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Free Culture Is Both!. "Free Culture" is
"Thanks to the lessons explained by others (Cory), and the courage of a great publisher (Penguin), Free Culture launches today with a free online version of the book, licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can get the book here,
though at the moment, only the bittorrent version is apparently up.
Later today, there will be a direct download available from the Free Culture site, and from the Amazon site." [Lessig Blog]
Kudos to Professor Lessig and to Penguin. I'm holding out for a Palm
version or, better yet, an audiobook (preferrably MP3, Ogg, or even Audible). However, the CC license says the following:
"You may redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book
provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit
Professor Lessig."
If I understand that correctly, I believe that means libraries can
download the PDF version, catalog it, link to it from their catalogs,
and let patrons download it (hellllllllooooooo, SWAN!).
Of course, I also think this book is important enough that every public
and academic library should purchase a print copy as well, but it's
nice to be able to offer the uncomplicated download, too.
So thanks again, Professor Lessig! [The Shifted Librarian]
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Japanese rescue robot vids. 
A post on Dottocomu includes links to videos of the Enryu Japanese
rescue-robot tearing the doors off of cars, moving steel girders and
demonstrating humanity's hubristic attempt to supercede the Creator's
unique right to create life. It's sacrelicious.
Link
(via Engadget)
[Boing Boing]
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Research vs Products. Breakfast with Lili and Sean in MS Research.
I'm sitting here with Sean Kelly and Lily Cheng, in Microsoft
Research. We're checking out the latest social software networks. For
instance:
Myspace A very young audience, but doing some real interesting stuff.
Why do I like what Lili and Sean show me? They get me out of my echo chamber. For instance, I haven't been playing with LiveJournal much lately, but it has more than a million people doing some interesting network spaces.
Are you seeing anything online that is cool in weblog/diaries/social
software? I'm gonna have lunch with Marc Canter next week. I can't wait
to see what he shows me.
Oh, there's a ton of social network people coming to Microsoft next week. I'll write more about that on Monday.
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
Let's see:
- Midentity - just went v1.0
- MediaChest - is boring
- Orkut - took down stats for good now
- Tribe.net - got a new look
 - Yafro - is hot
One funny thing - Lili emailed tonight asking that I not heckle
anyone during her thingie. :-) Now I wonder who can be worried? [Marc's Voice]
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Sarah has an answer for Dan - as well. why is XML good for GUI?.
why is XML good for GUI?
Dan Shafer asks a very good question about Laszlo:
"Instead of direct manipulation of graphical objects to create
pleasing interfaces, i get to write XML code (with its extreme overhead
burden) to describe how I want the graphical experience to look and
feel. And that's a good thing because...???"
I agree that it is counter-intuitive that XML would be a good format
for developing graphical user interfaces. I always felt that XML made a
mighty fine interchange format -- it's human-readable, almost
self-doumenting, and these days if you are working on a large software
development project you probably have at least one or two XML parsers
already linked in. So... why use it for developing applications?
There are a few attributes of graphical user interfaces that map well to XML:
Graphical user interfaces are inherently hierarchical
Screen
real-estate is naturally divided heirarchically. It is convenient for
that heirarchy to be represented by the development environment.
Graphical user interfaces evolve
While a hierarchy could
be effectively represented in a visual tool, arguably more effectively
than it is in an XML file, it is the managing the evolution of a
application where XML really comes in handy. It is natural for a design
to change over time. In response to user feedback, bugs, or simply by
realization of the author, an application needs new features, gestures,
or an altered composition. When your design is caught in a visual tool
with an opaque file format, you lose the magic of a diff. What happened
between then and now?
Graphical user interfaces are often built by a team
XML
files are simple text files. Media files live separately and can be
linked in by name. Designers and coders can work together on separate
pieces of an application without the need for complex group-ware
solutions. Coders use the tools they are used to for editing and
archiving files. Designers can use the tools they are used to for
creating and editing art assets and media files.
Graphical user interfaces require structure
Graphical user
interfaces need to be split into pieces to be manageable. XML provides
a structured framework which makes its fairly easy to divide your work
into bite-sized chunks. A common problem in a visual tool is that
people "lose" things. It may be hard to figure out what object a script
is attached to. An object that is invisible can be hard to discover or
manipulate. In a system where all objects and code are encapsulated in
simple text files, anything can be found. The inherent structure of an
XML file helps organize an application. There are lots of visual tools
that offer a tree-view of XML files which make this structure more
approachable.
As an aside, for Dan who "still doesn't get Laszlo," there's a whole
lot more to Laszlo than XML. What makes Laszlo cool is its constraints
system, animation geared to UI design, client-server data model,
effective class re-factoring, and more.
Someday there'll be a GUI tool for creating and editing Laszlo
applications. Let's face it: typing in pixel coordinates and RGB values
is no fun. Ideally there would be a layout tool that directly created
and edited LZX files. Most folks at Laszlo design in Illustrator or
whatever and transfer pixel and RGB values to the XML files. By the
way, this is often what folks do when building UI for desktop apps. [Sarah Allen's Weblog] [Marc's Voice]
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Interested in Laszlo?. Wanna build a rich media application or service? getting tired of HTML? Don't wanna learn timelines? Then check out Laszlo Systems.
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Free Laszlo for non-commercial usages.  I wanted to make sure everyone caught this.
In the midst of their big announcements yesterday, Laszlo announced their......
Laszlo Presentation Server Non-Commercial Edition
Laszlo Presentation Server Non-Commercial Edition (LPS NC) is
intended for organizations that would like to build and deploy
applications for non-commercial educational and research purposes as
well as non-profit organizations providing information for public
benefit. LPS NC is also ideal for Laszlo developers and partners
looking to showcase and promote Laszlo applications.
Support
LPS NC is supported via Laszlo's online forums. Access to the forum
is free and available to all Laszlo customers. It is monitored by
Laszlo's technical staff and enables you to get answers and exchange
ideas with other customers, developers and the Laszlo team.
Pricing
Subject to acceptance of an application form, LPS NC is free. It is
intended for organizations using the product for non-revenue generating
purposes.
Apply For NC Now
If you are interested in LPS NC, please submit a completed application form to Laszlo for review:
Download LPS NC application form (PDF format)
For additional questions about the Non-Commercial Edition, contact getnc@laszlosystems.com.
Marc's bit...
As long as it's non-commercial - you can do it - for free from Laszlo. The Internet Archive is using it. [Marc's Voice]
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Seb groks the ASN. Interview with Ken Jordan (Seb Paquet). 
March 24, 2004
Interview with Ken Jordan
On the venerable nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink interviews Ken Jordan, one of the coauthors of the ambitious Augmented Social Network
white paper. Jordan and collaborators have been thinking about the
issue of self-representation online for a long time, and he highlights
quite clearly many of the key issues in this area.
The ASN is a blue sky
vision for the future of online community. It stakes out some
conceptual territory, presenting a civil society vision of how the
Internet could evolve — particularly addressing the issues of Identity
and Trust (two packed terms that have a pretty specific meaning in this
context). It provides a clear alternative to the dangerous direction
the Internet may well be heading in — a corporate/government
panopticon. But it’s not enough to stand against digital disempowerment
and control; we need to stand for something. The ASN
shows that by coordinating the writing of standards and protocols
between several different, previously separate technical areas
(persistent identity, interoperability between community
infrastructures, matching technologies, and brokering) you could add a
layer of functionality to the Internet that would be greatly in the
public interest.
Jordan enumerates shortcomings of current social networking systems such as Friendster:
- They are non-interoperable walled gardens.
- Profile info is thin, not nuanced; it isn’t context sensitive (the boss and mother problem).
- The profile information is static, not effected by your actions elsewhere.
- You have limited control over your own profile information
(“It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers”; you also
want a “digital bill of rights” that enables you to exert control over
access.)
- The sites are exclusive, invitation-only clubs. [Note: I believe this is the exception rather than the norm].
I can’t help but notice how close weblogs come to fitting the bill -
apart from restricting you to a single context and making it difficult
to control acess, everything is in there. (See Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on blogs as SNSes .)[Many-to-Many]
Marc's bit....
It's almost been a year since thr ASN was first published. I became
involved in it - as I support the theories and vision of the ASN.
I myself have been trying ot make sure it happens.
The PeopleAggregator is our first step towards that. [Marc's Voice]
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Steven Hawking's wife accused of physically abusing him.
Steven Hawking's wife has been called in for questioning regarding
injuries to her husband. She used to be one of his nurses, and the
other nurses who tend him blame her for "numerous acts of cruelty."
Both of them deny this.
Professor Hawking, author of A Brief History Of Time, has
repeatedly been taken to hospital with unexplained injuries, such as a
broken wrist, gashes to the face and a cut lip, that have left his
family concerned for his safety.
Link
(via Fark) [Boing Boing]
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Aerogel.  Juju
has written an nice introductory piece about aerogel, a solid material
that just a tiny bit denser than air. The pics are amazing. They look
fake, but they come from the NASA web site. Link
[Boing Boing]
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GDC 2004: Carmack speaks!.
For the first time ever, id Software's chief coder John Carmack gave a
talk at the Game Developers Conference. He had a lot to say about the
perils of engine development and advancing game technology. [Extremetech]
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Producing a blogger-read audio of Lessig's book. Lessig's new book, Free Culture is available online as a gratis, Creative-Commons-licensed file, under terms that allow for the creation of derivative works.
AKMA has proposed a hell of a derivative work: he's inviting any
blogger who cares to to read a chapter aloud, recording it and posting
it, so that a distributed audiobook of the book will be produced. I may
take a crack at a chapter myself this week.
Heck, we could have duelling chapters; which version
of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted
Librarian’s? (Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They
haven’t offered or anything. Yet.) (Another disclaimer: When I went to
Jenny’s just now to get her link, I saw that she had the same idea —
and we didn’t even talk about it Wednesday night!)
Link [Boing Boing]
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Steve Gillmor - Why Microsoft needs RSS. Steve nails it! RSSify your org or die!
Memo to Steve Ballmer:
QUOTE Perhaps it's just as a
friend of mine suggested: RSS is not a high-priority item in the queue,
dwarfed by the challenges of security, open source, digital rights
management and the Longhorn evolution. These issues are rightly
top-of-mind, but that doesn't mean RSS shouldn't be up there too.
First, RSS offers a powerful evangelism tool for your security
efforts. For example, distributing Windows update information via RSS
would let you annotate hot fixes and updates with timely information
and tutorials about the reasons why the update should be accepted.
Delivering the updates as RSS enclosures might mitigate the concerns of
people who are concerned about unauthorized changes to their
configurations.
Another opportunity presents itself in the instant messaging space,
where important collaborative information is often lost to the ad hoc
IM bit bucket. Instead, IM data could be pipelined into an RSS feed for
archiving, auditing and indexing. RSS enclosures could speed the
adoption of audio and video messages, as well as provide a persistent
transport and collaborative synchronization for Tablet ink, OneNote
meeting recordings, music and photo sharing.
But the biggest Microsoft opportunity is in the authoring space,
where you could perform the same powerful ratifying effect you first
rendered with SOAP. What if you were to authorize a freely
redistributable runtime version of InfoPath that produced XHTML-ready
RSS content? The tool would empower users to drag and drop RSS objects
into the container, annotate and format them, then post them via an
IETF-standardized API mechanism that you would participate in producing.
Not only would such a tool promote substantial adoption of
well-formed XHTML, but it would also promote the use of RSS as an event
mechanism in workflow apps and even calendaring and scheduling. RSS
enclosures would be a convenient addition to InfoPath forms' e-mail
distribution methodology to boot.
If InfoPath can't be opened in this manner, there's another prime
candidate for RSS authoring: OneNote. As the strategic core (at least
for me) of the Tablet platform, OneNote promises a terrific environment
for rich text/ink/audio/video micro-content creation, management and
routing. With an XML API waiting to be switched on for its second
release, now would be the time to act to gain significant market share
in the developer community where RSS is already well-seeded.
Steve, thanks for listening. RSS may appear to be just a niche
technology, a hippie miracle cure for everything from information
overload to e-mail dysfunction. But I'd like to see the data on
relapsing from RSS. Once you kick the browser, it's very hard to go
back to the old way of doing things. I look forward to hearing from
you, perhaps via your own RSS feed. That's one channel I look forward
to subscribing to. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Friday, March 26, 2004 |
Send your future self an email.
FutureMe lets you address an email to yourself and set a date in the
future to have it sent -- pass an email to yourself in ten years
reminding yourself about your vow to never, ever drink peach schnapps
again and see how well you're faring.
Link
(via Ambiguous) [Boing Boing]
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Mythtv PVRs for sale. 
An Aussie company is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are
souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the
features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable. This analysis
of the features (including several features that the manufacturer
lamely decided to "hide") makes this box pretty drool-worthy indeed.
Link
(via /.)
[Boing Boing]
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Dijkstra - it's a superstition that programming is so easy that even a Republican can do it!. Ha!
Laugh out loud as they say! Programming well like doing anything well
is hard and anybody, even Republicans can learn to program (just like I
painfully taught myself how to assemble Ikea furniture :-) !). But not
everybody can put together and design great software just like not
everybody can write design great furniture.
So anybody who thinks all programmers are just equal units that can
be shuffled around and tries to manage programmers that way is doomed
to failure or worse mediocrity.
From Dijkstra paper in his own handwriting: Why American Computing Science Seems Incurable":
QUOTE In the essay, Dijkstra
argues that the pressures that the high-tech industry is adversely
affecting academic research. He says that industry pressure is causing
the definition of being a good programmer to change from someone who is
"able to design more effective and trustworthy programs" and who knows
"how to do it efficiently" to somewho who thinks of "'industrial
acceptance' as quality criterion" and writes programs such that "its
main feature [is] that one could apply it unthinkingly." Programming,
he says is becoming less a branch of applied math and more a branch of
keeping the high-tech industry afloat, a problem aggravated by "a total
lack of faith in [America's] educational system and a deep-rooted
mistrust of intellectuals."
UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Thursday, March 25, 2004 |
Removable Media For Our Minds.
In my latest article for TheFeature.com, I report on the first baby
steps toward "memory prosthetics," systems that could someday enable us
to google our entire lives. "Too often, our memories don't serve us well. We lose
our keys. We forget names. As we age, the home movies that play in our
heads begin to look like fifth generation VHS copies. But what if we
could rewind to yesterday? Indeed, what if we could watch our entire
lives flash before our eyes with the click of button? The possibility
is not as far fetched as one might think."
Link
[Boing Boing]
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Disney Ink Shop.  Disney
has launched a custom T-shirt shop with a seemingly infinite number of
images to choose from. some of the art is awesome, owing to the fact
that it was drawn by the good old Disney studio cartoonists. I've found
several ukulele related images already. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Don't think about pink elephants.
According to a new Harvard University psychological study, the thoughts
we push out of our brains during the day seep into our dreams at night.
The reason may be because the prefontal cortex--the part of the brain
we use to plan and organize complex cognitive processes--doesn't work
as hard when we're asleep.
"Maybe this is why students dream of sleeping through an important
exam, why actors dream of going blank on stage, and why truckers dream
of driving off the road," one of the researchers told Scientific
American. "Dreams are where our thoughts go when we try to put the
thoughts out of mind." Link
[Boing Boing]
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Time to try OpenOffice.org?. I haven't even read this,
(link discovered on Slashdot) but I
don't need to. When Microsoft publishes a comparison like this, they
validate their competitor. OpenOffice.org has never really interested me
very much, until now. :-) [Eric.Weblog()]
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Book Review: You Need to Be a Little Crazy. I recently read a good book entitled You Need
to Be a Little Crazy by Barry Moltz.
The subtitle is "The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business".
It's a book about entrepreneurship, with lots of good stories. It's not
specific to software, but the book does contain a fair amount of high-tech
cluefulness.
Moltz speaks with experience. Although the book includes case studies
of several other people, the author tells many of his own tales. In fact,
I think these personal glimpses are the best aspect of the book.
Somewhat by definition, entrepreneurs are surrounded by people who do
not truly understand them. Running a small company is therefore one
of the loneliest jobs in the world, especially because hiding this
feeling is one of the success criteria. Entrepreneurs need to know they
are neither alone nor unique. After reading this book, I found myself
believing that Barry Moltz and I have a lot in common.
I particularly enjoyed his various postmortem remarks about the dotcom
bubble, liberally sprinkled throughout the book. Granted, hindsight is
20/20, so it doesn't take a genius to say that a lot of boneheaded things
happened in the 1990s. Still, Moltz says it well.
Best of all, the book is just plain fun to read. I devoured the whole
thing on a plane ride. [Eric.Weblog()]
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Helping RSS Newbies Find Relevant Feeds. Ultimate Feed List?
"I got an e-mail from a teacher yesterday asking for some tips on
where to find appropriate RSS feeds for K-12 teachers to use in their
classes, and he said he'd had little luck finding a site that collated
them all together. I hadn't really poked around very much on this, but
I think between the feeds from Moreover, (which actually has a feed on 'firearms industry news'), coupled with the even more refined Moreover feeds you can find at Syndic8, and those listed at Weblogs compendium,
there's certainly enough to get started. But even in these three there
are a lot of newspaper feeds that aren't listed. My big question is
whether or not there's an "Ultimate Feed List" that's collecting all of
these into one place..." [Weblogg-ed News]
I don't know of an ultimate feed list, other than finding someone
with a similar need and hoping they already have a subscription list
you can steal.
This is why I'd like to see a concerted effort - in the library
community at the very least - to provide either an aggregator with
pre-populated feeds or opml files of feeds by type of library or
interest. Get the K-8 teachers to list their favorite sites and provide
the feeds in an opml file that a new user can import in order to get
started. Same thing for 9-12, reference librarians, academic librarians
(even better, by specialty!), medical librarians, law librarians,
technology librarians, etc.
Hmmm... maybe I'll have to set up a wiki for this, too, and then I could point users at it when I give presentations about RSS. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Pydoc - online docs of all the Python modules installed in your system. Python is awesome and so is Pydoc
From Simon Willison: Pydoc:
QUOTE Pydoc is awesome; I don't know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
pydoc -p 8888
Then point a browser at http://localhost:8888/ to browse interactive
documentation for every Python module available on your system. This
includes moduldes installed in your site-packages directory. If you
keep code you've written yourself in site-packages you'll be able to
browse the documentation for that too. If you're even remotely
consistent about writing docstrings you'll be amazed at how useful the
resulting documentation is. I can't believe I only just discovered this! UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Hold the Presses: A Non-Microsoft-Funded Windows vs. Linux TCO Study. From Microsoft Watch:
The Yankee Group and Sunbelt Software have teamed to do a truly
independent total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) study that pits Windows vs.
Linux. And Windows fares quite well, despite the lack of Microsoft
influence. But there are still bright spots for Linux, too — especially
among smaller businesses with custom vertical applications and/or no
legacy networks to support. Check out our synopsis of Yankee's findings here. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
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The Firefox opportunity.
The future of "great Windows applications," we're told, lies with
Longhorn's next-generation presentation subsystem, Avalon, which will
reboot software development sometime in the latter half of this decade.
Of course, even Microsoft can't wait until then. Consider InfoPath.
It's a great Windows application and a rich Internet client that had to
ship in 2003. Its foundation is none other than Internet Explorer -- or
rather, the suite of components and Internet standards on which
Internet Explorer depends. Could InfoPath have been built on a Mozilla
foundation instead? You bet. And the result wouldn't just be a great
Windows application. It would be a great application, period. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
After I wrote this column, I checked out an interesting new application that I wish had been built on a Mozilla foundation: Onfolio.
You can't fault Onfolio's creator, J.J. Allaire, for targeting the
overwhelming majority platform: IE/Win. Of course as a .NET app,
Onfolio targets a minority within that majority. We live in interesting
times! ... [Jon's Radio]
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The Hawk has the best Microsoft News. By the way, whenever a big news story breaks regarding Microsoft, I immediately go to "Watching Microsoft Like a Hawk."
That site points to a wide variety of news about Microsoft and in the
few years of reading it, I've seen them link to just about everything
of note regarding Microsoft.
If you wanna see a wide variety of stories on the EU decision (and Microsoft's official reaction), there's a bunch over there.
They do a "Watching Google like a Hawk" site too. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Night of the Living Dead on Archive.org. BoingBoing reader VonGuard says:
What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.
Link
UPDATE: Travis, a member of the BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net,
says: " Before 1978, any copyrighted work had to have a copyright
notice on every distribution, otherwise it wasn't considered
copyrighted. George A. Romero mistakenly left out the copyright notice
when he distributed his 1968 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The
copyright has not recently "lapsed," but was in fact never enforcable,
which is why we have dozens of "pirate" distributions of NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD and innumerable knock-offs." [Boing Boing]
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Home Glow. 
Luminosity is the new black. Loop.ph is a design group "exploring reactive luminous surfaces in the built environment." Products that respond to the activities of the human beings using them. Things that emit light, things worn or lived in. Here are a few:
wallpaper that glows as more sound is in the room Link
responsive window blinds that glow Link
a light blanket Link
Link to Loop.ph home with show dates and locations (Thanks, Bev!) [Boing Boing]
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Lessig's Free Culture, free online, under a Creative Commons license. Larry Lessig's new book "Free Culture"
-- which is about the value of freedom to cultural production -- is out
in stores today, and, unlike his previous two books, Larry has foudn
the leverage to convince his publisher to let him release the full text
of the new book online under a Creative Commons license. He credits me
with providing the ammunition he needed to convince Penguin to allow
him to do this -- which is extraordinarily flattering -- but however he
got there, I'm glad he did.
A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of
America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus
is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the
past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and
technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas,
Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise
of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider
the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful
wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the
long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that
fosters innovation.
All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so
on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is
possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years,
laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and
allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original
term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years.
Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting
the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an
essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?
Link
(Thanks, Larry!) [Boing Boing]
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004 |
Linux on the Desktop, Part XIV: The Novell Years.
Novell, the up-and-coming superchum of Linux who has recently acquired
both SuSE and Ximian, wants to toss its hat into the "desktop panacea"
ring and pontificate on the future of Linux on the desktop (with Novell
products in the server closet). [Ars Technica]
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NewsWatcher is a "new free
RSS reader for Windows that includes the unique Vision interface
developed by Scopeware and Dr David Gelernter." [Scripting News]
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Nano Jobs. Our friends at the Foresight Institute
collaborated with Working In Ltd. on Working-Nanotechnology.com, a job
board and information clearinghouse specifically for careers in small
tech. The Education & Training section is especially cool, listing
programs and courses for students all the way down to middle school
age. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Hobby: buying used hard drives on eBay and unerasing the data for fun. My friend Simson Garfinkel wrote a great piece on the foolishness of selling hard drives that haven't been sanitized: "Since
then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then
analyzing secondhand hard drives. (...) Last summer, I started buying
drives en masse on eBay.
"In all, I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150
drives(...) In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been
properly sanitized.
"Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives
once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial
transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a
organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such
information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card
numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another
had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in
Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman
he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography." Link (via Bruce Sterling) [Boing Boing]
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Japanese style: Elegant Gothic Lolita.  Article about Japanese schoolgirl subculture.
An
Elegant Gothic Lolita, EGL or Gothic Lolita for short, is a Japanese
teen or young adult who dresses in amazingly elaborate Gothic looking
babydoll costumes. On the weekends these women walk the streets of
Tokyo and Osaka and fill Yoyogi Park and Harajuku neighborhood where
they pose for tourist’s pictures and sit around looking pretty. They
are beautiful, glamorous, doll-like manifestations of their favorite
Visual Rock stars. Link
[Boing Boing]
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John Shirley on the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The
always interesting John Shirley has a posted an entry about immortality
research and Dawn of the Dead, and why they are related. I
just saw the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, which I thought worked
well--though it lost touch with Romero's satirical metaphor about
living/dead shoppers in the mall--and which reminded me that zombie
movies are not really about corpses coming to get us, they're about
death coming to get us. The hungry corpses in such films (28 Days
Later, the Evil Dead etc) very simply stand for our own death. Our own
corpses, seen in advance. Aggressive, because death is always stalking
us, near or far; because it's inexorable, shuffling toward us slowly
but never stopping, as the zombies do. In those movies, the humans
never completely win out over the zombies. Can't beat death itself. (John also has a new book out about the life of Gurdjieff.) Link [Boing Boing]
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Mikroman: 150-micron-thick slices of theater. My review of Sam Buxton's brilliant Mikroman desk-toys appears in this month's Wired. They really do kick ass.
Using a chemical milling process borrowed from the electronics
industry, the Brit product designer acid-etches detailed scenes onto
150-micron-thick slices of stainless steel. Each of his eight MikroMan
subjects - like this finely rendered astronaut with rover and landing
craft -- is sold flat and can be teased into the third dimension with a
fingernail
Link [Boing Boing]
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Night of the Living Dead on Archive.org. BoingBoing reader VonGuard says:
What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.
Link
[Boing Boing]
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Shrook 2 rocks Cory Doctorow's world. OK, after this ringing endorsement from Cory Doctorow, I have to re-evaluate Shrook. I wasn't too impressed with 1.0 but 2.0 sounds cool.
From Boing Boing: Wicked RSS reader redesign:
QUOTE My RSS reader of choice,
Shrook, went 2.0 this morning. After five or six hours of using it
(couldn't sleep, friggin' jetlag), I am in love. This is the best UI
overhaul I've ever seen (the old UI was pretty good too), a completely
unexpected redesign that nevertheless managed to make this app that I
use all day, every day, into something five times more useful and
stable than it had been the day before. I like this punctuated
equilibrium stuff. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004 |
Blog/print synergy: my strategies.
For almost a decade I've used the Web -- and most recently my blog --
to research, develop, and enhance the articles I write for magazines.
When I ran into Dan Gillmor
at SXSW we discussed some of my strategies, and Dan asked me to write
them up. Seems worth doing, so here goes. Much of this concerns the IT
trade pub ecosystem specifically, but I think the principles will
generalize. The basic pattern is simple: a story gestates in blogspace,
appears in print and online, and then matures in blogspace. ... [Jon's Radio]
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Comparative advantage vs. competitive advantage. Marc Andreessen sent me some clarification on comparative advantage vs. competitive advantage re: my post on Ricardo (thanks Marc). This is counter-intuitive so follow it closely. He says:
Ricardo's theory of
comparative advantage holds even in the case where one country does
*everything* better than another country. That's why free trade has worked so well over such a long period of time across such a large set of countries.
An
analogy that works is the following: a lawyer and a secretary. Say the
lawyer is a better lawyer AND a better typist than the secretary. It
still makes sense for the lawyer to hire the secretary and pay the
secretary for typing services -- despite the fact that the lawyer is
actually a better typist than the secretary. Obviously this is because
the lawyer is better off spending all of his time being a lawyer (the
thing he is "most best" at) vs taking part of his time to type, whereas
the secretary is obviously way better off spending all of his time
typing as opposed to trying to be a really bad lawyer. Both sides
benefit from the exchange. That's comparative advantage, and that's why
Ricardo's theory applies just as much today as ever.
Here is more elaboration
on comparative advantage. The key is opportunity cost. However, this
brings me back to my original problem: what should the US specialize
in? [John Robb's Weblog]
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Andrew's
BitTorrent test is going well. I was able to download the 2 Mb file in
24 seconds (including initialization). Now to the good part:
- An interface for publishing Torrent files to your weblog via enclosures.
- An easy to use interface for managing downloaded files in your newsreader.
- A plug-in architecture for BitTorrent that simplifies the
installation and upgrade process (like Quicktime or Flash) -- or -- at
least a snazzy installer (like the PDF installer).
- A java downloader for those that don't or can't download the client may be something worth building.
I don't necessarily want a separate interface for BitTorrent but
rather support for it built into existing tools. P2P tools should be as
invisible as plumbing. [John Robb's Weblog]
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More leverage for terrorists via technology. NS. The next generation of terrorist bombs will likely be something antipated on this weblog: fuel-air.
Designs for a fuel-air device were also acquired by the CIA from three alleged IRA members on trial in Colombia. The three are said to have been developing the bomb in conjunction with the country's FARC guerrilla group. "Although an IRA/Al-Qaida collaboration seems unlikely, the bottom line is that their respective manuals are probably in circulation," says David Ritzel, an explosives expert working for the DRDC.
Fuel-air explosives, while difficult to build, are much more effective than traditional bombs. They work by igniting a cloud of finely atomized fuel. The result is a high degree of "overpressure" which kills people and collapses buildings. This radically increases the distance at which bombs can have impact (the overpressure can travel a great distance). It can also kill people within protected structures. [John Robb's Weblog]
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The reactions to the assassination of Yassin from London and the EU
is more than a little hypocritical. All of the global nation-state
players use (or condone) assassination as a tool of policy against
non-state actors (and even state actors in the case of Saddam -- which
all the coalition members during GWI and GW2 were complicit in). Once
you start down the road to assassination, there is no case that can be
made for discretion in targetting if a clear link to national preservation can be made. The US response
seems to be cognizant of this. Of course, this policy will likely bite
us in the ass in the future when a similar line of reasoning is used
against us. [John Robb's Weblog]
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NYT.
The founder and leader of Hamas was assassinated by Israel yesterday.
Unfortunately, decapitation strikes -- while they might confer moral
and propoganda benefits (of course, even that can be disputed)
-- do not provide any lasting disruption of distributed terrorist
networks. For a deeper analysis of the impact of decapitation strikes,
visit "Global Guerrillas." [John Robb's Weblog]
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Son of Bride of Robolympics Photos, part umptybillion. callum prentice says, "Our team entered a combat robot in the robolympics
this weekend. I'm in the process of collecting images - more will
appear here over the next few days - the heavyweight & super
heavyweight battles were simply the most awe inspiring, violent
mechanical event i've ever seen - these shots don't even come close to
describing the screech of titanium armour being ripped off, the crash
of a 6" spike smashing into steel plating or the staccato vibration of
shrapnel crashing into the bullet proof windows of the arena." Link
VonGuard says, "Robolympics pictures -- about 300 of them." Link
Link to previous BB Robolympics photos post. Thanks, robogeeks! [Boing Boing]
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Awesome anime ferry. 
Kudos to the crafty operators of this Japanese ferry service, who
commissioned manga legend Leiji Matsumoto to design it "to appeal to
the younger generation." As Gizmodo's Joel Johnson put it, "It does
this by being awesome."
Link
(via Gizmodo)
[Boing Boing]
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TypeKey FAQ. Kudos to Six Apart for addressing the concerns of the community with an excellent FAQ. If only other companies would respond so well to feedback.
From the TypeKey FAQ:
QUOTE With Movable Type comment
registration, we've provided a great deal of options for weblog owners.
At release (remember, we're still in Alpha), we plan to provide a
detailed user's guide to comment registration and comment management
options. But, for now, we want to provide a glimpse of the commenting
options.
With Movable Type 3.0 you have options. You can:
- Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments where the commenter sends an email address
- Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments
- Accept TypeKey-authenticated and moderated comments
- Accept TypeKey-authenticated and regular comments
- Accept moderated comments
- Accept unmoderated comments
- Accept anonymous comments
Currently in Movable Type, 6 and 7 are the only two options. 1 through
5 have been added to create a varying degree of accountability.
While comment registration is not the right answer for every weblog,
Movable Type 3.0 and TypeKey provide a flexible system that we feel
will work for the majority of Movable Type users." UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Markdown - a more frictionless way to enter HTML and XHTML for blog posts. Markdown
sounds like exactly what I am looking for. Very cool! Must check this
out. Writing HTML without a WYSIWYG editor, using the broken code from
Mozilla and IE's WYSIWG editors and using an HTML text area with a
preview mode is for the birds. Hopefully this will alleviate the pain
of doing this
From Daring Fireball: Markdown:
QUOTE Markdown is a text-to-HTML
conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an
easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to
structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax;
and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text
formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to
Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the
online Dingus.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to
make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted
document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking
like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While
Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML
filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax
is the format of plain text email. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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3 FREE RSS Technorati searches. Awesome, thanks! Now if you could only do wild card URL searches like PubSub's referenced URI
feature e.g. give me an RSS feed of all blogs that have links with
rolandtanglao.com in them. That way I can see if anybody links anywhere
on a site rather than to just a single URL i.e. anybody who links to a
page anywhere on rolandtanglao.com
From Sifry's Alerts:
QUOTE I'm proud to announce the
new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com.
Some highlights of the new design:
Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to
do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for
watchlists are grandfathered in as well. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Illustrated MT templates. Oldie but goodie that I must re-read now that I have a MovableType blog hence the re-post. The CSS and JavaScript and HTML stuff apply to Blogware
blogs too. Only the template stuff differs. But once you have figured
out one templating system, the second and third and fourth :-) (I think
this is the about the 5th or 6th blog templating system that I have
learned) comes easier.
From mediatinker.com:
QUOTE Tackling Movable Type
templates and CSS for the first time can be daunting. The MT default
templates contain four kinds of code: CSS, HTML, MT tags, and
Javascript.
If you're new to all this, you're about to learn that it pays to
make a careful study of the code. Once you understand the way it works
together, it's pretty easy to modify your MT templates to display
almost any design you want. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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RSS for TiVO. RSS for TiVo. RSS for TiVo
This is the right idea but now it needs to be implemented for mere mortals to use. Only when RSS hits functionality for the masses and not for the digerati will it take off. I'm looking at some stuff that does just that and it will change the way you think of RSS (and more importantly, you won't need to think of RSS) when released.
I agree with Michael - but hey, at least we're getting there. It's not like TiVO would ever dream this up! [Marc's Voice]
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TypeKey + FOAF. Idly.Org defends Six Apart from yours truly. Anyway, if TypeKey is anything new it's a breakthrough. I've been puzzling about this stuff for years. Some people say there's something brilliant here. If so, that's great, but until I understand how it works, I'm from Missouri. [Scripting News]
I just left this comment at this excellent post/analysis about TypeKey......
Just one word: FOAF.
It will solve all the complaints, be the right thing to do technically - and help an overall movement which - oh yah - the Trotts and Typepad are already participating in.
:-)
[Marc's Voice]
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103 words why Open Source will rise. Andreesssen: Why Open Source Will Boom - in 103 Words [Slashdot]
- "The Internet is powered by open source."
- "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
- "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
- "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
- "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
- "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
- "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
- "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
- "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
- "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
- "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
- "It's free."
[Marc's Voice]
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Toshiba Debuts New DVD Writers.
Toshiba's Storage Device Division (SDD) announced a half-height
recordable DVD drive for desktop PCs on Monday, as well as two slimline
drives for notebook PCs. [Extremetech]
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Reverberations in the Echo Chamber. I love it when EVERYBODY blogs the same dam thing. Talk about Echo chamber!
Congrats to Dave, Kevin and the rest at Technorati!
New Technorati beta launches.
I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:
- Three free email or RSS watchlists
for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course,
people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.
- Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you
who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a
step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize
the language as well - using words like "conversations" and
"references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati
does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more
improvements we can make. Help us.
- Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection
capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can
search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS
feeds.
- Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and
NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand
or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more
context-rich, deeper view into the data.
- Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog"
codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a
bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out
how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number
of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.
- Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.
A few points to note:
- Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough.
Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is
unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster
response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve
the user experience.
- We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for
keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go
out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the
meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or
email subscriptions yet.
Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.
Thanks again for all your support.
[Sifry's Alerts]
New Technorati is Live.
The latest version of Technorati, a blog search engine, has launched. You can read details on what's new from Dave Sifry.
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Technorati's New Look.
I love it. Technorati is updating it's page design and I am watching it as it happens at 2AM.
A note to Dave Sifry: I
like the alternate background coloring, Dave. I also like the
conversation thingy except I don't want to click on all the
conversations. Reflect the LOUDNESS of the conversation behind each
entry with some visual hint (i.e. icon count, color, size) so I can
zero in on the center of the noise.
 [Don Park's Daily Habit]
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl. [Joi Ito's Web]
Very cool.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
New Technorati Beta. Blog search update. Not sure what's new, aside from an improved UI. Technorati PS. Sifry lists the new stuff.... [Raw]
Search wider.
Technorati has gone live with a raft of improvements that David Sifry explains here.
I'm on the company's advisory board, and it's nice to see so many good
ideas and suggestions by so many people show up in the (continuously
un)finished product.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
New Technorati beta. Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of
you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a
step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize
the language as well - using words like "conversations" and
"references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati
does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more
improvements we can make. Help us. # Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection
capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can
search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS
feeds.
Link [Boing Boing]
AND FINALLY FROM THE BRAND NEW VP of INternational Sales at Technorati - the GODHEAD himself.....
New Technorati beta launches.
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl.
[Joi Ito's Web] [Marc's Voice]
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Don Norman is my hero!. Don Norman: Emotional Design [ETCON2004].
[Full title: Emotional Design: The Principles] Don Norman used to be
known as a critic of unusable things but now, he says, he has changed.
He has transformed himself into an advocate for pleasurable, enjoyable
products. Beauty is good, says Norman. Successful products should a
pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self, of
accomplishment, and pride of ownership. In this keynote address, Norman
shares work from his latest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or
Hate) Everyday Things. Do you believe it? Is there really more to life
than whether something works well? Does you car really drive better
after you have washed and polished it? Listen in. This was a keynote
presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, February 12, 2004. Recording courtesy of O'Reilly & Associates and IT Conversations. A complete transcript of this and other keynote sessions is available on the IT Conversations web site. [Internet Archive]
Don Norman is one of the few people I really look up to today.
His visions picks up right where mine leaves off. We're a perfect complement to each other.
Here we are debating at PopTech 2002 together. [Marc's Voice]
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Monday, March 22, 2004 |
Job of the week: Dept of Homeland Security Entertainment Liason.
This has to be one of the more interesting "help wanted" ads to surface
of late -- Entertainment Liaison for the US Department of Homeland
Security. Up to $136K:
The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of
Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security
is portrayed in mass entertainment media. It helps to ensure accurate
portrayal of the department's mission, policies, and activities, while
proactively working to help the American public better identify DHS
functions.
Link
(via pho list) [Boing Boing]
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Elfy-Welfies, War Bores, Decadent Vamps and Licensed Crap. (Today's post is on science fiction, rather than games--I beg your indulgence.)
When
I was a young science fiction fan, lo these many years ago, I was of
the opinion that calling science fiction a "genre" was something of a
misnomer. Other genres tend to have shared tropes, predictable story
arcs, and common themes. While SF has some shared tropes, it was so
diverse that it was at least as variable as, say, literary fiction. It
was hard to call a category that included both Arthur C. Clarke and
Jack Vance, both Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov, both Cordwainer
Smith and Roger Zelazny, a "genre" in the same sense as the Romance or
the Western.
This is no longer the case. Entering a bookstore
and examining the science fiction shelves, you can instantly categorize
most of what is on the shelves into one of several subgenres of science
fiction. That's true of other genres, as well; in mystery, you have
cosies and hard-boiled. In romance, you have Regencies and fab dads and
god knows what all--there seem to be dozens of well-known subgenres
(that, not being a romance fan, I can't all name).
It's time we
established names for the obvious sub-categories of the field. I'm
going to propose three--all I've heard on other lips, but none has
become widely known in the field. I think its time they did.
First
of all, we have the elfy-welfies (a term I first heard from Darrell
Schweitzer). These are multi-volume heroic quest fantasies, whether or
not they contain literal elves. They constitute perhaps a quarter of
what's on the shelves. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, the
ur-elfy-welfy, the original quill from which all this crap derives.
Which does, of course, point up the fact that not all of it is crap;
it's perfectly possible to write well within a sub-genre such as the
elfy-welfy as, for example, George R.R. Martin is doing today. But the
simple fact is that we don't need more elfy-welfies. I've read enough
of them. They are jejune. I have no desire to read more.
Second,
we have the war bores, a term I heard from John Boardman. A more polite
term is military science fiction. These are stories that feature lots
of combat, generally of the land rather than space variety, generally
(but not invariably) with a right-wing viewpoint, and generally (but
not invariably) somewhat hard-boiled in tone. I can't point to any
single ur-war bore, but Jerry Pournelle and H. Beam Piper are certainly
the originals in the field. War bores seem to constitute about a
quarter of what's on the shelves. Mind you, when I was a young science
fiction reader, I quite liked work of this kind; I was, after all, a
wargamer. But by know, I've read enough of them. They are jejune. We
don't need any more of these.
Then, we have the Decadent Vamps.
These generally, but not invariably, involve vampires, but always
involve darkness, angst-filled people, and a high degree of eroticism,
whether implicit or explicit. Anne Rice is the maven here, of course,
but she has many imitators, some of them best-selling writers in their
own right. You can't even call this "horror," any more, as there is
scant effort in this subcategory to scare or horrify the reader;
rather, the intent is more to tittilate and imply that a really cool
life is possible for you, too, if you wear a lot of black and makeup
and fuck around a great deal. This stuff also takes up perhaps a
quarter of the shelves. Mind you, I loved Interview with the Vampire,
back when, but I've read enough of this stuff. It is dull. I do not
need to read any more.
And finally, of course, we have the
category that is best named "licensed crap." This stuff is, thankfully,
shelved seperately from everything else, so you can easily skip over
it. It's stuff like D&D novels, Trek novels, World of Darkness
novels, and so on. There's probably some good writing buried in there,
but really, who can be bothered? It constitutes the rest of the science
fiction section.
Categories such as the cosy, the Regency, the
elfy-welfy, the war bore, and the licensed crap exist for readers who
do not want to be challenged. They like sinking into the warm
familiarity of something they know they like. Even though no elfy-welfy
says "A new elfy-welfy!" on the cover, the signifiers of its packaging
clearly indicate to readers what the volume is. There's a lush
illustration of heroic people in pseudo-medeival garb striking vaguely
heroic poses, and there are quotes from other writers of elfy-welfies
saying how great this one is. Readers of the category can readily
distinguish them from, say, war bores, and the readerships of the two
subcategories overlap very little.
The problem is, of course, that I do
want to be challenged. I want to be challenged with interesting ideas,
distinctive writing styles, unconventional ways of looking at things,
and transportation to a world very different from our own. I don't want
to sink into the familiar, I want to be surprised and shaken up.
As
a young science fiction reader, I would typically walk away from the
science fiction section with a half dozen books to read. Today, I find
it hard to find one. Part of that may be that I'm simply more
discriminating; I have less time to waste, these days, and less
inclined to take a flyer on something that might possibly be
interesting. But I think the main reason is the evolving
sub-genrefication of the field.
There's not much that can be
done about this, of course; so long as people want to read
elfy-welfies, they will be published, and will constitute a large
sub-category of the field. But perhaps it can't hurt to start applying
gently degrading terms to these subcategories, to draw attention to the
fact that they are not entirely part of what used to be termed "the
literature of ideas," and thereby suggest to their readers that it
might not hurt to experiment with something else. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Do we really use just 10 percent of our brains?. No. It's a myth. Psychologist and neuroscientist Barry L. Beyerstein puts the (gray) matter to rest at Scientific American.com:
"With the aid of instruments such as EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, PET scanners and functional MRI machines, researchers have succeeded in localizing a vast number of psychological functions to specific centers and systems in the brain. With nonhuman animals, and occasionally with human patients undergoing neurological treatment, recording probes can even be inserted into the brain itself. Despite this detailed reconnaissance, no quiet areas awaiting new assignments have emerged." Link
[Boing Boing]
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New Technorati beta. Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.
# Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Microsoft isn't changing its bad behavior, Dan Gillmor says. Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column today: Microsoft change? Don't hold your breath.
Disclaimer: I'm not an executive at Microsoft. And I didn't play a
part in anything Dan wrote about today. But, I think that Dan only
presented one part of the story today.
Note that earlier this week, Microsoft, for the first time that I
remember seeing, apologized in an official forum (the Minnesota trial)
for our anti-competitive behavior: "The conduct involved competition
that went over the line," said Microsoft's lawyer, David Tulchin,
according to an Associated Press account. You can read more in the Seattle PI's Microsoft weblog about that.
There are many examples that Microsoft is changing (and note that Gillmor didn't mention even one of these).
For one, Microsoft's execs are now compensated on customer satisfaction scores.
Guess what, getting sued for being a jerk, er, anti-competitive, does
hurt customer satisfaction (I've seen those numbers and we study them
quite closely). Why? Customers want great technology without strategy
taxes applied. And, they want to be seen as supporting a winning team,
not one that gets where they are through legal or other tactics that
don't have anything to do with making a better product.
That's a major change and just happened about a year ago. It takes a
while for such a change to translate into different behavior, though.
Note that the EU is going after us for behavior that was decided on
before the compensation policy changed.
The second change is that now we have a corporate mission and values policy. That came online about a year ago. And, clearly it's aimed at getting us to change how we work with the market.
Third change is employee-produced, non-censored, weblogs. How
many of those existed two years ago? One that I remember. Today? 400.
As more of our employees engage with customers online, we're going to
change toward a company that does more and more things in a
customer-centric way and less of a company that relies on stuff that
customers don't care about or don't want. Why is that? Because if you
take a position online that isn't something that the community wants,
they'll beat you up for it. For instance, I'm sure that Jeremy Allison
will tell me everytime we do something that's anti-competitive (he is a
frequent commenter here, and testified against Microsoft at the EU).
It's hard not to hear that feedback, even if you don't want to hear it.
Fourth change is the marketplace itself punishing Microsoft.
Our stock price is down from where it was when I joined Microsoft 11
months ago. Linux and Apple are showing us that if we don't change our
products to be more customer focused (marketing talk for "better"), the
customers will go elsewhere.
Fifth change is how employees are compensated. We used to be
given stock options. Having options puts a lot of pressure on you to
get the stock price to go up. Why? Well, because you're rewarded if it
does! Hey, we're human. If I'm rewarded for doing something, I'm more
likely to do it again. When I joined Microsoft, the stock was at 26.10.
Right now it's less than that. So, in the old system, I don't get any
reward. The new system gives out straight stock. So, I care a lot less
if the price goes up (yeah, I still do care, but I don't care nearly as
much -- in the old system I wouldn't get a dime, in the new system I'd
get quite a bit). Again, that policy was just put into place, so
changes are slowly happening.
One ironic thing, Dan implies that having competitors is a good
thing. Dan, do you really agree with that? If so, why do you work for
Knight Ridder (the corporate owner of the San Jose Mercury News)? After
all, Knight Ridder has put their competitors out of business in many of
the markets it serves (including in San Jose, where the Mercury News is
Silicon Valley's only daily newspaper of note).
Sixth thing: freedom to speak. Don't assume that just cause I
work at Microsoft that I can't tell my employer off (Dan, have you ever
tried telling your employer off in public? Why not?) Remember, I'm one
of the only webloggers who's gone on record telling Bill Gates that he
should voluntarily split up Microsoft (I said that before I was a
Microsoft employee, and now that I'm inside Microsoft I'm still taking
that stance -- one nice thing about Microsoft is a diversity of points
of view are allowed and encouraged here). And, just two years ago I was
arguing voiciferously with Microsoft employees about doing nasty stuff
against users. Remember SmartTags in IE? Do a Google search on that one
and see just how anti-Microsoft I was.
One last thing: corporations exist to serve their investors. I'm an investor in Microsoft and right now I'm not happy.
My stock price has gone down. Apple's has gone up. Most other tech
companies' stock has gone up. If you owned a market index, for say,
NASDAQ, over the past 12 months, you would have made money, but
Microsoft's stock has gone down.
So, is the market rewarding us for our behavior? No. Is Microsoft
going to change because of that? Well, I'm betting my stock shares on
it!
Personally, as I interview various people throughout the company, I
see that we're focusing on making our customers lives better. Just talk
to Kam, who's team is working on the next UI. Or Bill, who's team is
working on new fonts and new ClearType technology. Or the XPSP2 team,
which is making XP a ton more secure. There are hundreds of such
examples of things we've done recently to make our customer's lives
better.
It's those things that make me proud to work at Microsoft and, yes,
I see a ton of examples that Microsoft is changing internally and
becoming a better company too. But, yes, we have a long long way to go. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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More Robolympics photos. Boingboing reader matthew bennett says:
Here's some pictures on my photoblog from Robolympics yesterday and
today! I competed with a mini sumo, that got taken out. I'm also a
mentor on the Boilermakers robotics team
(
link
to earlier BoingBoing post). You know, the SF innercity school that
still needs money to go to Atlanta for the finals! As of Sunday
morning, our blog has raised over $2200 in donations! Thanks, Boing
Boing!
Link to photos [Boing Boing]
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Sunday, March 21, 2004 |
REST for the rest of us.
The word used again and again lately to describe distributed
information systems is "composition". The Unix idea of piecing together
solutions from reusable parts has morphed into XML-based,
service-oriented architecture. This time around, though, it's all
happening on the Web, in an environment where everybody can compose
simple and popular tunes. When technologists forget that, I hope users
will administer the dope slap we deserve. [Full story at XML.com]
I wrote this column on the plane home from SXSW. Dinah Sanders, product manager for the Innovative Interfaces OPAC system, invited me to sit in along with Liz Lawley, Tanya Raybourn, and Sun's corporate librarian Cynthia Hill. Reactions to the panel came from David Weinberger and Jenny Levine.
... [Jon's Radio]
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Channel 9 hype machine starts spinning up. Ahh, the project I've been working on, Channel 9, is starting to get talked about (Channel 9 was named for the channel on United Airlines where you can listen into the pilots in the cockpit -- we're trying to do the same thing for you at Microsoft. Coming soon). Lenn Pryor, my boss, teases. Jeff Sandquist, our program manager, posts a flair, Alan Griver talks about being interviewed today (Jeremy Mazner did the interview, I played camera monkey).
Microsoft employees: we're looking to interview anyone interesting who is doing interesting things. Fit the bill? Especially for developers or ISVs? Email me: rscoble@microsoft.com. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Programmers at Work reunion. Last night I participated in the Programmers at Work reunion at CMP's Software Development Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California. It brought together seven of the 19 programmers profiled in the now out of print book along with interviewer Susan Lammers as moderator. They contacted most of the subjects that are still living and these were the ones who could make it last night. The post is a write up with pictures and some comments on open source. [Dan Bricklin's Log]
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It's articles like this that make me glad I can still subscribe to Evhead. [Scripting News]
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Laszlo Inspector. Laszlo inspector.
Laszlo inspector
For the Laszlo developers amongst my readers...
I wrote a little interactive debugging tool that I have found very
useful in my own app development. It lets you inspect the view hierachy
and see and modify key properties (bgcolor, position, size, visible).
You can try it here.
You can change bgcolor and view position. Click on the x/o to toggle
visibility. Click on '...' will send the instance to the debugger,
where you can click on it for further inspection.
You can download a zip of the source from the mylaszlo forum.
[Sarah Allen's Weblog]
This seems really cool. Thanks Sarah!
We'll be using this - like today. [Marc's Voice]
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Electric Sheep artificial life DVD launch March 31, San Francisco.
Spot Draves is the author of the brilliant Electric Sheep screensaver
-- this is a distributed rendering application that grabs its users'
computers' idle cycles to create computationally expensive, vivid and
beautiful animated fractals. Users vote for the animations they like
best while the screensaver is running, and those fractals are then
given precedence within the computational gene pool, spawning
variations that are rendered out again, dancing for their human masters
who have the power of life and death over them.
The result is a breathtaking, psychedelic form of artificial life
whose fitness factor is the ability to tickle the aesthetics of
computer geeks.
Spot has assembled the best of these animations -- these "Electric
Sheep" -- on a DVD, with DJ mixed background audio. The contents of the
DVD are all online as small QuickTime movies, for for the high-rez,
you'll have to order a copy or go to the launch on March 31, in San
Francisco:
wednesday march 31st 7pm-2am StudioZ
314 11th st @ folsom san francisco
415.252.7666 www.studioz.tv 21+ w/ID
free admission
featuring the soundz of Spool, jhno, mbb,
dj vordo, and Kenji Williams/ABA Structure
Link [Boing Boing]
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Carbs crank up serotonin. An MIT study suggests that low-car/pro-protein diets like Atkins can chemically bum you out. Judith Wurtman, director of the Program in Women's Health at the MIT Clinical Research Center, found that when you kick the carb habit, your brain stops regulating serotonin. As people who take SSRI drugs like Prozac know, serotonin elevates mood and can also act as an appetite suppresant.
"According to Wurtman's clinical studies, if the carbohydrate craver eats protein instead, he or she will become grumpy, irritable or restless. Furthermore, filling up on fatty foods like bacon or cheese makes you tired, lethargic and apathetic. Eating a lot of fat, she said, will make you an emotional zombie." Link
[Boing Boing]
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Nature's artforms, with alpha channels, free for the remixing. 
Spot Draves has released a bunch of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) as Creative-Commons-licensed, high-resolution scans in PNG format, with painstaking alpha transparency channels that allow you to easily composite them onto other images. Haeckel was the naturist who stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb. It turned out that he was kind of making that up and faking his evidence, but he sure drew pretty pictures, and the meme's got legs. Well, first it had a tail, then it had legs.
Link
[Boing Boing]
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XPower Mobile Plug Inverter. Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:
You plug this solid-state inverter into your car's lighter socket and
power whatever 110 volt AC appliance you want, 75 watts max. No need
for special DC gadgets. It's made for recharging cell phones and other
batteries, but I've used it for my scanner and my printer while on the
road. Also, I've run a small B&W TV set (5'5), and more important,
my baby's bottle heater (I admit is a small one). You can power almost
anything that doesn't use large resistance like hair dryers, waffle
makers, bread toasters, small ovens. I haven't tried a coffee maker
yet. The same company offers an assorted line of automobile inverters
with more output power (200 watts on up). This is the smallest one.
-- Juan J Gil
XPower MobilePlug 75, Manufactured by Xantrex
[Boing Boing]
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Peter Bagge's libertarian comics for Reason.  I used to dislike Tom Tomorrow's comic strip, This Modern World.
I'm not entirely sure why it didn't work for me, but I think it is
because he would set up right-wing straw people to say exaggerated
things to make them look bad. Lately, I've been enjoying his strip a
lot more, and I think the reason is because the right-wing is now so
outrageous, he doesn't need to exagerate to show how bad they are. The
truth is funny without having to embellish it.To me, Peter Bagge is the
opposite of Tom Tomorrow. I love the stuff he did for Weirdo, Neat Stuff, and Hate. Now he's doing a libertarian comic strip for Reason,
and like a mirror-image Tom Tomorrow, he tries to make his point by
exaggerating the kinds of things left-wingers say. And just as
Tomorrow's early work wasn't funny, Bagge's recent Reason work doesn't make me laugh either. I did read Bagge's latest Hate Annual and thought he was in top form, so this criticism only applies to his Reason comics. Link
[Boing Boing]
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WSJ.
Using cellphones to detonate bombs remotely. This isn't a new technique
but it has now gone mainstream. The simplicity and power of the
technique promise extensive use in the future.
Terrorists in last week's attacks in Spain apparently hooked up
bombs to cellphones, which theoretically could have allowed them to
detonate the explosives from the other side of the world. Hooking up a
phone to a bomb also provides the option of using an alarm clock in the
phone to detonate the explosive, which is how it appears one unexploded
device was set up.
Cellphones can allow a large operation to be run by just a few
people, since the bombers aren't being blown up along with their bombs.
"All the bombs went off within four minutes, so it would have been
possible to detonate the blasts from just one or two phones," Dr.
Ranstorp said in a telephone interview about the Madrid bombings.
Authorities investigating the bombings in Saudi Arabia "seized
cellphones which appeared to have been modified to trigger improvised
explosive devices," according to a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
bulletin released to American law-enforcement authorities last June.
This method enables global power projection, multi-point attacks,
and simultaneity. It is also very difficult to guard against. Smart. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Financial Times. New Gartner study on outsourcing.
The growth of global IT outsourcing will continue despite a growing political backlash, particularly in the US, and up to 25 per cent of traditional IT jobs will be relocated from developed to developing countries by 2010, according to Gartner, the IT consultancy.
Wow, that is much higher than other estimates. At that rate of
growth, it is hard to believe projections that the US IT job base will
grow over the rest of the decade. Also, remember that IT jobs are just
a part of the offshoring trend. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Lind on strategic bombing in Spain:
The whole notion that the 21st century can suddenly revert to the 18th
and governments can fight wars in which the people and vital national
interests are not involved is absurd. That is the real lesson of the
Spanish election. War is no longer a “game of princes.” The
people are involved, and Fourth Generation opponents know how to make
sure they are intensely involved, by bringing the war home to them.
The Washington Times quoted a Pentagon official as saying of the Spanish election, “This was a big defeat for us. Al Qaeda caused a regime change better than we did in Baghdad. No cost.”
That is exactly correct. Using the simplest of technologies, al Qaeda
or whatever Fourth Generation organization did it, undertook a
strategic bombing campaign of unprecedented effectiveness. Their backpacks outperformed our B-2 bombers. [John Robb's Weblog]
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What categories should I have?. I had over 80 categories on my old Radio Blog. I think that was too many.
All non tech stuff will go on our personal blog at www.BarbAndRoland.com. So that leaves about 60 categories.
I think I will see how it develops, but for now, I think the
categories will be: Social Software (for wikis, blogs, RSS, etc.),
HowToDevelopSoftware and the rest I will leave uncategorized for now.
Suggestions? Leave a comment or email roland AT rolandtanglao.com [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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MovableType is the Windows of Blog Systems. Nice rant from Boris. Where is the Macintosh of Blog Systems? Drupal is more like the Linux of Blog Systems. More powerful but requires effort to learn because it is not user friendly. Perhaps Wordpress
is the Mac of Blog Systems (or personal publishing systems as Boris
likes to call Blog Systems) but I doubt it. Probably need somebody as
fanatical as Steve Jobs to get that and as far as I can see, nobody in
the Blog world (except maybe Brent Simmons) has his eye for visual aesthetics and usability.
Anyways, the prime reason I am now using MT is that it is the best
blogging platform to build software on top of at the moment. As a
result, all the coolest toys (like ecto
which I am writing this post with) work best with MT. And part of the
reason why might be because it is built using Perl and CGIs which
evidently, Boris and I share the same love/hate relationship with.
From MovableType is the Windows of the Personal Publishing World | B. Mann Consulting:
QUOTE
Everyone is all a-twitter that MT 3.0 is about to come out of hiding.
Am I biased because I use a different publishing system? Probably.
But I maintain that MT has gotten to the top of the heap because of
it's wide adoption. Much like Windows. Many people agree that OS X or
even Linux is a technically superior operating system, but it's still
Windows with the lion's share of the market. Much like MT.
So, herewith, a list of things that I don't like about MT.
These are in no particular order. I've used MT (kicking and
screaming), but am by no means proficient. These are my opinions, so
you can disagree with them. Feel free to comment or otherwise let me
know if I get something factually wrong. And yes, I am talking about a
default install.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Impossible Japanese pencil carvings. Website documenting the creation of some insanely implausible carvings -- made from common #2 pencils, in Japan.
 "According to their forms,they are divided into 4 types
- Double spiral, Chain,
Ring and Kikko that may be called a honeycomb
pencil.
Others like Six-fold spiral,
Extensible and
Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon
are considered to be variations based on one of those 4 types.
[...] We are required to be skilled enough for delicate woodwork in carving out
a pattern like some kind of a tracery without making any miscut on the naked
lead inside."
Link (Thanks, CJC) [Boing Boing]
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40 drunkard milestones.
This Modern Drunkard list of 40 Things That Every Drunkard Should Do is
very good. I like "Sit in on an AA meeting" and "Extravagantly overtip
a bartender," but this one is my fave:
7.) Buy a crowded bar a round.
For no reason at all.
Jump up on a barstool and shout it loud: "A round for the house! On
me!" Make sure you have a good toast ready, because, for once, they'll
all be listening.
Link
(via Fark) [Boing Boing]
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Uncovered - The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.  Uncovered
is a documentary about the way the White House distorted the truth in
an attempt sell the American public and the rest of the world on its
pre-emptive war on Iraq. I already thought that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice,
and the rest of that gang were being sneaky about it, but this DVD
nailed it for for me. The reason Uncovered is so persuasive
is that the director wisely chose to interview only "insiders" for the
documentary -- CIA analysts, weapons investigators, Pentagon officials,
and former White House counsels. Their comments on the administration's
exaggerations and spin are devastating. According to the director, even
people who support the war in Iraq become angry after watching Uncovered, because it exposes the Bush administration as a pack of thoroughly corrupt liars. Link
[Boing Boing]
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VSLive = VSLove.
AT VSLive next week, Microsoft's will have a few new product
announcements up its sleeve, ranging from Speech Server 1.0, to its
Laguna CE database, to its MapPoint Mobile Server. And there will be
new Whidbey alpha code, to boot. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
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Nerdy Bay Area dream-jobs.
Claris sez, "A collection of cool geeky companies located in the
greater San Francisco Bay Area, from anime/manga publishers to
videogame companies to special effects shops. Best of all? Direct links
to the job opening pages of each site, whenever I can find 'em. Might
as well work somewhere cool, right?"
Link
(Thanks, Claris!) [Boing Boing]
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Business Week.
Excellent article about outsourcing. The central idea is that
comparative advantage is now giving way to absolute advantage. Those
factors that drove the US comparative advantage -- labor (educated and
hard working), capital (investment at favorable rates), and technology
(infrastructure and new tech) -- is now available in China (and to a
lesser extent India). Other contributing factors: security, climate,
and geography are also now non-issues. This change provides an absolute
refutation of Ricardo's theories and yields:
It's not really about trade but about labor arbitrage.
Companies producing for U.S. markets are substituting cheap labor for
expensive U.S. labor. The U.S. loses jobs and also the capital and
technology that move offshore to employ the cheaper foreign labor.
Economists argue that this loss of capital does not result in
unemployment but rather a reduction in wages. The remaining capital is
spread more thinly among workers, while the foreign workers whose
country gains the money become more productive and are better paid.
Bing! What does this mean for the US? Global
equalization of incomes (a rapid decline for the US and a slow rise for
the rest of the world). A rapidly increasing trade deficit. Climbing
budget deficits. AWOL multinationals. Radical intrastate income
inequality. Political unrest. Protectionism. Domestic terrorism. The
list goes on....
There is no silver lining for Americans. Unfortunately,
our economists will continue to believe the world is flat. The
invisible hand and comparative advantage will provide, they will
intone. Time for some new thinking. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Scott Mathews does it again. The logic of IP.
It has taken me way too long to catch up on this point, but I've been
thinking it through for sometime now, and here's version 1. Scott
Matthews is a talented coder. He's the author of Andromeda, and this very cool thought experiment Baudio. And he's become a valuable contributor
(Salon) to the file sharing debate. He posted a piece on Dave's IP list
(I used to be a subscriber, but I had to change email addresses and
then can't seem to be able to get back onto the list -- no longer
interesting enough I expect) which points to a suggested contradiction
between my views and Creative Commons. Here's his post
with a response by Dan Hunter. Dan's right about many things, but don't
think he's right about Scott's intelligence. (More...) [Lessig Blog]
Scott Matehws is one of my favorite new age entreprenuers. He's
often attacked on the pho list for his views - which combine the
freeness of P2P with the logic of an pragmatic capitalist. Right on
Scott!
I haven;t had time to grok Baudio - yet. Needless to say things have been hopping around here, my Dad is here and..... [Marc's Voice]
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Wednesday, March 17, 2004 |
Photoblogging a trail of nutty signs from deranged neighbor.  A participant in the Something Awful forums posts photos of Dr.-Bronner's-soap-like signs she claims were created by a disturbed neighbor nicknamed Crazy Tammy.
"She's been gone from the neighborhood for about nine months now,
hopefully getting the treatment she so sorely needed. From what I
understand, and from what others have told me, Crazy Tammy is a
textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. We would have never known
about her terrible mental problem if she hadn't advertised her insane
views on giant sheets of cloth hung from her fence."
Link (via Warren) [Boing Boing]
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Bruce Sterling talk from SXSW. Here are my running notes from Bruce Sterling's rant at SXSW:This
is a genius adminsitration for inspiring angry rhetoric.It's got a
nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dighis poetry. Job
one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they'rean info-war-centric
outfit. If you get it spun, you don't need toget it done.Controlling
the message is more important to them thancontrolling the underlying
reality. It's a blatant part of theirideology. Their global climate
change policy is in defiance ofthe laws of physics, it's Lysenkoism.
The Union of ConcernedScientists has a page documenting the Bushies'
Lysenkoism fromclimate change to on. The science stuff is
starting to blow back. The UCS isnonpartisan. It's like Stalin and
Lysenko's faith-basedagriculture: the reason Soviet wheat fields have
weeds is becausewheat is evolving into weeds. You didn't have to get
the peasantsto weed the fields, you could just allege this. Scientists
wereamazed and horrified. Soviet scientists who went abroad to
talkabout chemistry and physics were confronted with a credibilitygap
arising from this -- they had to admit that back home,politicians made
up the laws of physics. So scientists defectedto Cornell. Link [Boing Boing]
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Controlled vocabulary for describing personal relationships.
Clay Shirky's posted a fine rant on RELATIONSHIP, a controlled
vocabulary of terms for describing personal relationships (i.e.
friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf,
spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith,
knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation,
closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith,
employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf,
grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf,
participantIn, participant):Take the relationship
closePersonalFriendOf. The designers of this list somehow overlooked
it, possibly on the grounds that it's tautological, and only of use on
talk shows. ("Oh yes, Julia Roberts is a close personal friend of
mine.") But it is nevertheless informative -- you would only use
closePersonalFriendOf if the person in question was someone of
relatively high fame or station.In addition, anyone claiming to be a
"close personal friend" of someone else is talking about a domain where
a high degree of social interaction is the norm, e.g. show business. By
extension, the seemingly oxymoronic friendYouDontLike is also a valid
category, as anyone in highly social environments can tell you. (You
often run into friendsYouDontLike at partiesYouHaveToGoTo.) Link [Boing Boing]
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Shootin' pool with Hellboy.
Actor Ron Perlman shoots pool and talks with the magazine FHM, while
dressed as the comic world's favorite beast of the apocalypse. Hellboy the movie, directed by Guillermo del Toro, launches April 2. Link to interview, Link to the website for the comic that inspired it (thanks, J. Hurwitz!) [Boing Boing]
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Self-made superhero Angle Grinder Man is back.  Joi Ito reports that Angle Grinder Man
is back and in full effect. The British homegrown hero wanders the
streets of London clad in gold lame caped crusader getup, freeing
illegally parked cars of parking enforcement security boots. Or, as
AGM himself would put it,
"Angle-Grinder Man [is] the world's first wheel-clamp and speed camera
vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type
personage.
A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to
you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots."
Link to Angle Grinder Man's website (Caution: Not worksafe for villains or parking enforcement officers. Contains strong superpowers) [Boing Boing]
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VoIP company Skype raises $19MM.
Internet telephony startup Skype today announced a $19 million
investment through DFJ. The VoIP provider was founded by creators of
P2P network Kazaa. Skype plans to use some of that cash to buy hundreds
of thousands of minutes per month from major telcos, and provide them
in turn to its own customers. Link [Boing Boing]
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A DIY Gaming PC for Under $1000. Build It:
We put together a full-fledged Pentium 4-based gaming rig -- including
monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Windows XP license -- for less than a
grand Find out how we pulled it off. [Extremetech]
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Finally, weblogs, RSS, and P2P have been combined.
This has been a dream of mine since I turned up in the Weblog world in
early 2001 (and right in line with the vision in a Forrester report I
wrote 1996 entitled: Personal Broadcast Networks). Thanks Andrew! This is excellent. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Interview with Martin Van Creveld (in early 2002)on the Arab-Israeli conflict and asymmetrical wars:
The same thing has happened to the Israeli army as happened to
all the rest that have tried over the last sixty years. Basically it’s
always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself.
There is one thing that can be
done – and that is to put and end to the situation whereby we are the
strong fighting the weak, because that is the most stupid situation in
which anybody can be.... You do that by A, waiting for a
suitable opportunity... B, doing whatever it takes to restore the
balance of power between us and the Palestinians... C, removing 90% of
the causes of the conflict, by pulling out... and D, building a wall
between us and the other side, so tall that even the birds cannot fly
over it.... so as to avoid any kind of friction for a long long time in
the future. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Next Generation Terrorism
New restricted discussion group on the future of terrorism. It is a
private group (only members can read messages) due to the sensitive
nature of the topic. Informed discussion only. Topics include:
network-centric organizations, swarming, smart mobs, social technology
(software), infrastructure attack, cyberwarfare, counter-terrorism, the
decline of the nation-state, 4G warfare, transnational crime, corporate
mercenaries, cascading failure, and more. [John Robb's Weblog]
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650M mobile devices with cameras built in by 2008. 650 million cameraphones a year. Alan Reiter points to
a research report suggesting that 150 million camera-enabled mobile
phones will be sold this year, growing to 650 million by 2008. At that
point, there will be something like a billion people sending photos and
video back and forth among mobile devices. And people are wondering
what all that Internet capacity will be used for?
[Werblog]
I doubt the # will hit that much - that fast - but eventually it
will. I just hope to hell that there's some sort of intelligent client
in these devices - 'cause god help us if all those photos were sent as
emails! [Marc's Voice]
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Monday, March 15, 2004 |
RSS Feeds for Internet Archive Collections.
"So as for your 'I want this' list re:RSS goodness and libraries:
'An RSS feed of new additions from a library's digital collection, whether it be for images, audio, or video.'
..is already done at the Internet Archive, albeit on a collection-centric basis - examples include:
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php [everything!]
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?mediatype=audio&;;collection=monotonik [music label Monotonik!]
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?mediatype=movies&;;collection=feature_films [feature films - which is an excellent new collection, btw.]
Oh, on a related note, with the help of Andrew Grumet at MIT, we
just added an RSS feed which has BitTorrent enclosures to our
BitTorrent site LegalTorrents.com, which you featured in December.
Information on getting (complicated!) Beta version working with Radio
Userland is here:
http://grumet.net/rssBitTorrentIntegration/radioClient.html
LegalTorrents is here: http://www.legaltorrents.com
This
is very cool cos it paves the way for people to automatically download
the latest additions to a collection using RSS + BitTorrent, every x
hours/days." [From Simon Carless]
Excellent - this is very much what I want to do with library digital collections! Thanks, Simon! [The Shifted Librarian]
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Push Me, Pull Me, Just Give Me My Feeds. Push or Pull?
"I remember the early days of the push technologies on the Internet.
It was only a few years ago but looking back I viewed them as one of
those great ideas that failed due to poor marketing and
implementation....
Today we have RSS and aggregators. This XML language and its
associated client software allow you to 'subscribe' to a feed and then
receive the updates whenever they occur. Almost every presentation that
mentioned RSS at this year's Computer's in Libraries conference (and
there were many of them that did,) described this as a 'push'
technology. I beg to differ on this description. It may seem like push
but is it really?...
Here's my question. When teaching people about RSS and aggregators,
should we be describing it as a push technology when it really isn't?
(Yes Jenny, I'm expecting a comment from you on this.)" [Me. Like It or Not]
I don't think it's important to classify RSS as push or pull,
although if forced to I would say it's a push technology that the user
pulls. (How's that for straddling the fence!)
I think the best context in which to describe it is customization
and filtering; in other words, I get to pull in what I want, and
hopefully 2004 will be the year when I can fully customize that
experience (*cough* metadata *cough*). [The Shifted Librarian]
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Radical alien-style cube case.  This
is a sweet PC case -- "The bare-bones chassis includes three large
acrylic windows, cut-outs for a mind-numbing 11 fans, chrome
front-panel switches, and a set of medium-duty casters. You can remove
the drive bays, the motherboard tray, and the backplane, and Xoxide
plans to offer interchangeable drive bay modules for buyers who prefer
different configurations. All three acrylic panes are fitted into the
case's U-shaped wraparound cover, which removes them from harm's way
whenever you work inside."Link (via Wonderland)
[Boing Boing]
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Cover art for ReVisions anthology.  Last year, Charlie Stross and I wrote Unwirer in a public blog. The story was for ReVisions,
an alternate history anthology edited by Isaac Szpindel and Julie
Czerneda. Now, Kenn Brown has finished the cover art for the book, and
it's very very nifty. Link (Thanks, Kenn!)
[Boing Boing]
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Articles Restored. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I recovered several articles of mine that were originally run by Happy Puppy,
back when they were one of the top three sites devoted to games. (Happy
Puppy has been sold a number of times since then, and all the old links
are broken.)
The articles are:
- Hit Hunter, a humorous piece looking at possible ways to replicate the success of Deer Hunter...
- A Requiem for the Hill, or, I Dreamed I Saw Charles Roberts Last Night--written when Avalon Hill was taken over by Hasbro.
- Tilting at Windmills, a proposal to do a version of Nethack with Diablo-style graphics.
- King of Dragon Pass, a review of the game, which was an IGF finalist some years back.
Still
two pieces I can't find--"You Can Smell the Desperation," an article
about an announced takeover of three hobby game distributors by
iEntertainment (that never came to pass), and a report on the first
(and only) IGDN conference. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Two responses to globalization?. Friedman provides a nice insight: The two responses of the developing world to extreme globalization.
Infosys said all the walls have been blown away in the world, so
now we, an Indian software company, can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to get superempowered and compete
anywhere that our smarts and energy can take us. And we can be part of
a global supply chain that produces profit for Indians, Americans and
Asians.
Al Qaeda said all the walls have been blown away in the world,
thereby threatening our Islamic culture and religious norms and
humiliating some of our people, who feel left behind. But we can use
the Internet, fiber optic telecommunications and e-mail to develop a
global supply chain of angry people that will superempower us and allow
us to hit back at the Western civilization that's now right in our face.
A couple decades ago I read a study (I wish I could find it online)
that examined how certain nations were genetically incapable of working
within the international system. Their internal dialogue led them to
lie, cheat, and steal in order to avoid paying debt, abide by
international rules of behavior, etc. A large part of this internal
dialogue was grounded in an overweening pride and a feeling of unfair
treatment by powerful, arrogant 'enemies.' [John Robb's Weblog]
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A classic example of terrorism's coercive impact.
Watch the election results in Spain. It will be a strong indicator as
to whether current terrorist methods can actually coerce change in a
modern nation-state. My analysis is that it will likely backfire
against the terrorists by increasing support for the party in power.
Turnout is expected to be over 80%. Just before the attack the PP was
up 4.5% in the polls and just 4 seats shy of an absolute majority. [John Robb's Weblog]
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MEMRI has the full translated text of the al Qaeda message claiming responsibility for the bombings in Spain.
The Death Brigades penetrated into the European Crusader
heartland, and struck a painful blow at one of the foundations of the
Crusader coalition. This is part of a settling of old accounts with
Crusader Spain, the ally of the U.S., in its war against Islam…
Take your hands off us! Release our prisoners! Get out of our lands! Then we will leave you alone. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Spain is coerced by al Qaeda.
Wow! The bombing in Madrid completely reversed the elections in Spain
today. The Socialists (who want to withdraw from Iraq) won by a
substantial margin. Prior to the bombing, the Popular Party was ahead.
This is a tangible terrorist victory. Of course, this is blood in the
water for terrorists. I was clearly wrong in estimating the impact of this attack due to
some unique factors: the government's prevarication regarding the
perpetrators, the extremely high public sentiment against the war in
Iraq, and the rapidity of the elections after the attack. Working on what this means over the longer term. Will post that thinking tomorrow. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Question: Do you think your country can keep you safe from terrorists?.
Voters in Spain answered this question on Sunday. Many said no. They
are not alone. Many people in the US and other parts of Europe reading
this think the same thing. This reaction is key to understanding what
is going wrong globally. The nation-state is in decline. It has failed
in its most basic task: to provide for the safety of its citizens. The
consequences of the delegitimization of the nation-state will be
central to life in the next century. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Chapter two
of Dan Gillmor's book is up. He tells his side of a meeting that I
remember very well. As we were working on Manila in the spring of 1999,
I was keeping Dan briefed step by step, but it didn't really come
together until we had a demo
at his office at the Merc. He, along with my uncle and Jamis MacNiven
at Buck's became our first users that summer. Dan's class at the
University of Hong Kong was among the first educational institutions,
if not the first, to do weblogs. [Scripting News]
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SXSW irc users: support freenode.
Adina sez, "Lilo's letting SXSW use irc.freenode.net even though SXSW
is a commercial project. People who are using freenode might want to
contribute. In general, folks whose projects benefit from freenode
might want to consider posting a "support freenode" link." Link [Boing Boing]
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Secret knocking codes for firewalls.
Port-knocking -- like a secret knock for firewalls. Schneier calls it
"defensive system that would not accept any SSH connections (port 22)
unless it detected connection attempts to closed ports 1026, 1027,
1029, 1034, 1026, 1044, and 1035 in that sequence within five seconds,
then listened on port 22 for a connection within ten seconds.
Otherwise, the system would completely ignore port 22." Link (via Crypto-Gram) [Boing Boing]
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Warren Ellis -- Biological. A short dose of delicious new prose from Warren Ellis:
Lavinia sits on the bench outside the local Starbs and swallows her
antifutureshock meds with a soy chai latte. After a few minutes, she
feels able to switch her shades from obstacle-imaging to full vision.
The world slowly fades up from green and black wireframe to
three-dimensional colour. She gazes blankly over the rail station, at
the full-motion billboard ad for the new Speculum Bar down on Main
Street, where warm drinks are mixed in and served from the muscular
rectums of young Algerian girls.
A flock of Fuckit Kids clatter past Lavinia, videoloop John Lydon
tattoos on their scrawny arms snapping out the words "fuck it" over and
over. Some of them slow down in front of her. People under twenty-five
or so aren't used to seeing pregnant women. One of them stops dead,
scratches his scabby upper arm, making his fresh new talking John Lydon
face bend and ripple. Antishocked to the eyeballs, he still struggles
to cope with Lavinia's alien curves.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Steampunk submarine free paper toy.  Stefan
sez, "John McEwan is a grand old man of military and role-playing
miniatures. He also makes cut-and-fold paper models of buildings and
vehicles. Some of these are really, really cool, like a line of
alternate-history zeppelins and steam tanks. Once in a while he puts up files for free download. This month it's a cool Victorian submarine."
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
[Boing Boing]
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New addition to the solar system.
Is it a planet or isn't it? Today, CalTech astronomers announced the
discovery of a "planetoid" eight billion miles from Earth, or more more
than three times the distance of Pluto.
With a size approximately three-quarters that of Pluto, it
is very likely the largest object found in the solar system since the
discovery of Pluto in 1930.
Link [Boing Boing]
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The Future of Work. Congrats to Tom Malone for the launch of The Future of Work,
a terriffic look at how decentralization is affecting the nature of the
organization, the structure of business and our work lives.
When we first launched Lotus Notes in the early 90's, it was an era of Reengineering The Corporation, in which companies were reducing the cost of coordination internally
through business process reengineering. Companies embraced Lotus Notes,
an advanced communications technology for the time, reflecting the changing nature of the organization from centralized hierarchical structures toward more decentralized work flows.
When I left
Iris/Lotus/IBM in 1997, I did so primarily because in '95-'96 I saw, in
our customers, the beginnings of something quite significant: they were
extending their core business processes and practices outward to
partners, suppliers, and in some cases even customers. When we launched
Groove's V1 product in 2001 and began selling it to enterprises, our
primary focus was on how it was an advance in decentralized
communications that would reduce the cost of coordination externally
in a manner not possible with technologies primarily designed for
enterprise use. The fact that enterprises and government have embraced
Groove truly reflects the changing nature of business from centralized structures toward networked, decentralized organizational relationships.
Over the past 12-18 months, we've seen some other very significant
technology-catalyzed changes occurring in business, in society, and in
our everyday lives. Last year was most certainly the "year of the
laptop". Broadband is now ever-more pervasive,
and 2003 was also undeniably the "year of WiFi". Our PC usage patterns
have been transformed: we carry them to meetings, use them at hotels
and on client sites and at home. Whereas most of us used to do most of
our work in our "office" or "cube", our most important work is now done
in our "virtual office" - the one that is implemented in software on
PC's and a variety of devices tucked away in our backpack, briefcase,
purse and pocket.
This isn't a small trend: its impact on business, society and our
lives is huge. I would strongly recommend that you spend some quality
time with this presentation based on a landmark study done in 2003 on the pervasiveness of off-site work.
I sit here writing this as we're about about to lift the veil from
what I believe you'll find truly represents the next generation of
communications software, Groove v3.0.
Our primary design goal for this product, based very specifically on
how it has been being used by our customers over the past three years,
was to implement, for its users, the essence of their "virtual office".
Where we do our work together, and where we want to do our work together because of how it feels and just works. We now live in an era of extreme mobility,
where the attributes of secure communications, coordination, and
synchronization are core to most everything we do in terms of
information work. An era where our tools and mobile devices must be
specifically designed with advanced, elegant awareness & notification
to help us to efficiently swarm around our joint activities, and to
aggregate and prioritize notifications in ways that help us to conserve
our attention and cope with information overload.
Think of how you yourself work, on a day-to-day basis. This era is
one of virtual work performed by a highly decentralized workforce.
Technology's role in this era is to bring us effective horizontal fusion - reducing the cost of coordination between us in a manner not possible with centralized technologies. It should reflect the changing nature of work, from the physical workplace, toward the decentralized workspace. And it most certainly will. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 |
Grand Challenge finish: not so grand?.
Looks like our autonomously war-waging robotic overlords won't be
taking over any time soon. A little over two hours and about seven
miles into the DARPA Grand Challenge race
in the California desert, all vehicles were either withdrawn or
disabled. But oragnizers say just because no competitor finished the
race -- leaving the $1MM prize unclaimed -- doesn't mean the event was
a flop. Link to status board, Link to CNN story. [Boing Boing]
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Bringing recruiting into the 21st century. Microsoft's blogging recruiters: Introducing recruiting to the 21st century.
OK, is there any other large company. Heck, any other company at all,
that is letting their recruiters post to the web with no prior
restraint?
This is great info! I wish these two were blogging back before I had my job interview.
Speaking of which, if anyone sees a good event planning job, let me
know. My wife is still looking. Hey, networking is the best way to get
a job!
Wouldn't it be interesting if they pointed at the best "begging" on
blog sites to get hired by Microsoft? It'd be like "Bill Gates meets
the Apprentice." The person who does the best job gets an interview. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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The Mind of Microsoft from the Microsoft Monitor weblog. Joe Wilcox, who does most of the blogging over on the interesting Microsoft Monitor weblog: the Mind of Microsoft.
Yeah, Joe's right. And he knows Microsoft better than I do. He's
been covering the company for quite a few years now (used to write for
CNET news.com).
You'll really get a good idea how Microsoft works when all 55,000
employees write a blog. Yeah, I do dream about a day like that.
Probably won't happen in my lifetime, though. But, in 1976 a couple of
kids were sitting in a garage in Cupertino imagining the day they'd
have their own cool personal computers. And look what happened.
Dream big. Who knows? [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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PC-bots (like the one below) are really interesting. Adding mobility to
a PC chassis makes it possible to replace lots of dedicated devices.
Functionality can be added just by loading software and attaching
peripherals (that plug into the system usign PC standard connections).
Some applications: litterbox cleaning ($250 for a dedicated system),
medical reminders and pill delivery, security and alert notification,
mobile music, household inventory control, cleaning, etc. It will also
be interesting to see how the "embedded" vision competes with the
personal PC bot. I think PC bots will win in the home given they are
much less expensive and much more flexible. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Why RSS is more productive than Web. I've
written about this one before, but thought it might add something to
the mix. It's my ideas on why RSS is better than reading in the Web
browser.
My goal is to use IE (or any browser, really) as little as possible?
Why? Because it is FAR LESS productive to read information in a browser
than it is in a news aggregator. Keep in mind, I'm watching 1353 feeds
right now. Every night I read all my feeds. That'd be impossible to do
in a browser. Here's why:
1) It is 10 times more productive to read RSS than HTML.
If you want to read, in a browser, all 1353 of my information sources,
which include not only blogs, but MSDN, and BBC, and New York Times,
you'd need to visit every single one of those every 24 hours to see if
they posted something new. But I DO NOT NEED TO DO THAT. Instead, I
only need to look at the sites that have actually posted something. In
the past 24 hours only 189 feeds have actually posted something. So,
right there I'm 10 times more productive than you are!
2) No wait for browser loading. The average weblog
takes 10 to 15 seconds to get to a readable state in the browser. But,
my RSS feeds are downloaded ahead of time for me, and when I click on
them they load instantly. 15x1353=20295 seconds/60=338.25
minutes/60=5.6375 hours. Am I doing the math right here? If you wanted
to pull up 1353 weblogs/websites in your browser you'd be waiting 5.675
hours just to have them load?
3) No looking for "what's new." When you visit a
site like CNET you need to do a lot of mental work to see what was
different from yesterday when you read the site. In NewsGator new
things are bold. I don't need to do any work and I don't need to pay
any attention to old things.
4) No distractions. If you do eyetrak research
you'll see that the average human eye spends a lot of time looking at
blinking stuff and color stuff (er, advertising on a page and design on
a page). In RSS, I only get the content. That means that I can read
that content far faster than you can and provably so.
5) Same font for easier reading. Because all RSS is
presented in the same font (unless the feed producer is an idiot), your
eye can read more without getting tired (imagine if USA Today ran each
story in a different font, how hard would that be to read?).
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Why RSS is better than email. Internally
at Microsoft I've been getting a ton of questions about RSS. I figure
I'd just post my emails here too so you can see why I like RSS so much.
The first one is what is better about RSS than email.
1) RSS is easier to have search bots visit.
2) RSS is easier to link to (at least if it also spits out an HTML page, like all weblogging software does).
3) RSS won't get mixed in with other email (SPAM, other DL traffic, and
other email types). I've been looking at Microsoft employees inboxes,
and many people here don't setup rules to filter their email into
separate buckets.
4) RSS is easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from.
5) RSS doesn't use up any of my Outlook rules spaces (some of my coworkers have so many rules that they can't add anymore).
6) RSS is usable not just in an email client (Bloglines, other weblogs,
even other Sharepoint sites can subscribe and aggregate it). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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SemText.  Anything Danny Ayers likes - I check out.
So I just signed up for SemText.
Here we go - I wonder if it gets all hung up in Semantic kind of things
- and misses teh 80'20 rule for portals, CMSs and end-user experience.
If it can get the balance right - there's no limit how far it can go.
This is kind of what I was hoping Nova Spivack was doing and what Haystack was. Well we'll see soon enough. [Marc's Voice]
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More on Mono.
Mono, an open source project (sponsored by Novell these days) to create
a free implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework, still isn't soup
yet. But the Mono backers are promising to deliver the 1.0 release by
June, and an update that will add .Net 1.2 and C# 2.0 support by year
end. The Mono 1.4 release, due in August 2005 will include "previews of
Longhorn technologies Indigo and Avalon," the report adds. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]
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White Box Robotics. Making robots inexpensive, simple to modify, and powerful.
Our platform, or "rig" as we call it, is based off of standard
PC architecture. Similar to an industry standard PC case in
construction, almost any off-the-shelf PC hardware can be used on the
912 platform with little or no modification.
HMV security robot (with the same paint as the Hummer). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Kim Stanley Robinson on what Martian water means for science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, who is, on the one hand, the author of a brilliant, seminal series
of novels about terraforming Mars has written a grand, overarching
survey of the speculative literature of the Red Planet for the NYT, in
the wake of the discovery of Mars's aquaeous history.Meanwhile,
the feedback loop between science and science fiction continues to
flow. It is, as we have seen, an elliptical loop, like the orbit of a
comet. Science-fiction writers seize on new scientific findings and
immediately leap to conclusions, in the form of stories. Then these
stories dive into young minds and percolate there, shaping future
scientists and giving them dreams, visions, plans.Leap and
percolate. These days I sometimes hear from young people who tell me
they are studying some kind of science because of my Mars books. ("But
you forgot to mention the math.") I feel like part of the
science-fiction loop. I still follow the latest Mars news, and
sometimes I wonder what the next wave of Mars stories will be like. It
seems awkward. I suppose the thing to do would be to tell the story of
the robot rovers, because that's what we're going to have for a while.
Maybe rovers much more powerful than Spirit and Opportunity --
artificial intelligences, in fact, and happy to be on Mars, because
it's the world they were designed for, and they're protecting an
indigenous cryptoendolithic, or hidden in rock, bacterial culture they
have discovered. So that when humans finally arrive in person, it's a
disaster in the making for all concerned, and the rover artificial
intelligences and little red people have to play dumb and play ghost
and change humanity for the good of all, and . . . Link (via Nelson) [Boing Boing]
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Binary LED watch from TokyoFlash.  New
from TokyoFlash, purveyors of fine and impractical Japanese hipster
novelty watches: the LED by Binary. It's a watch with a naked printed
circuit board, on which are situated 10 LEDs, which glow to display the
time in binary notation. ¥8900.00 -- about $80. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Free and unencumbered exotica.
Dave sez, "Hello and welcome to Comfort Stand Recordings, a
not-for-profit community driven label where all releases are free for
download with artwork and liner notes. Having no business model or
profit motive we strive to bring you recordings that we find
interesting, compelling and downright enjoyable. Everybody needs free
music." This is pretty good exotica/tiki tuneage right here.
Link
(Thanks, Dave! [Boing Boing]
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Another nail in the coffin of classic terrorism. The mass protests in Madrid prove yet again that "terrorism" as a method of warfare
is deeply flawed. It doesn't achieve the desired results: to coerce or
delegitimize a nation-state. It does exactly the opposite: it hardens
the policies and increases the popular support of a nation-state. Given
that terrorist organizations are learning organizations run by
educated, sane individuals (almost all the psychological literature on
terrorists points to this), it is only a matter of time before classic
terrorism gives way to something much more effective. [John Robb's Weblog]
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What can we learn from China's success?.
A couple of items. The rapidly rising trade gap due Chinese outsourcing
vastly overshadows offshoring of service jobs to India (there is a gap
in perception). Second, China currently runs only a slight trade
surplus with the rest of the world, which indicates that its currency
is fairly valued (although a free float with the dollar should be a
precondition of trade). So a big fall in the dollar may not occur even
if the currencies floated against each other. What this means is that China represents a trade threat to America
on par with Japan in the eighties. Competition with Japan proved to be
somewhat good for the US. It provided us with inexpensive, high-quality
goods -- and -- it forced US manufacturers to radically improve their
methods (in quality and cost). Unfortunately, the Chinese threat
appears to only provide low cost, high-quality goods. It doesn't offer
any improvement in manufacturing method that the US can match other
than low cost labor. Does anyone else know of any other "secret sauce" in Chinese manufacturing? [John Robb's Weblog]
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Centralizing the Internet??. CNet. The
long-awaited proposal, submitted to the Federal Communications
Commission on Wednesday, has been crafted so broadly that it would
outlaw the introduction of new broadband services that did not support
ready wiretapping access. Companies currently offering broadband would
be given 15 months to comply.
Basically, CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act)
is being used by the Homeland security department to force rewiring of
the Internet. The original act was aimed at forcing open call
forwarding (etc.) enabled phones to wiretaps. It is now being applied
to VoIP (particularly due to Skype, since systems like Vonage route
calls through a central hub and are therefore easily accessed). The
Skype "hole" is being used to force broadband companies to create
central hubs for all Internet traffic (on a per ISP basis) where the
FBI can place Carnivore. It is basically going to turn the Internet on
its head... [John Robb's Weblog]
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Colombia and a new wave of Terrorism. Hallinan (USC) has a couple of telling notes on how we are diving off the deep end in Colombia:
While mass murders and kidnappings
have declined, 20 percent and 32 percent respectively, targeted
killings and disappearances of unionists and left opposition supporters
have increased. Disappearances have increased from 258 in the 1994-95
period, to more than 1,200 a year since 2001. In the past 10 years,
more than 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered, almost all at the
hands of the Colombian Army or the right-wing paramilitary United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). According to Human Rights watch,
"There is detailed, abundant and compelling evidence of continuing
close ties" between the two.
This is reminiscent of the "our" bastard approach to foreign policy during the cold war.
US Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), chair
of the powerful House International Relations Committee, said of
Colombia that "three hours by plane from Miami, we face a potential
breeding ground for international terror equaled perhaps only by
Afghanistan." Former US Ambassador to Colombia, Curtis Kamman, told the
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government
that "The terrorists who operate in Colombia have not explicitly
declared the United States to be their target. But their political and
economic objectives are incompatible with our values, and they could
ultimately represent a force of evil no less troublesome than al Qaeda."
It is only a matter of time, due to
our policies, before that war extends to target us... (note the
potential ties between ETA and al Qaeda). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Wilson on the 4th generation warfare swamp:
The situation is growing more complex resulting
in a pugilistic witch's brew and hurly burly stew in the offing. For
example, it has been reported in the open press that Hamas has an
office in Nasariah, and Hezbollah has offices in Basra and Safwan. The
political wings of both Hamas and Hezbollah are recruiting Iraqi youth
with seminars that embrace their ideology and terrorist nature.
Terrorists' tactics and the nature of the
insurgency are changing. This is characteristic of fourth generation
warfare. One striking aspect of these fourth generation terrorist
groups is their ability to adapt, transform and reappear. We must not
lose sight of the fact that our fourth generation adversaries are
constantly adapting changing as Islamic terror networks fan out seeking
fertile new ground to foment discontent in places with weak
authorities, lack of Iraqi security forces, shifting alliances, and
endemic corruption associated with criminal enterprises. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Mobile fiction micropublishing. Interesting Japanese publishing model: send 1.6k of serialized new fiction to subscribers' phones every day.The
bestselling novel Deep Love was self-published in installments by the
author on a website that offers content packaged for users of mobile
phones. The story is about a 17-year-old girl named Ayu, who finds love
through a chance encounter.The author, who calls himself Yoshi,
created a website providing content for mobile phones in May 2000 with
an investment of just ¥100,000 ($909.09 at ¥110 to the dollar). Using a
promotional campaign that consisted of passing out business cards to
about 2,000 high-school girls in front of Tokyo's Shibuya Station (the
center of Tokyo youth culture), Yoshi released The Story of Ayu, the
first installment in the longer novel. News of the novel spread by word
of mouth, and within three years the site had received a total of 20
million hits. Mobile phones can receive e-mail of up to 1,600
characters. While this is more than adequate for most personal use, the
limit presents unique challenges to the author of a novel. Yoshi,
however, not only managed to overcome this challenge but even turned it
to his advantage by keeping the prose concise and fast-paced. The novel
maintains a straightforward, conversational style and avoids the use of
difficult words. Thanks to this quality, the story has found favor even
among people who do not typically read novels. Link(via Engadget) [Boing Boing]
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Everquest widows tell all.
Everquest Daily Grind is a place where video-game widow(er)s post their
personal stories of life with MMO-addicts who ignore spouse, kids, jobs
and life for the game.Last spring my grandmother passed
away, and he was so involved in the game that he wasn't there for me. I
would go to his house when I only had an hour, and the hour would go by
and he would play, and I would sit there, and then I'd have to leave
without so much as a kiss. There would be nights when I'd go to sleep
there, and wake up at 5 or 6am and he'd still be playing because his
guild needed him, or he was retrieving his corpse - which as I'm
reading is a popular line! Link (via evHead) [Boing Boing]
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Picture of orangutan hand and human hand.  Juju
sez: This is a great picture comparing a human and an orangutan hand.
There's also an analysis of the various differences between the two,
and why those differences allow humans to have a precision grip, thus
allowing us domination over the planet. Link
[Boing Boing]
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Howard Lovy's nanotechnology essay on H2O purification. Another essay from the always interesting Howard Lovy:
Carlo Montemagno makes molecular devices that contain “embedded
intelligence,” each molecule working in tandem with another to produce
a desired action. His first application? Yes. Water purification. “We
use membranes incorporated with some molecules that selectively only
transport water molecules through, and with very, very high
efficiencies,” Montemagno said. “The end result is that projected
performance is at least 100 times better, maybe 1,000 times better than
the best … filters.”
Link
[Boing Boing]
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Roll your own pr0n.
A rollicking three-way of ironic, porn-themed fun. A site full of both
Flash and flesh. Here is a DIY centerfold construction kit -- kind of
like Mister Potatohead, but hotter. Link. And here is an ant's eye, interactive, nano-tastic view of a gigantic naked babe. Link. Finally, construct your very own soundtrack to shag by. Link. Nothing is worksafe. (Thanks, Susannah!) [Boing Boing]
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News.Com:
"McDonald's doesn't expect to earn money initially from its Wi-Fi
service. It hopes instead to attract more customers and sell more
burgers and fries." [Scripting News]
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Andrew:
"I've finished an initial version of a RSS+BitTorrent integration tool
for Radio Userland's news aggregator. This is beta software." [Scripting News]
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Friday, March 12, 2004 |
TV cliches catalogued.
Here's a Wiki cataloguing, with cited examples, all the eye-rolling idiot plots from sitcomdom.
Gilligan Cut
The Gilligan Cut is a classic staple of comedy. A character protests
vehemently, "What, you expect me to wear a grass skirt, stand up on top
of Empire State Building and belt out the chorus of 'New York, New
York'? Well, I'm not gonna... I'm just not gonna..." And then you cut,
and see the character doing just that. The Gilligan Cut. Comedy ain't
pretty.
Link
(Thanks, Gnat!) [Boing Boing]
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We're a Movable Type blog now!. 
After over four years with Blogger, Boing Boing is now a Movable Type
blog! Blogger is an excellent tool, but we'd outgrown it and it was
time for a change -- we're immensely grateful to Ev, Steve, Jason, Biz
and the gang for all the support over the years.
So now we're an MT blog, which is great news. It means that we've
got access to some of the fastest-evolving tools in the business, with
all the third-party plugins that talk to MT's API. Expect some cool new
features on the blog soon (we're gonna add search right away, and CSS
layouts, and other neato crap to follow!).
Enormous, undying gratitude is hereby flung in the direction of
Ben Trott, for all the work he did on making the transition smooth and
painless. Ben, you are a prince.
Another change that you'll notice straight off: our permalinks
are now post-per-page; that is, in order to load an individual post,
you needn't load the entire month associated with it. We'll be using
some mod_rewrite mojo to make this true of all the backlinks as well --
the bandwidth bills for loading monthly archives were really starting
to add up (the reason we did monthly archives was the lack of a good
search tool -- at very least, if you could remember what month you saw
a post, you could load that month's archive and dig through it).
We still need to convert the guestbar to MT, which will come soon enough.
So, life is good. Beware falling rocks. Welcome to the MT era of Boing Boing.
Link
Boing Boing has an Atom feed. Another salutory effect of transitioning to MT: we now have an Atom feed for the latest in syndication goodness.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Thursday, March 11, 2004 |
More Firefox search plugins.
I've added a few more search engines to Firefox, and I'm parking them here so I can easily transfer them to my other machines.
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The Building-Block PC. Opinion:
We think our PCs are upgradeable, but they're really not. They're a
collection of parts, only some of which can be replaced. What about a
truly upgradeable PC -- one that fits together like builing blocks? [Extremetech]
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Automated font-identification.
Nishad sez, "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by
certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can,
using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image
of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!"
Link
(Thanks, Nishad!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Random synonyms for masturbation. Funny Javascript mad-libs toy generates random synonyms for masturbation:
Charming the mink
Violating your goalie
Using the Force on the witness
Punishing the gator
Tenderizing the unicorn's horn
Loving Isaiah
Assaulting the possum
Twanging the antenna
Link
(via Fleshbot) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Tucows registers 4M domain names. Tucows Milestone: 4mm names in the bag.
Sometimes good ideas do translate into good businesses. This is a
huge milestone for Tucows. We got into the competitive registration
business officially in 1999 when we were accredited as a fully-fledged
registrar by ICANN. Prior to that we were simply a reseller for Network
Solutions who had a monopoly on all sales of .com, .net and .org.
We did our first competitive registration on January 12, 2000. We were 85th in the market according to DomainWatch. Last night, we registered our 4,000,000th domain name - one in ten gTLD registrations is managed through Tucows.
Thanks to the entire team, the last four years has been a blast and
achieving little milestones like this here and there seems to indicate
that the best is yet to come.
[Random Bytes]
Congrats to Elliot and Ross and everyone at Tucows! 10% of that
market ain't bad! I wonder who the 4Mth name was? Did they get a prize? [Marc's Voice]
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Disney builds a Green Line at Disneyland. Disneyland is adding a Green Line -- a security gate to "stop terrorists."
Reality is coming to Disneyland's fantasy world, in the form of
permanent security gates. Bowing to terrorism fears, the Walt Disney
Co. plans to build the gates at the Disneyland Resort next fall. The
company had resisted security gates around Disneyland and the
California Adventure theme park next door, believing the sense of
fantasy would be spoiled.
Link
(Thanks, Ian!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Iran threatened to withdraw from IAEA. It wants entry into the nuclear club. This has been building since Sunday.
Iran sought to raise the stakes in its dealings with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Wednesday, threatening to
stop cooperating with the UN's nuclear watchdog unless it stopped being
"influenced by the Americans". [John Robb's Weblog]
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Imagine a facewall like
this as active wallpaper on your PC desktop. Each picturre would
contain one click contact info (VoIP phone, IM, e-mail threads, and
fax), presence (IM "I'm online"), GPS data (for your family), etc. New
messages would be highlighted on the picture. Contacts can be
grouped/outlined by high level pictures (family, company, etc.), just
click to drill down. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Three hilarious remixes of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Yoz Grahame has remixed my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a bunch of really whacky and wildly imaginative perl scripts:
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) - in which the
original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA's new
cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation.
"Beautiful,"
BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because because because
because -- because because because because because because because
because because because because because because because become become
become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed bed bed bed bed
bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom bedroom-bedroom beds
bedside bedside bedside.
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix) -
in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and M
replaced with "Sausage" and "Mash" respectively, in accordance with the
classic children's game.
He chuckled. "No sausage, not mash. I'm into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world."
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars
Remix) - in which the original is run through Babelfish several times,
from English to French to German and back to English again.
I
never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the
maintenance would decide A-Movin ' Dan at the person in possession of a
favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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New DARPA Grand Challenge live action website. Just launched: a website promising live virtual coverage of this weekend's Grand Challenge race, in which robotic vehicles will race accross the California desert.
Live
Tracking will show relative positions of the Challenge entrants, and
requires a 7 MB download each time you use your browser to view the
tracking. The Status Board provides a 30 second update of the status of each Challenge team. The Image Gallery will contain the most recent images from the Challenge, updated nightly through March 14.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Black, magnetic silly putty. Puttyworld sells a $9 magnetic silly putty substance -- and it's goth black to boot.
Black Thinking Putty noticably responds to a magnet. Try pulling out a
thin strand with your fingers and holding the magnet nearby. Or roll it
into a ball and watch it roll right to the magnet, even uphill. The
stronger the magnet the better the result, Neodymium Iron Boron works
best. You can purchase some from our accessories category.
Link
(via FARK) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Remixing "Construction Kits" are the future of the music industry?.
Inspired by the Jay-Z Construction Set (a CDROM and .torrent full of
Jay-Z vocal tracks, samples and art, intended for remixture), Ernest
Miller has written a shrewd editorial about a potential path for
musicians to engage their fans with their work through the release of
similar kits -- he likens this to videogames that encourage players to
invest in making or seeking out custom mods.
Many videogames permit players to create new content for the game
engine, such as levels, maps and mods. This new content is freely
distributable (at least for noncommercial purposes) and frequently
incorporates content created by the original game designer along with
new user-created content. This has been incredibly successful for
videogame companies. The more content there is, the more popular the
game becomes. The ability to create and add content creates feverish
and committed communities of fans for a game. Imagine if musicians had
such communities working for them.
Link
(via A Copyfighter's Musings) [Boing Boing Blog]
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On Feb 24 I asked for visions of the future of weblog software from Scripting News readers, and got a huge response. At last Thursday's meeting at Berkman, I asked three people, Lisa Williams, Shimon Rura and Jay McCarthy to read each of the posts, collate them, group and summarize so we could make sense of what people were asking for. Lisa's summary is available for review now. [Scripting News]
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004 |
Asia Times:
Is Zarqawi the new Osama or a scarecrow set up to claim al Qaeda
involvement in every terrorist incident? The Iraqi Sunni Mujahideen:
...are adamant: "The truth is, al-Qaeda is not present in Iraq."
They claim that hundreds of Arabs entered the country a year ago to
fight the Americans, but now only a few dozen remain. "We had to help
hundreds of them leave for their own protection because they were only
a burden on the resistance. It was difficult to hide them." [John Robb's Weblog]
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I've been having fun exploring realtor.com.
I've always wondered what it would cost to live in various places like
New Orleans, Vermont, the east coast of Florida, Santa Cruz. Now it's
really easy to find out. [Scripting News]
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How do you identify a .NET "Thought Leader?". Dare
Obasanjo: "When I think of thought leadership in the .NET world I'm
more likely to think of Sam Gentile or Clemens Vasters than I am to
think of some blue badge carrying employee at the Redmond campus."
I totally agree with that. But, I want to go deeper. What makes a
"thought leader?" Dare has some opinions, but they don't nail it for
me. And, I think this question goes to the deeper sense of reputation
and trust that certain bloggers build up.
Why are Clemens and Sam at the top of my, and Dare's, mind when we
think of "thought leaders?" Well, I know both of these guys from the
offline world. They are expert in their domains. I know that from
previous non-blog experience. So, when they say something on a topic, I
believe them.
Now, let's compare that to Ryan Dawson. He's doing, by far, the most interesting stuff
with the PDC Build of Longhorn. But, why don't we think of him as a
thought leader? Because he hasn't been around very long? Because he
hasn't spoken at a conference? Because he hasn't written a magazine
article? Because he hasn't written an app yet? Because he hasn't had
the cuts and bruises that this industry puts on people over time? (He's
one of the younger people who came to the PDC).
How about Carl Franklin? He does the .NET Rocks radio show. Is he a thought leader?
Really, what's more interesting to people who develop with a
technology? Something like the above or something like what Microsoft
Employee Chris Brumme does? (please note that Chris Brumme and Dare Obasanjo are the only Microsoft employees I'll link to in this post).
I don't know. As a blogger, I really love what Mike Gunderloy is doing. Or James Avery. Or Julia Lerman. Or Larry O'Brien.
Anyway, I am going to work on this theme for a little while and try
to build a directory of all the .NET bloggers who don't work at
Microsoft. And then I'm going to try to give you my ideas on who is a
"Thought Leader" in that community. No Microsoft employees will be
considered. I'm finding a lot more .NET bloggers than I expected. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Fonts used in Disney parks. This is a wonderful list of faces employed in incidental typography in the Disney parks, including links to freeware versions of many of the fonts.
# Albertus - Animal Kingdom (entrance area signage), Norway
# Algerian - MK monorail station, Main Street, Haunted Mansion Fastpass, etc.
# Americana - Main Street, Liberty Square
# Anna - Tomorrowland logo/signage, Studios, etc.
# Antique Olive - Soarin'
Link
(Thanks, Mark!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Warren Ellis's Mek and Reload omnibus edition. 
It's Wednesday, which means the new funnybooks are out. I'm using The Beguiling as my interim comix shop while working on the next novel in Toronto, and tonight, they had a very nice surprise for me: a perfect bound omnibus edition of two of Warren Ellis's short-series stories: Mek and Reload.
Reload's a great action story, a lot of fun, but it's Mek that's the
real standout here. Mek is like Asimov's Robots stories told by Hunter
S Thompson after overdosing on Ralph Ellison: a caustic and corrosive
story about body-modders who get the machinery the fetishize implanted
in their flesh, and the discrimination they face as a result. (Also
noteworthy: this is, as far as I know, the only comic to mention the
EFF in dialogue).
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Linux-based managed access-point from Sputnik.
Sputnik has shipped the next generation of its Linux-based, open source
managed WiFi AP. At $185, it's the cheapest managed AP on the market,
with some of the coolest features (though in most contexts I think I'd
just advise shopping for el-cheapo no-name APs for $30 per and
connecting them to a $50 a month DSL and making your money back in
extra lattes, rather than paying for a managed solution).
The Sputnik AP 160 utilizes a customizeable captive portal that
requires end-users to authenticate with their username and password
before they can access the wireless network.
Additional wireless and wired devices connected through the AP
160’s built-in four-port router are also authenticated and managed by
Sputnik Control Center. Simply plug third-party APs into the back of
the Sputnik AP 160; end-users who associate with those APs are
authenticated and tracked. The same principle applies to end-users who
connect directly to the LAN ports.
Link
(via Sifry) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Video Codec Shootout.
Wondering which video codec to use at home? We put DivX 5.1.1, Windows
Media Video 9, QuickTime 6.5 with Sorenson 3, and QuickTime 6.5's
MPEG-4 codec through a battery of tests. The results might surprise
you. [Extremetech]
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Open Source UIs. Improving Open Source UI.
My response to Eric Raymond's rant on the poor quality of open source UI is: No Kidding, Sherlock.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that open source UI is crappy and I am
surprised that it took Eric this long to notice the problem. As to why,
it's because:
- open source developers have little interest nor incentive to do it right.
- most software developers lack the knowledge and experience to design good UIs.
- UI design is hard and insanely tedious, even for the professionals.
Frankly, I don't think it is realistic to expect open source
developers to build good UIs. Instead, open source software should be
designed to make it easier for others to change or replace the UI
without understanding the code underneath. Let a thousand UIs bloom and
may the best one win. In other words, leverage evolution in pursuit of
good UIs.
 [Don Park's Daily Habit]
In 1999 - when Dave Winer developed XML-RPC - we were the first
company to build a client side, browser based interface to it. We did a
'broadband' version of Dave's 'Mail to the Future' service.
That mini-project proved that it was possible to de-couple the front-end UI from the backend.
Here's a screen from that interface. We spent all of 1999, 2000,
2001, 2002 and 2003 - waiting for the world to catch up with us. Now it
looks like that time has come.
All I can say to Don Park is "you just wait - dude". Wait till you meet Jim Collins. [Marc's Voice]
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No-Touch Deployment vs ClickOnce.
Mark Levison, one of the developers I interviewed for the .NET story,
thinks that Microsoft has undersold the benefits of No-Touch Deployment
(NTD), the current solution for running rich .NET clients from the Web.
Having done the gruntwork required to understand and use NTD, Mark's
not so sure that developers ought to write off this technology and wait
for Whidbey's ClickOnce. ... [Jon's Radio]
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Understanding Games as Narrative Spaces. On his blog, Peter Berger has posted recently
on -- his words -- "what makes games fun." Actually, he's wrong about
that; what he's really talking about, and very cogently, is games as
narrative spaces. He does indeed offer some concrete suggestions for
why particular architectures or theme choices may make for more fun
games than others--but, of course, the "narrative space" lens is only
one way of looking at games, and, as Mahk LeBlanc says, there are many types of pleasure that people draw from games.
In
other words, the question of "what makes games fun" is a larger
one--but Berger has some interesting things to say on this more narrow
topic. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Programmable credit-card to replace most of your wallet's contents.
The Chameleon Card is a programmable credit-card and the Pocket Vault
is a programming terminal for it. Feed it your credit-card magstripes
and your loyalty-card bar-codes, seal it with your fingerprint, then,
on demand, it can mimic any of the cards in your wallet. Oh, and it's
got an RFID-mimic built in to replace your swipeless gas-pump card.
This strikes me as simultaneously very cool and very creepy, and at
$200, it seems too pricey to fly.
First-time
users of the Pocket Vault will read their old credit cards with the
device, which stores their information internally and backs it up to an
online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen.
Each credit card stored on the Pocket Vault is then represented by an
icon on the device's touch-screen display.
The Pocket Vault also prompts its owners to place their fingerprints on the device's reader pad to create a biometric profile.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Radar on a Chip Means Radar on the Cheap. I wrote a piece for The Feature about the potential uses for a newly invented radar-on-a-chip.
Late last month, an associate professor by the name of Ali Hajimiri of
the California Institute of Technology announced that he had come up
with a radar system on a chip. This is significant for two reasons.
First, its tiny dimensions (one-fifteenth the diameter of a penny) will
make it possible to add radar-like functionality to almost any wireless
device no matter how small it is. Second, the price of anything that
can be manufactured in a silicon fabrication plant will plummet as the
number of units shipped increases. Will the next decade be known as the
"Radar Age"?
Maybe
so. Hajimiri's radar on a chip could replace a lot of existing dish
antennae, like the kind you have on your roof to watch satellite TV.
The frequency at which the chip runs - 24 Gigahertz - falls right into
the spectrum allocated by the FCC for vehicular radar systems. These
chips could be embedded into a car to give it 360-degree, all weather
vision, protecting the occupants from reckless drivers and other
highway hazards.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Spy On Your Food with this DNA Chip.
Roland sez: "Do you want to know if the chicken you just bought at the
supermarket contains bits of pork or beef? Or would you like to know if
the vegetarian meal you just ordered contains some fish or meat? If
your answer is yes, you might get some help from a DNA chip which can
recognize 32 different species of fishes, birds and mammals, including
humans(!!), in a single test. Both Small Times and New Scientist carry a story of this DNA chip, which will likely be used first by food regulators. The FoodExpert-ID
biochip is the first high-throughput gene chip for testing food and
animal feed. But it doesn't come cheap. The cost of all the equipment
needed to perform the tests is around $250,000, but each test would
cost only $350 to $550. This overview contains more details and references. It also includes illustrations showing how the technology works." Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Roundtable on design coverage in the media.
There's an interesting discussion taking place at Core 77 about
industrial design in the media. Participants include I.D.'s Julie
Lasky, New Yorker's John Seabrook, writer Kurt Anderson, designer Bruce
Mau, and Moma design curator Paola Antonelli.
John Seabrook: It is very tedious, both for the writer and the
reader, to describe in words the color, shape, texture, material, and
style of an object -- when a picture could communicate most of this
information in a fraction of a second. And yet, when you are writing
for an audience that knows nothing of the context within which
decisions about design take place, and has no feel for the culture out
of which design choices emerge, then one has little choice but to
scatter one's seed over such barren ground as mere description. Ergo,
most cultural critics choose to spend their time writing about
something else. Janet Jackson's breast, say.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Photoblogging Chernobyl. 
Elena
from Kiev recently toured the Chernobyl area on a motorcycle. She
photo-blogs the journey here, and it is a truly amazing personal
account. This is the sort of intimate, human stuff that makes you drop
your jaw and think, good God, the Internet is an incredible thing.
"I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl dead zone.
It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there
for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul.
People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods,
lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those which left from 80th in
fairly good condition..."
Link (via Warren). Recommended Reading: Polidori's Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, a collection of photographs shot in the dead zone (thanks, Patricio) [Boing Boing Blog]
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REST microkernal and XML app server. This seems really cool. These new kinds of servers are gonna be a key part of our collective future.
The 1060 REST microkernel and XML app server. 1060 NetKernel Suhail Ahmed alerted me, via email, to a really interesting project called NetKernel, from 1060 Research. The docs describe it as "a commercial open-source realisation of the HP Dexter project." Here's the skinny:
Today's
Web-servers and Application Servers have a relatively flat interface
which creates a hard boundary between Web and non-Web. This boundary
defines the zone of URI addressable resources.
What if the REST interface (URI address space) didn't end at the edge of your external interface?
NetKernel
uses REST-like service interfaces for all software components. The
services are fully encapsulated in modules which export a public URI
address space. A module may import other module's address spaces, in
this way service libraries may be combined into applications. [NetKernel Essentials] What
if, indeed? I downloaded the 20MB NetKernel JAR file, installed the
system, and took it for a spin. Fascinating concept. As advertised, it
offers a suite of XML services -- including XSLT, and the Saxon
implementation of XQuery -- in a composable architecture based on URIs.
These include the familiar http: and file: plus NetKernel's own active:
which is a URI scheme for NetKernel processes scheduled by the "REST
microkernel." ... [Jon's Radio] [Ted Ritzer: BizBlog] [Marc's Voice]
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Michael Hawley - getting it done. MIT Professor Michael Hawley [Slashdot]
"Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow
project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What
really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers
aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an
ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that
the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the
correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more
to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket
protectors."
Marc's bit......
I go way back with this dude - like 20 years. [Marc's Voice]
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The British are coming, the British are coming!.  Ecademy - USA has launched.
It's a mature, full featured networking environment originally based
in the U.K. I've often referred to these 'blokes' as British
Intellectuals - but they're really more or less just business folks -
out hussling, using technology - to make money and network.
The best part of Ecademy is the suite of technology that Julian Bond
has built up in there - including RSS feeds of almost everything
(listings, message boards, blog posts, etc.) - and they're the FIRST
major system to support FOAF!
Lee Wilkins and Thomas Power
have really built-up Ecademy into a promising environment - much more
than LinkedIn - and I'm excited as hell that they're landed on this
side of the pond. I just hope they don't burn down the White House
while they're at it (well actually, maybe that's a great idea!)
| connect > |
communicate > |
transact > |
Quite a suite of features! [Marc's Voice]
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AlstraSoft E-Friends. Start You Own Social Networking Company: For $280!.
Start Your Own Social Networking Company: For $280!
Why are the venture capitalists investing millions in social
networking startups when you can start your own SNA service for $280
(with 1 year updates, no less), courtesey of the nice folks at
AltraSoft: AlstraSoft
E-Friends - Run your own online social networking community just like
Friendster. Members create their own personal friends network, meet new
friends, dating and join groups
AlstraSoft E-Friends
Cost (single license): [was $600] $280 (with 1 year updates)
Language: PHP
Platform: Unix
Release: Feb 15, 2004
Current Version: v3.0
Last Update: Feb 15, 2004
Product Overview
AlstraSoft E-Friends is an online social networking software that
allows you to start your own site just like Friendster and Tribe.net.
The E-Friends software allows members to connect to people in their
personal networks and community, creating a new online interactive
resource that is based on a trusted network of friends and associates
on the internet.
Members can use this abundant network to make friends, find their
love ones, locate jobs, buy and sell stuff, locate a roommate, and
accomplish much more with the help of groups and individuals who they
know and share the same interests.
Start your own social networking community just like Friendster and Tribe.net in minutes with AlstraSoft E-Friends now!
How does E-Friends work?
Once members are registered with E-Friends, they will be able invite
people they know to join their personal or professional network. A
member's friends will come to E-Friends and invite their friends. As
the network grows, members will have more opportunities to interact
easily with people they know, make friends, and use the E-Friends
network to enrich their social life."
This is absolute proof that we have reached the bizarro stage of the social networking exponential buzz curve. [Get Real]
With Social Networking systems available for $280 - what's next - free, open source social networks?
Oh yah - that's what we're working on - it's called the PeopleAggregator.
I sure hope E-Friends supports FOAF! [Marc's Voice]
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Slate: How To Speed-Read the Net.
Slate launched their RSS feed today, and with it, published an
excellent introduction to RSS article by Paul Boutin. What I like about
the article (apart from the fact that it recommends SharpReader) is
that it's clearly geared towards people who are more likely to read the
New York Times or the Washington Post than diveintomark or scripting
news. Instead... (157 words) [Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]
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Michael Gartenberg is enthusiastic about the OQO.
Will it ever ship?? I expect that a mature type of this device (IF it
eventually gains traction) will likely include a dual-mode option that
allows you to use it as a Linux-based (most likely on a low power chip
set) media player while on the move. It would also need video glasses,
which despite advances in technology, have not arrived yet. [John Robb's Weblog]
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An oldie but goodie in Wired: Corporate Mercenaries.
DynCorp represents nothing
less than the future of national security. While outfits like Raytheon
make their money developing weapons systems, DynCorp offers the
military an alternative to itself. In 2002, the company took in $2.3
billion doing what you probably thought was Pentagon work. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Aibo-style "guard-dragon".
A Japanese inventor has shipped an Aibo-like "guard-dragon" that costs
as much as a car and has a bunch of anti-burglar sensors and behaviors.
With more than 50 built-in sensors, Banryu is capable of picking up
changes in its surroundings and transmitting an alarm to its master's
cellphone.
A camera on its back can swivel 360 degrees and send images of the
room around it. It can also sense the smell of burning and detect
temperatures above 50 degrees.
Link
(Thanks, hary!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Software-based PVR that's feature-complete.
SnapStream's "Beyond TV 3" is a software-based PVR that turns your PC
into a TiVo-plus-plus, capable of streaming stored programs to your
browser and auto-skipping commercials. Basically, it's as though they
made a TiVo whose only considerations were what you, the customer,
would likely want to see, and not what the Hollywood studios would
prefer.
The software streams to Web browsers, so
you don't have to buy another copy for remote viewing. It's fairly
simple to enable security so strangers don't have access to your
television signal or recordings.
Beyond TV handles all the personal video recorder basics well.
Users can pause live TV, rewind and set up recordings — all without
an advanced degree in VCR technology. And like TiVo's Home Media
Option, recording can be scheduled over the Internet.
But SnapStream also added commercial break recognition, which
vastly simplifies ad skipping. It also supports a variety of video
formats and lets you easily convert to a more tightly compressed file.
Link
(via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Jon Udell points to one of the major reasons US workers are vulnerable to offshoring: corporate health care expenses.
“When you move the work to India and China you get an immediate $6,000 savings right there,” he says. “It’s huge.” [John Robb's Weblog]
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Jabber time - again. Jabber Goes Mobile.
Jabber,
of course, has been mobile for a while now with applications such as
TipicME and AgileMessenger. But what I'm talking about is Jabber, Inc.
They released a press release yesterday which announced their focus on
mobile messaging and promoting the XMPP XML spec. Jabber, Inc., the leading commercial provider of
XMPP-based presence and messaging solutions, is adding a wireless
instant messaging (IM) client suite to its product portfolio, making
the company's product suite the pre-eminent offering to bridge mobile
and desktop instant messaging users. This month the company is
releasing clients for RIM, PocketPC, Smartphone, Symbian and J2ME
compatible devices. Jabber, Inc. currently has gateways available for
connectivity to WAP and SMS devices. According to Jabber, Inc., each of the available clients
connects wirelessly to the Jabber XCP server, making them technically
interoperable with other IM and presence networks. Additionally, the
company reports that due to the flexibility and extensibility of the
Jabber XCP platform, mobile users will ultimately have access to a wide
range of real-time enterprise messaging applications across an
extensive spectrum of devices and networks. Each wireless client
initially offers text-based IM and presence management features, while
the RIM client also offers group chat functionality, otherwise known as
text conferencing. ... The RIM, PocketPC, Smartphone, Symbian and J2ME clients
are currently available for evaluation, with general release scheduled
for April 1, 2004.
The push for mobile instant messaging has been going on for a while
now, but seems to be reaching critical mass now in terms of deals. This
is just one announcement among many. The OMA is trying to push
standardization, OpenWave announced the other day it was integrating
MSN Messenger into its suite of products, and Canada's OZ just landed a
big deal with T-Mobile USA. There's lots of players in the space
already, as I wrote a year ago in a post titled Forget Mobile Instant Messaging as a Business Plan.
But reading that post, I can't believe that a year has gone by
already! There just hasn't been as much progress as I would've
expected. One would think a year is a long time, but Europeans are
still sending billions of SMS messages and the Americans are still only
slowly starting to get a clue. (I still regularly get short 30 second
calls from people here. JUST SEND ME A MESSAGE DAMMIT.). I guess it just has to do with the network and the phones.
I've had a GPRS Symbian phone for over a year now, but most people are
stuck on basic black and white handsets. Maybe this will be the year
where Mobile Instant Messaging starts to compete against SMS? I'm sure Jabber is hoping so... It'll probably be another year though. Oof.
-Russ By russ@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie]
Not only do I think XMPP and moble will take off for messaging -
but I have a sneaky feeling that within the NEXT year - we're gonna see
all sorts of other new uses of Jabber.
Here's a hint: "what humans do you know - who have static
emotions? Static set of friends? Just one set of opinions - which never
change?"
Wouldn't a system for dyanmically expressing friends, feelings
and ideas - be more appropriate for social networking? And wouldn't
Jabber be perfect for that system? [Marc's Voice]
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Tribe and Career Builder deal.
Tribe.net & CareerBuilder.com partnership…
Posted Mar 1, 2004, 12:53 PM ET by Judith Meskill
Partnerships, acquisitions, and new service launches continue to
heat up in the social networking space — Are all of these moves in the
“best” interest of the communities these YASNs serve? I hear echoes of
dana boyd speaking of “context” and “best” as being “in the eye of the
beholder.”
 SAN FRANCISCO, March 1 /PRNewswire/ — Tribe Networks, a company
pioneering a new approach to the online classifieds business through its popular Web site http://www.tribe.net,
today announced a partnership with CareerBuilder.com, a leading online
career site with over 16 million monthly unique visitors and more than
400,000 continuously updated jobs. Through this relationship,
Tribe.net’s users will be able to access CareerBuilder.com’s job
postings from over 25,000 top employers and leverage their own social
and
affinity networks to maximize job search efforts.
According to CareerBuilder.com’s “Plans for 2004” survey completed in
December
2003, 40 percent of workers said they plan to change jobs this year.
Workers also revealed that the top three methods they use for finding
new positions are newspaper classifieds, online career sites and
networking — making the relationship between Tribe.net and
CareerBuilder.com a natural fit.
...“Our mission is to give
people a better way to leverage their own networks to connect with
life-changing opportunities big and small,” said Mark Pincus, CEO of
Tribe Networks. “By partnering with CareerBuilder.com and joining its
network of partners, we can offer a critical mass of local job listings
that matter to our audience.”
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[The Social Software Weblog]
That's 3 today for Tribe. [Marc's Voice]
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A Taste of Linux, Part Two.
In our second helping, we serve up LindowsLive!, MandrakeMove, and
SUSE's Live Evaluation. Find out which is the blue-plate special and
which gets sent back to the kitchen. [Extremetech]
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SharpReader 0.9.4.1.
SharpReader 0.9.4.1 is now available at sharpreader.net. Changes since
the last version are: Fixed bug preventing SharpReader to startup for
some users. Fixed bug that was causing problems with long feed URLs
like amazon.com's feeds.... (37 words) [Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]
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Wired: The
best minds in electricity R&D have a plan: Every node in the power
network of the future will be awake, responsive, adaptive, price-smart,
eco-sensitive, real-time, flexible, humming - and interconnected with
everything else. [John Robb's Weblog]
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The accident of geography.
When I was in kindergarten, my family lived in New Delhi. It was a
magical year in which I made permanent memories of the sights, sounds,
and smells of India. A decade ago I returned to India for a tour of its
software industrial parks. That visit changed me in another way. I met
programmers and tech journalists who were my equal or better in every
way, but whom you'll likely never hear of unless they're profiled in an
article such as this week's cover story. Their faces and their voices
became permanent memories, too. For me, the offshoring debate isn't
abstract. I know that it turns on a mere accident of geography. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
This week's column is more about China than India. I interviewed MAPICS
CEO Dick Cook, who's been on trade missions to China, knows the
situation better than anyone I've met, and has thought deeply about how
the US can and should deal with it. ... [Jon's Radio]
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So, you wanna be a pyro?. BoingBoing buddy Hutch (pyrotechnics guru who works on the Burning of the Man,
as well as Hollywood stuff) points us to a series of workshops in
Southern California where you can learn to operate fireworks and do
pyro stage effects.
The seminars cost only $15 each to attend (what is that in Starbusian currency, like, four venti cappucinos?),
and they're offered by a group called Fireworks America. This year,
they'll be held in three locations: March 13 - Los Angeles area, March
20 - San Diego area, March 27 - Stockton area. Hutch says, "This is a
great opportunity to learn more about fireworks and stage effects.
Courses are available for every level of experience. There will be
special 'get your license' training for those that want it (please
note: this is for Public Display and Theatrical licenses, it does not
include Special Effects licensing information). These seminars are
always informative and a lot of fun! I learn new stuff every time I
attend. If you're interested in doing more shows, this is the place to
meet other operators and get on their crews."
Attendees must be 18 years or older. And if you're coming with
no prior experience or pyro scene connections, don't expect to walk
away with an invitation to join someone's crew. For good reasons, that
tends to take time, say folks in the biz. To RSVP for one of the
seminars, FIRST visit this link for background info, then call Ashley or Dianna at 800-464-7976, and for more background visit the Fireworks America site. [Boing Boing Blog]
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Chernobyl Poems and photos of Lybov Sirota. 
Following up on last week's post about a woman's photoblogging-by-motorcycle in the Chernobyl dead zone, this somewhat older collection of poems by a Chernobyl survivor -- and an online collection of images documenting her journey back to the site.
Lybov Sirota once worked as director of a writing program for children
near the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Before April 25th, 1986,
she'd never written poetry. That night, she needed a breath of fresh
air; she walked out on her balcony in Pripyat and watched Chernobyl's
nuclear reactor explode. The radioactivity exposure caused Sirota and
her son, Sasha, to become very ill. She began writing poetry about the experience. In 2000, her son persuaded her make a pilgrimage to their their former home; that journey is documented here.
Link to poems, Link to photo series.
(Thanks, muonzoo.)
[Boing Boing Blog]
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New Korean Robot Wants to Guard Your Home. BoingBoing pal du Paris Roland Piquepaille says:
There's
a new robot in town who wants to guard your home. This new security
robot, which currently has no name, is designed by the Korean company
Mostitech and will be distributed starting in June by Korea's top
mobile carrier, SK Telecom. With its price tag of only $850, it will be
a serious competitor for Banryu,
which costs $18,000. The unnamed robot is 50 centimeters tall and
weighs only 12 kilograms. In case of emergency, such as a fire, its
cameras can take snapshots and send them to the owner's cell phone.
Likewise, if an unexpected visitor is entering your home, you'll
receive his picture on your phone. It also can entertain your kids by
reading them a book. The Korea Times tells us the story while this overview provides some pictures of the cute unnamed robot.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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How news travels through blogs. 
A
reader writes, "Stephen VanDyke analyzes how news travels on the
Internet. He uses a nifty graphic that resembles a kabbalah diagram.
(In the process of doing this, VanDyke's post becomes a textbook
example of how news travels."
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Filthy origami. 
This
collection of dirty origami -- mostly explicit sexual stuff -- is
hilarious. The Kama Sutra pieces are nice, and folding a vulva out of a
dollar bill is a great dinner-table trick, but they're not a patch on
this pooping doggy origami.
Link
(via Flashbot)
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Undergroundfilm.org.
What is undergroundfilm.com? [Scripting News]
In answer to Dave's question - Undergroundfilm.org is a site for film and video makers to upload their work and interact between each other.
All I know is that someone named Alex Cohen (who's an old buddy of
Dave's) - got handed this server a while back and is now heading up the
effort.
More later............ [Marc's Voice]
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Big Screens. better UI for big screens.
Better UI for big screens
"Our user interface designs do not scale well to the available
screen real estate. Windows are hard to access on very large or
heterogeneous displays, like Tablets and non-touch-enabled devices.
Notifications come up where one is not attending, and windows open in
unexpected places or are improperly sized for their contents." -- Microsoft Research VIBE, Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment
The Microsoft team presents a number of ideas for dealing with complexity across large screens. I like the idea of Drag-and-Pop which might help navigate even not so big. yet cluttered desktops like mine.
via every breath death defying: more GUI Madness [Sarah Allen's Weblog]
Marc's bit....
Another direct effect of broadband on our world - big screens and UIs designed for big screens. [Marc's Voice]
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Timelines. Quote du jour.
From Jerry Michalski:
...why is the Microsoft Office suite so pathetic at timelines and
other structures involving time? Excel in particular just sucks at
charting timelines. (If you've found a way to do it, send me some
hints.) Do they think adding time smarts will kill sales of Project?
They can't actually believe that.
Ran across that while thinking about OSAF, Chandler and the need to break corporations free from the iron grip of Exchange.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
Marc's bit.....
Jerry's right - Timelines are a key form of interactive
information and browsing. This is another example of what should be
built into the OS. Certainly APIs and a standard for time based events,
etc. - would also be required. [Marc's Voice]
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N-Gage. Scott Miller has been talking about the problems with N-Gage,
mostly from a brand marketing point of view. I think he's right on some
things, and a bit off-base on some others... But before I talk about
it, I need to say: I am not an Nokia employee. I do not speak for Nokia
corporately, in any fashion whatsoever. Everything I say here is in my
role as an independent observer of the games industry, and as someone
pretty knowledgeable about the wireless industry as well. And indeed,
by the time I post this, I will have read it over three or four times
to ensure that there are no disclosures of any information unreported
by other media--except for the bits that must be taken as purely
personal opinion.
First, lets talk about the hardware issues,
which have been extensively dissected elsewhere. The N-Gage is
essentially a reskinned Nokia 3650, minus the camera and plus an FM
radio, with a different set of controls. Virtually all of the hardware
flaws result from this legacy. In the 3650, you need to remove the
battery pack to replace the memory card; this is not a problem, because
you basically only replace the memory card if you decide to upgrade to
one with more memory. You take photos, send them via MMS or sync them
to your PC, then you delete them. The card can stay in place basically
forever.
With the N-Gage, it 's a problem, because you have to
replace the memory card every time you want to play a different game.
Doing so is awkward; you turn off the device, you open the back, you
take out the battery pack, you take out the MMC, you slide in a new
MMC, you replace the battery pack, you close the back, you turn the
device on, and you wait for it to reboot... For anyone used to yanking
the cart out of a GBA, sticking a new one in, and starting to play,
this is intolerable.
The N-Gage screen is portrait format (that
is, taller than it is wide). In fact, it's the same screen used in the
3650 (and, I believe, all other Nokia Series 60 devices so far). Most
games are played on screens (monitors, TVs, or GBA screens) that are
landmark format--wider than tall. Most games are designed with this in
mind, and it causes some problems when porting to N-Gage, because in a
game that moves side-to-side, you have less time to react to something
appearing at a screen edge, since the screen edge is closer. Obviously,
it's not a problem for displaying photos, or SMS messages, or other
phone features. In other words: Works fine for the 3650, a problem for
N-Gage.
One of the reasons for Nokia's phenomenal success in the
mobile phone market is that it is among the most efficient
manufacturers of phones. One of the ways they keep their manufacturing
costs down is by sharing parts among different models. As a result,
some of these decisions are understandable.
From my perspective,
once the press started pointing out the problems with the device--in
particular, the memory card placement issue--Nokia should have pulled
back, said, hmm, if we want a strong launch, we'd better do something
about this. They should have delayed the launch of N-Gage by six months
or a year, if necessary, to correct the issues. You only get one chance
to launch a new console system--and never, in the history of the field,
has anyone recovered from a weak launch.
The mobile phone market
does not work in the same way. Nokia has over 60 devices on the market
at the moment. They launch a dozen or more new phones every year. Speed
to market is considered more important than getting every little aspect
right the first time around; there's always room for a new, improved
version in six months or a year. Typically, console manufacturers
announce a new machine years before product launch; Nokia
announced N-Gage in December 2003 and launched in Fall 2004. I'm not
sure it ever occurred to them to delay the launch; in the mobile phone
market, you can fix flaws later.
I'm going to tell a story now.
This story is not based on any kind of inside information. It's a guess
as to what was going through the N-Gage engineers' (and marketers')
heads. I have not personally talked with anyone on the engineering
side, and my acquaintance with people on the marketing side is
glancing, and any discussions I may or may not have had with them have
not centered on these issues.
When Nokia launched the 3650 (the
second Series 60 device), they looked at it and said, hmm, this is a
nifty little game machine. 104Mhz ARM chip, hugely faster than GBA;
nice full color screen; decent battery life; multiple megabytes of
storage on the MMC; Bluetooth and air network connectivity. You could
do some cool games for this thing. But it doesn't look like a game
machine.
Nokia is lauching a whole slew of special-purpose
phones: camera phones, PDA/phone hybrids (both pen-based and
keyboard-based varieties), phone/MP3 player hybrids, devices that play
video. Why not do a sort of game-phone, with controls optimized for
gameplay, based on our dear old Series 60 platform?
Thus N-Gage.
But when it was announced--what was, I think, from Nokia's original
perspective, just another new device combining phone functionality with
functionality for another purpose--the games industry went nuts. The
game industry said: Nokia is going toe-to-toe with Nintendo!!!!
To
which, I suspect, Nokia execs said: Holy fuck. We are? Well... Okay
then. Hey, there's a lot of money in them thar games. Let's see what
happens if we do go toe-to-toe with Nintendo.
One of the points
on which Miller is right is that Nokia execs didn't know much about the
game industry going in. At the press conference at the London Eye at
which N-Gage was announced, the presenting executives didn't seem to
know what the device's processor speed was. This is not normally a
concern for mobile phone buyers--but it's virtually the first question
a game journalist will ask at a new console unveiling. And there were
few people in Finland with game industry experience. (Nokia hired a
publishing team, operating out of Vancouver, who do have substantial
experience with the industry.)
Nokia is, however, a company that
is light on its feet, learns quickly, and does not allow its success to
become arrogance--virtually a Finnish national trait, by the way. I
don't think I've ever met an arrogant Finn. The problem, I think, is
that Nokia didn't learn fast enough--but if it tries something like
N-Gage again, it will have learned a lot from the N-Gage experience.
I
also think Scott is subtly wrong that Nokia was guilty of bad branding
by making it the "Nokia N-Gage" rather than setting up a subsidiary to
be "the N-Gage company". It is, after all, the Sony Playstation 2 and the Microsoft
XBox. Scott maintains that Nokia was diluting the value of the Nokia
brand by associating it with something other than a phone, and
sabotaging the potential success of N-Gage by associating it with a
company not known for games. In reality, the mobile phone market is
moving away from pure voice telephony devices to multipurpose devices.
High-end phones today run an operating system, and provide PDA like
functionality--datebook, address book, and so on. Even mid-range phones
can run games (and other J2ME/BREW apps). If you walk into a wireless
store today and ask for a bare-bones phone, one that can't run
J2ME and/or BREW, you're going to have a problem finding one. And three
years from now, if you walk into a store and ask for a phone that
doesn't run Symbian, Microsoft Smartphone, Palm OS, or Linux for small
devices, you're probably going to be shit out of luck.
My guess
is that Nokia has lost a chunk of change on N-Gage, so far--but that's
a drop in the bucket from a larger corporate perspective. At the same
time that N-Gage was acheiving, to be generous, limited success, Nokia
became the largest camera manufacturer in the world. That may sound odd
to you, but Nokia ships and sells more photo-taking devices than Kodak,
Nikon, Canon, or Olympus. No shit.
Scott views Nokia as "diluting its brand by moving away from phones," but in fact, phones
are moving away from phones. Nokia bills itself as a manufacturer of
mobile devices, not of phones alone--although every device they
manufacture has wireless voice telephony capabilities. Where the market
is growing is not, however, in barebones talking sticks, but in
multipurpose mobile "phones" that also do a lot of other things.
Scott
also deprecates the games on other Nokia phones as not fundamentally
important to Nokia; actually, that's not true. Mobile operators are
faced with rapid declines in revenues from voice telephony (in industry
argot, ARPU--average revenues per user--is in swift decline). This is
driven party by competition, and partly by Moore's Law; the switches
and routers on which operators depend on the backend are cheaper and
cheaper, so providing voice telephony is becoming cheaper. To sustain
ARPU, operators desperately need users to adopt wireless data services
other than voice--and they've succeeded in doing so (more so in Europe
and Asia than here). Today, the largest revenue generators for
operators on the data side are, in order: text messaging; screenery and
ring tones; and... games.
In other words, even if N-Gage had
never happened, games are central to Nokia's strategy moving forward.
They're among the few mobile data services for which users have proven
their willingness to pay. The game industry has fixed on N-Gage as the
most interesting piece of the story--but in terms of gross revenues
(pan-industry, not for Nokia per se), downloadable J2ME/BREW games
generate a lot more traffic, and a lot more dollars, than retail sales
of N-Gage titles. And as smartphones (I'm using the term generically--a
lot more Symbian phones out there than Microsoft ones) become more
widespread, games compiled to native machine code are going to become
increasingly important, too. In other words: N-Gage die or soar, Nokia
needs to have an interest in games, and a strategy for them.
Launching N-Gage as a Nokia device wasn't a bad idea; the flaws of the device were, however.
Nokia
made another mistake, which Scott does pick up on. In the games
industry, hardware doesn't sell itself; nobody but a few hardware nuts
buys a console because it's a cool machine. People buy hardware to play
games they want to play. Every console manufacturer tries to ensure
that in its slate of launch titles, there's at least one must-have
game--Halo for XBox, for example.
Ideally, you have a title that
says: This is so cool a machine, it can play games that could never be
played on any previous platform. And here is that game.
With
N-Gage, the potential was -absolutely- there. N-Gage is the first
connected hand-held console. (Pace those who cable-connect GBAs for
multiplayer play.) With both Bluetooth and air network connectivity, it
held open the possibility of cool multiplayer, even massively
multiplayer, gameplay on a mobile device. When N-Gage was announced, I
talked about it with my kids, suggesting that they could play with
their friends even while tooling around in their mom's car. (I'm a
NYer... I don't have a car. In fact, I bike almost everywhere.)
"Cool!" was their response.
When
N-Gage launched, it had (I might be wrong on this) precisely one title
that allowed multiplayer gameplay; the N-Gage version of Red Faction
(developed by ideaworks3D). Bluetooth fast-action gameplay, no use of
the air network.
What Nokia =should= have launched with was a
slate of multiplayer games--some Bluetooth, some hitting the air
network--that were NOT ports from other platforms, but really showed
off why a multiplayer, mobile, wide-area device could create really
cool games. They should have had TibiaME for N-Gage. Hell, they should have had EverQuest for N-Gage. They should have had Laser Squad Nemesis
for N-Gage. They should have had PoppaZoppa for N-Gage. And they should
have had N-Gage-only titles that were equally compelling--multiplayer,
mobile, networked games.
What Nokia had, instead, was
essentially tired, repurposed IP. Sonic N. Red Faction. Tony Hawk.
Yadayada. I'm not going to lay out $300 to play these games; I can play
them on other platforms.
Nokia went out to ensure that other
major publishers supported N-Gage. They enlisted Sega, THQ, and (later)
EA among others. That was a smart move; it allowed Nokia to say "It's
not just us, look, other major game companies are supporting N-Gage."
But it wasn't enough. Nokia should also have gone after the innovators
in multiplayer, online gameplay, because they were the ones likeliest
to product games that really showed off the N-Gage's capabilities. In
addition to the Segas and THQs of the world, they should have been
talking to the ids, the Turbines, and the Blizzards.
Nokia also
botched the message on pricing. When I can get a version of GBA for
$70, you have to persuade me that an alternative device is extremely
cool, if you want me to lay out $299--the announced price point. When
Nokia announced that price point, they failed to get across a highly
important secondary message: operators often subsidize the price of
phones, if you'll sign a year (or two year) contract. The game press
reported: price is $300, gosh that's high. This was not a good message
for consumers to hear.
The fact is that, in the UK, you can get
an N-Gage for one pound (and a year's contract). And even in the US,
you can now pick up an N-Gage for $199--with a game kicked in for free.
Just by stating the message a little differently, Nokia could have
gotten a very different reaction from the industry press.
People
(including commenters on Scott's blog) have speculated that Nokia may
release a new version of N-Gage that fixes some of the hardware flaws.
I have absolutely no inside knowledge on this subject (and if I did,
probably wouldn't even be talking about it), but I wouldn't be
surprised. That would be in keeping with Nokia's past history of fixing
the problems with one device in a new one.
But.... In the games
industry, you only get one chance to launch a console system... And no
system has ever recovered from a bad launch.
Not, incidentally,
that this is necessarily a "bad launch." The game industry has
concluded so--but then, the game industry considers XBox's sales a
"disappointment." As reported elsewhere, Nokia has shipped 600,000
N-Gages. Nokia considers a single phone model that sells multiple
millions of units a major hit; N-Gage probably hasn't done as well as
Nokia hoped, but it isn't necessarily a huge disappointment, by their
standards (though Jorma Olilla, Nokia's CEO, has said that sales
weren't up to expectations). I would fully expect Nokia, in a year or
so, to say that N-Gage has done reasonably well by their standards.
Their standards are not the game industry's standards.
And--it's
interesting that new games are being announced virtually every month,
by major game publishers, for N-Gage. By game industry standards, not a
lot of SKUs are being shipped for N-Gage--and it may be that, on a
per-title basis, the publishers are doing rather well. A relatively
small installed base can still be profitable, if the competition is
slim. This is, after all, why there's still a Mac games industry.
It's
true, though, that N-Gage hasn't become what I'd hoped it would: A
real, and dynamic, challenge to Nintendo's dominance of handheld games.
Not that I bear Nintendo any ill... Quite the contrary, really; however
annoying some of their business practices, they produce some pretty
keen games. But the GBA is, when you come down to it, a surprisingly
underpowered device, and we -need- good mobile multiplayer games, which
GBA can't supply, and it's amazing that Nintendo's dominance of
handheld games has gone unchallenged so long.
I personally would
not be surprised if, two or three years from now, Nokia decides to give
it another go, with a new device.... And given Nokia's ability to
learn, I suspect that the next time round, they'll do rather better.
[Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Pole Tricks. Step
aerobics? So 80s. Spinning? So boring. Yoga and pilates? Over by virtue
of having been included in lyrics to a Madonna song. If Angelina Jolie,
Daryl Hannah, and Oprah Herself say that pole dancing is the hottest
new fitness craze, who are we to argue?
Pole Tricks 101 [Fleshbot]
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Erotic Origami. An
oldie but a goodie: this site gives you dozens of ideas for doing
something with the money in your wallet besides spending it on porn.
We're especially fond of the "Bill & Monica" tableau.
Origami Underground (thanks Lynn) [Fleshbot]
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The Madonna That Was. Younger
readers of Fleshbot may not remember the time in the early 90s when you
couldn't open a magazine or turn on the television without hearing
about Madonna naked somewhere, with nude photos from her early days
appearing in Penthouse, the release of a really bad movie in which she
had sex with Willem Dafoe, and the publication of an infamous coffee
table book of pictures featuring her simulating sex with Vanilla Ice
and Naomi Campbell. Will Britney be following in her footsteps one day?
La Vida de Madonna (lasguias.com, via Linkydinky) [Fleshbot]
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Museum of Bad Art. 
The
Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is the world's only museum dedicated to the
collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all
its forms. "We do not tire in our efforts to bring the worst of art to
the widest of audiences," reads the MOBA manifesto. At left, the piece
that started it all -- Lucy In the Field With Flowers, oil on
canvas by Unknown, acquired from the trash in Boston. "The motion, the
chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the
expression on her face -- every detail combines to create this
transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out masterpiece."
Link to MOBA's online collection (via Buffoonery). BoingBoing's founder, the ever-prescient Mark Frauenfelder, covered this years ago in Wired Mag -- Link to article.
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Sick, surreal, dark QT short -- Beauty Kit. 
The nightmarish QuickTime short "Beauty Kit"
parodies toy ads for children, instructional health videos, and
modern-day body image psychosis by way of a do-it-yourself breast
augmentation kit for young girls. When you live in LA, this is not such
a far stretch of imagination: I've heard testimony from SoCal teens of
late-teenage daughters in wealthy families receiving plastic surgery as
gifts from adult family members. For real. While you're on this site,
check out the rest of pleix.net's short films, which are fantastic. For instance, e-baby -- utterly chilling.
Link (from Ticklefight, via El Fabuloso Mas Macho). [Boing Boing Blog]
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Beyond knowledge?.The February issue of Wired features an article on offshoring by Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation. Wired's story, entitled The New Face of the Silicon Age, might instead have been called Free Agent World. Here's a stunning exchange between Pink and New Jersey state senator Shirley Turner:
... [Jon's Radio]
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The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin. Nice interview with Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh project at Apple and bOING bOING contributor.
very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for
the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was
only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to
press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was
probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which
discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have
done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain
school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that
designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't
put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a
multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select"
and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of
putting writing on keys did not occur to anybody, including me. So if I
was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be
labeled. The labeling also the other good effect of forcing software
designers to use them as labels otherwise it's clear that they are
being misused.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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We Are Porn. Actually, we thought we were porn, but we're happy to share the spotlight with the ten talented artists in this gallery. (Side note: We plan on using "porn" as an adjective as much as possible from now on, e.g. "That's so porn!" or "I'm feeling very porn today." Help spread the word.)
We Are Porn (via Body Collector) [Fleshbot]
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Fallows
provides a detailed account of how well researched pre-war plans for a
post-war Iraq were cast aside. One of the major drivers of this is
Rumsfeld's belief in uncertainty:
The limits of future
knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, "who is
death to predictions." "His big strategic theme is uncertainty," Feith
said. "The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability
to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on
our intelligence."
Uncertainty is different from
risk in that there is no mathematical predication that can be made
based on historical behavior. However, in Rumsfeld's mind, it seems
that a belief in uncertainty only applies to negative outcomes and not
upside opportunities (ie. don't prepare because we don't know what the
outcome will be):
In the immediate run-up to
the war the Administration still insisted that the costs were
unforeseeable. "Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless
and until we get there on the ground," Paul Wolfowitz told the House
Budget Committee on February 27, with combat less than three weeks away.
The way military planning
accounts for uncertainty is to build contingencies. While the precise
risk can't be calculated, broad categories of uncertainties can be
anticipated and contingencies can be built around them. That requires
lots more resources than the core plan requires. In business the logic
is exactly the opposite. If you fund every contingency based on
unquantifiable uncertainty, you will lose money. This, in combination
with the heavy emphasis on corporate mercenaries currently in place,
leads me to conclude that "business" logic is at the core of Rumsfeld's
transformational military. [John Robb's Weblog]
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I say call it RSS 3.0!. RSS/Atom merge.
RSS is raging and Dave has outlined a plan to merge RSS and Atom. I think it would be a good thing for the web, for RSS, for Atom and for syndication technology in general. As developers of an RSS-based product we are going to support such a merge whatever it will take to make it work. Let's start by creating a new topic: RSS/Atom ";->". [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Is there any conenction between this olive branch and the notion of RSS 3.0? I say - yes! Let's do it - think of the end-users FIRST! [Marc's Voice]
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Interview with Microsoft's typography master. What do you look at on a computer more than anything else, but rarely think about? Fonts!
Today I got to interview Bill Hill, the co-inventor of ClearType, and the head of the typography team here at Microsoft. Several hours later I'm still pinching myself.
Mike is an awesome storyteller. I can't wait to give you access to the video. Just a few snippets:
1) He has a 200 dpi IBM monitor in his office. Wow. You haven't
lived until you've read a weblog on such a high resolution screen. He
spent a good part of the time explaining how coming screen advancements
are going to really increase readability.
2) He says he designs software, not for Windows, but for
"Homosapiens 1.0." He spends a lot of time understanding how humans
perceive things. In fact, the idea thread that led to the development
of ClearType started when he was tracking a Coyote in a forest (he does
that for fun -- he belongs to a club of people who read animal tracks
to try to understand more about the animal world).
3) He spends a lot of time studying how humans perceive color and
how they read. And what causes them pain when reading on the screen.
His team is working on new fonts that'll increase readability and
productivity (he was the one who commissioned Georgia and Verdana).
4) He's studying how to use multiple screens. In his office he has a
second monitor -- a projector on the wall -- running full time. He uses
this second monitor differently from his main high-res monitor. In his
studies of human perception he learned that the periphery vision is
more attuned to movement. So, he puts his email and his alerts on this
second screen.
5) Why wasn't ClearType on by default? Because they weren't sure how
well it'd work on non-LCD monitors. And because some video cards had
troubles.
6) Why do some people hate ClearType? Because ClearType relies on
how we perceive color. Some people, he says, have a heightened
perception to some colors which makes ClearType less useful to them.
5) He answered for all time why you should never put two spaces
after punctuation: extra spacing slows down readability. He explained
to us why that convention was started for typewriter fonts, but he says
that there is no professional typographer in the world that'll put two
spaces after a period with a modern proportionally-spaced font.
I asked a good number of the questions that were left by you in my
comments area. Thanks! I'll try to get to those soon (and have sent
Bill them in email too).
Some tips from Bill?
1) Make sure your LCD is set to the native resolution. ClearType won't work if you don't have your resolution set properly.
2) Use the ClearType tuner. For many people this makes ClearType much better.
3) Small fonts (the 8 pt style that's the rage on many weblogs now)
are far less readable than, say, 11 pt fonts. He does say, though, that
readability starts going down at sizes bigger than 11 or 12 pt.
Anyway, thanks Bill for the interesting insights. I know I'll never
look at my fonts the same way again. When our Channel 9 project turns
on, I'll let you know more. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Google's Orkut improves. Wow, Google's Orkut
yesterday turned on new "friends" functionality. You can now accept a
message from someone and tell Orkut "I haven't met" this person. Nice
and makes me much more willing to come back and spend some time
adjusting my list.
I wish I could use Google as a PhotoBlogRoll, though. It's amazing. Almost everyone has entered their photo in my Orkut. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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ITConversations fantastic, Jeremy says. Jeremy Wright: "I'm sure I'll never get invited, but hearing these real people talk in real ways is fantastic. Keep it up ITConversations!"
I agree. Doug Kaye is onto something here. He called me up and we
just started talking. I'm listening to the other interviews he's done
and I like the format. It's just like many of the conversations we have
at geek dinners. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004 |
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Thursday, March 04, 2004 |
Details
on how the US used its ability to track a cellphone chip (Swisscom)
globally enabled them to shut down al Qaeda operations and capture key
operatives. Of course, al Qaeda is a learning organization (heterarchies are good at this), they have since moved from cellphones to the Internet and hand delivery (most likely Skype for voice):
A half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe
agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation
because, they said, it was completed. They also said they had strong
indications that terror suspects, alert to the phones' vulnerability,
had largely abandoned them for important communications and instead
were using e-mail, Internet phone calls and hand-delivered messages. [John Robb's Weblog]
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William Lind whacks the neo-con thesis: democracratic capitalism can be imposed. Case point to contrary: Haiti.
The neo-cons in fact are Jacobins, les ultras of the French
Revolution who also tried to export “human rights” (which are very
different from the concrete, specific rights of Englishmen) on
bayonets. Then, the effort eventually united all of Europe against
France. Today, it is uniting the rest of the world against America. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Blackmail and terrorism. This is a real trend.
A previously unknown group calling itself AZF has threatened to
blow up France's SNCF state railway if it can't be satisfied with a
ransom of five million US dollars (four million euros), officials said
Wednesday.
On Feb. 21, the police found one sophisticated time bomb under
rails near Limoges between Paris and Toulouse following hints by the
AZF.
This is unusual given that it was directed against a state
run organization. It is much more effective against companies that
trade in public markets. Terrorists are quickly moving away from away
from mercurial sources of funding (donations and state funding) to
self-funding via economic crime (drugs, blackmail, protection money,
stock market manipulation, etc.). This move will make terrorist
organizations much more difficult to shut down. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Full text of the Zaqwari letter (not just quotes). The last paragraph is particularly interesting.
SO IF YOU AGREE WITH IT AND ARE
CONVINCED OF THE IDEA OF KILLING THE PERVERSE SECTS, WE STAND READY AS
AN ARMY FOR YOU, TO WORK UNDER YOUR GUIDANCE AND YIELD TO YOUR COMMAND.
Here's an alternative interpretation: It implies that Zaqwari's
operation wasn't set up by al Qaeda. By emphasizing the
negative/perils, he is making his case for help and command ownership
from the larger organization. [John Robb's Weblog]
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But They Will Want It All Someday, Even if They Don't Know It Yet. Consumers Don't Want It All, and They Don't Want It Now
"Many consumers are not interested in handheld devices that offer
multiple functions beyond making phone calls or holding data, according
to a survey by Guideline Research, a custom market research firm. The
survey of a representative group of online consumers also found that
25% of consumers think these multifunctional devices have limited
functionality.
As the market for electronic handheld devices has become saturated,
manufacturers of such electronics are driven to add features in an
effort to maintain their growth. To this end, they are hoping to add to
their general consumer base by offering products to those who are
looking for devices that perform two or more functions. Yet, despite
their efforts, 49% of consumers surveyed said they have no desire for
such a device." [infoSync World]
I think it's a bit misleading to be asking consumers these types of
questions just yet. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the
headline could have read, "Consumers Don't Know that They'll Be Able to
Have It All Very Soon."
Whenever I show someone new my Treo 600, I get one of two reactions:
1) I want one and I want it now (followed by shock and disappointment
when they hear how expensive it is), or 2) I'm not ready for that yet.
The key there is the "yet." After all, I'm sure that 20 years ago, more than 25% of consumers would have said that computers have "limited functionality" and well more than 49% of consumers would have said they have "no desire for such a device."
With the introduction last year of converged devices like the Sony
P800, Treo 600, and any number of devices in Japan (along with faster
networks in the U.S.), we're finally getting to a point where such a
beast is useful and actually works. It won't take anywhere near 20
years for them to become as mainstream as computers have become. Maybe
3-5, but that time is definitely coming, and libraries need to prepare
for it. [The Shifted Librarian]
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What Is RSS-Blog-Furl High School Missing?. Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School
"English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up
the computer at his classroom desk. It’s 6:50 in the morning. After
logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog.
There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines
and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting
that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a
quick click, Tom uses the 'Furl it' button on his toolbar, adds a bit
of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl
journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the
link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for
students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of
summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the
night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks
through to the student’s personal site and adds a positive comment to
the assignment post. He also 'Furls' that site, putting it in the Best
Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for
students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created
to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It’s
7:00...." [Weblogg-ed News]
Check out the full text of this amazing post by Will Richardson. In
it, he pulls together the beginning threads of integrating blogs, RSS,
and social bookmarking in an educational setting. It's a great vision,
one that I fully believe will eventually happen in one integrated app.
However - and this is a big however - the only time the library
shows up in Will's post is when the teacher unsubscribes from the
library's feed! There's no mention of a topical feeds from the library,
use of library databases to support research or assignments, no
collaborative collection of web-based resources managed by the library,
or any other daily interaction with the library and its resources. It's
actually pretty sad when you think about it, but unfortunately, it will
be accurate if librarians don't start understanding, using, and
providing information to these types of tools. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Component builders and solution builders.
Despite lots of second-guessing, there is no consensus that the CLR is
inherently unfriendly to dynamic languages. The JVM didn't bend over
backwards for such languages either, and yet Jython is a great success
thanks to the heroic efforts of its inventor, Jim Hugunin. Now Hugunin
has turned his attention to .NET, and reports promising results with a
prototype Python implementation for .NET called IronPython.
Such projects always seem to spring from an inspired
individual or small team. In fact, Microsoft has such a team. It
created JScript.NET, the most dynamic of Microsoft's .NET languages.
But JScript.NET is the unloved stepsister of C# and VB.NET.
Dynamic languages are rooted in a culture that is simply not
indigenous to Redmond. That may change, but for the time being, the
future of dynamic languages in .NET lies with non-Microsoft innovators.
[Full story at InfoWorld.com]
The day this story posted, Larry O'Brien pointed me to Jim Waldo's essay, To type or not to type, which says in part:
When we argue over whether or not a programming language should have
types, we are not discussing a matter of fact. Instead, we are
participating in what [linguistic philosopher John L.] Austin would
call confessional language; what we are really doing is saying something about ourselves.
... [Jon's Radio]
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The Purpose of a Business. This is largely a response to JP's comment on my last post...
As a libertarian, I can hardly object to making money... Indeed, I think making money is something very much worth striving for.
However,
any business that is -just- about making money is unlikely to spur
sufficient passion in its employees to succeed over the long term. This
is, I think, one of the big problems with Disney animation; if you read
what animators have to say about what it's like to work for Disney,
it's pretty horrifying. What was (for an animator) once one of the
coolest jobs in the universe is now rote work on formula plots. There's
a reason Pixar triumps and Disney fails, and it's not
technology--although Disney has, naturally, come to the incorrect
conclusion that drawn animation is dead, and 3D is the future.
A
business is an organization. Organizations--businesses, non-profits,
social clubs, government institutions, organizations of all kinds--are
founded by people who have -something they want to do.- A business is a
good type of organization for many of the things that people want to
do--not feeding the hungry, but making microchips--precisely because it
-does- allow its owners to profit from its success.
But profit
is not the =purpose= of a business; profit is the condition of survival
(to borrow Tom Peters' phrase). A business that does not
profit--indeed, more than that, a business that does not provide a rate
of return at least comparable to that available from other
investments--will not survive long.
The purpose of a well run
business is not profit in and of itself; a well run business always
seeks profit, but if a book publisher, say, could make more money
investing in junk bonds (a very likely scenario, by the way), well, it
probably won't do that, because its management and employees don't want
to invest in junk bonds. They want to publish books.
The purpose
of a game company is to produce games. The way to motivate the
employees of a game company to do their best work is to allow them to
work on games they think are really cool.
By and large, most
people are in the game industry not because they want to make big bux,
but because they love games. There are exceptions--there seem to be a
lot of marketing and management folk who are in the game industry
because they can't get the job they really want in Hollywood (and some
developers who qualify here too), but almost everyone could make more
money doing something else. Programmers could make more money working
on financial transaction systems for investment banks. Artists could
make more money doing animation for TV. Marketers could make more money
working for packaged goods firms. Game designers... Well, okay, maybe
they're stuck, but they surely didn't become game designers as a second
choice after they couldn't get hired as technical writers.
JP is
right that part of the game industry's problem is a somewhat cynical
concentration on the bottom line at the expense of other
considerations--considerations that, as I've argued, are actually
equally important to ultimate success. But part of it is also a failure
of taste, I think; I suspect a lot of people pushing the new racing
title, the new football game, the new RTS just like the last one
actually do think it's pretty darn cool. Or have swallowed Warren
Spector's Kool-Aid, and have convinced themselves that if they have to
do a Scooby Doo game, by golly, they'll make the best darn Scooby Doo
game they can.
But a lot has to do with the cover-your-ass
syndrome. It's easy to greenlight the tried-and-true. Greenlighting
novelty puts your ass on the line.
I'm not sure how to get out
of this fix. I've argued previously that we need an independent games
industry, with a parallel but separate distribution channel from
conventional games; that would be nice, but it hasn't happened yet.
I
remember Warren telling me, years ago, about a conversation he had with
an executive at his then firm. Warren pointed out that all the titles
he had worked on up until then had been profitable, even though none
had sold in excess of 300,000 units. The executive told him, yes, but
if he funded the next Wing Commander game, it would sell a lot more
than that, and be a lot more profitable. And thus he was cancelling
Warren's title. Warren felt he couldn't really argue.
But he
should have. The next Wing Commander might sell a lot more than the
next Ultima Underground, but they'd both make money, in a field in
which most games lose money. The right thing for the executive to do
was fund the Wing Commander game--then go raise capital, however
possible, to fund Warren's game, too. It really wasn't all that risky a
proposition.
I'm not in favor of big financial risks on novel
like, say, Majestic. (An idea, incidentally, that anyone with a history
in multiplayer online games could see was badly flawed--not that EA
listened to anyone in its studios with experience in multiplayer online
games, since they weren't at Redwood Shores.) I am in favor of placing
a lot of smaller risks.
What the industry learned from Deer
Hunter was "jeez, Wal-Mart can move a lot of product." What it should
have learned was "hey, find a new market niche and you can make big
bux." The original Deer Hunter cost low six figures to make.
I'm
not holding it out as a beautiful examplar of jewel-like innovative
perfection. It sucked, when you come down to it. But it was a big
innovative leap, in its own strange way. We need a lot more of them. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Douglas Adams media archive. An extensive online media archive dedicated to the creator of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
The Douglas Adams media archive is presented here by the wi2600.org
groups for your enjoyment. This allso is to serve as a tribute to Mr.
Adams's great, but suddely shortened career. Those who have not heard
his voice and those who know it well will both enjoy having this
material available.We will miss him!
Link, which will no doubt be BoingBoinged to death by the time you read this, (Thanks, Chris!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Gene Wolfe's rules for writers. Gene Wolfe's rules for writers are amazing and sensible and good.
Examine your modifiers ruthlessly. What do they add to the story?
Cut adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors which do not shed light or develop the narrative voice.
Don't repeat yourself.
Give the reader small surprises: moments of humor, delightful metaphors, something that jolts.
Understand your characters. No one is a villain to him/herself. No one is clinically sane if you know them well enough.
Link
(via Making Light) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Stop geting credit-card offers.
A Kuro5hin writer has posted a great step-by-step for ensuring that you
never receive a pre-approved credit-card solicitation again.
Fortunately, hidden away in the fine print of every single pre-approved
offer sent to consumers is a paragraph stating how to prevent credit
bureaus from including you in pre-screened lists. If you're like me and
always end up throwing these offers away, I urge you to follow one of
these procedures to notify the four credit reporting agencies of your
request to opt out.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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How to run a beta test. Joel gives us 12 rules on how to run a beta test.
I would add one other thing: reward top testers. Adobe gave me a
$1400 laser printer for reporting more bugs than any other Acrobat beta
tester (this was back in the Acrobat 1.0 days). The next release they
told everyone they weren't going to give away any prizes and my bug
reporting went WAY down. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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InfoWorld's CTO on Blogging ROI. Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld's Chief Technology Officer, talks about blogging ROI.
"In media business circles, most discussions focus fundamentally
on ROI. A lot of these folks are asking, "What is my return on weblogs?
Why do weblogs?" In financial terms, because weblogs are so simple to
produce, I think the business folks should focus more on the minimal
"I" involved -- the investment. There is very little financial risk in
starting a weblog, so clearly-defined returns aren't as necessary." [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Joel has interesting thread on offshoring. Joel Spolsky
really is on the top of the "A list" of tech bloggers for me. Why do I
say that? Out of all the bloggers that have linked to me lately he's
sent me more traffic than any of them. 7000 came from one link alone.
Plus, he gets talked about in the lunchroom and at geek dinners.
Both of these things tell me that developers look up to him a great
deal.
His readers, too, are interesting and intelligent. At lunch today we were talking about this thread about offshoring. It's one of the most interesting discussions about offshoring that we've seen. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Robert Kaplan
turns his focus to the newly emerging American warrior diplomat (again,
a back to the future moment), with a profile of the US military advisor
to Mongolia (this has to be one of the best jobs in the world). He's
working to hold the country together in the face of Chinese and
terrorist encrouchment. An example of his work is his plans for border
enforcement:
Wilhelm's plan for policing the border was a mobile force that
would mix fast ponies and Bactrian camels with light, high-tech
communications gear.
A little flavor of the job and the man:
Having swallowed a glass of
blood and eaten the animal's testicles and eyeballs, Wilhelm turned to
me. "Like I said," he announced, "this is better than rush-hour traffic
on 395 en route to the Pentagon." He never tired, never stopped
laughing and slapping his fellow officers on the back. Major Altankhuu
confided to me at one point, "Colonel Wilhelm is a great man. He makes
us like America so much."
More:
The victorious army had a
handful of T-72 tanks with stereo speakers blasting Jimmy Buffett's
"Last Mango in Paris." That, Wilhelm told me, was "postmodern war, or
whatever you want to call it."
BTW: Mongolia sent 175 troops
to Baghdad to help the US. This is the first time since the Mongol
empire killed 1 m people in and around Baghdad, by hand, nearly 800 years ago. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Art project on economics of tech outsourcing to India: Aladeen.
Danielle Spencer (a BoingBoing pal who works with David Byrne, among
other things) points us to a new art project from The Builder's
Association debuting in LA this week. It's "a techie sort of production
about globalism and outsourcing in Bangalore," says Danielle, adding
"The performances of ALLADEEN will be at REDCAT (the new LA
Philharmonic Gehry space) on March 3-7. There is more information about
the specific show here. Other sites which may be of interest: www.alladeen.com, and The Builder's Association." Here's a snip from the project summary:
The Alladeen project encompasses three collaborative works: this web
project, www.alladeen.com (directed by Ali Zaidi); a cross-media stage
performance (directed by Marianne Weems); and a music video (directed
by Ali Zaidi), featuring music by Shrikanth Sriram (Shri) and video by
Peter Norrman. Although distinct, these three works have been created
in tandem, drawing on a common pool of imagery and information, with
material from each interwoven into the others. [The show] explores how
we all function as "global souls" caught up in circuits of technology,
how our voices and images travel from one culture to another, and the
ways in which these cultures continually reinterpret each other's signs
and stories.
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Water on Mars. Life on Mars. Wow..
Human beings reached a milestone in our understanding of the universe
today, thanks in part to a hard-working robot. The NASA Mars rover
Opportunity found evidence that an abundance of water once covered an
area of the planet's surface. Where there was once water, it is
presumed that there was once life -- and that living things may in fact
still exist on the red planet.
[A] rock outcrop at the site, a shallow impact crater in
Meridiani Planum, was once "drenched'' in water, Ed Weiler, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration's deputy associate
administrator for space science, said at the agency's headquarters in
Washington. "The rocks here were once soaked in liquid water,'' Steve
Squyres, the mission's principal scientist, said in elaborating on the
discovery. The concentration of salts in the rock suggests the
formation may have emerged in a briny sea, he said.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004 |
Virtual Sex Change. 
From our pals at Fleshbot:
Men: wondering how you'd look as a woman, but don't want to
deal with messy plastic surgery or expensive hormone treatments? Let
expert technicians Candy and Angel Lee transform you through the magic
of Virtual Feminization: "The process carried out by an artist
technician employs hands on digital imaging to facially reconstruct and
feminize your image using your own genetics and facial features as a
base for the new beautiful, feminine you." (We think the new Dubya looks quite fetching, kind of like a femme Jamie Lee Curtis.)
Virtual Feminization Clinic and Imagurl Models (Imagurl.com),
See also: Cleavage Transformation Tips
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Eugene Jarvis!. Twenty-five Years at the Heart of Gaming [Slashdot]
| Twenty-five Years at the Heart of Gaming |
Posted by michael on Tuesday March 02, @01:28PM
from the hyperspace dept.
Andrew Leonard writes "Salon has a loooong interview
with Eugene Jarvis, the creator of legendary arcade video games
Defender and Robotron, up today. Jarvis talks about why he is
pro-emulators, anti-Grand Theft Auto, still focused on arcade games,
and deeply worried about terrorism. It's a good read, even if you have
to watch a ten second ad to get access."
:-)
Marc's memories.....
I met Eugene Jarvis at a bar on Clark St. in Chicago - in 1982.
We were both in the videogame business - his game 'Defender' was a lot cooler than ours - 'Prof. Pac-Man' - but he didn't seem to mind.
And what a coincidence - had lunch with Andrew Leonard - yesterday.
What a small world this is turning into.
Maybe I'll get lucky and run into Eugene at: the GDC or E3 - this year.
It's feeling better and better to be back in the gaming world - after 21 years of being away.
[Marc's Voice]
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004 |
Another Perfect Use for RSS. RSS for RFPs
"Utah's Division of Purchasing has an RSS feed of current solicitations. This is an RSS version of the current bids page.
Of course, the good news is that if you're interested in following Utah
RFPs and know how to use an aggregator, they'll just show up on your
desktop without having to remember to go and check the page. I wish
they had a 'what's this?' link next to the RSS link to tell people
about how to use RSS. If more states had RSS feeds of their
solicitations, you could do some nice work with a filtering aggregator
to deliver customized solicitation notices for multiple jurisdictions.
Since solicitations frequently have addendums and updates, there's a
need for extensions that consistently render the solicitation number or
some other correlating information so that addendums can be linked to
the original solicitations." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] [The Shifted Librarian]
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Cool Tool Alert. Cogitum Co-Citer
" 'There's a stone cold freebie (no ads, spyware, etc) called 'Cogitum Co-Citer', available for download here.
Once installed, when you're at a site where you want to save some
text, you simply highlight the desired text, right-click to get the
pop-up context menu, then select 'Grab the selected text'. Co-Citer
then auto-opens its screen, allowing you to add comments, organize by
selecting/creating a category, etc. To get to the info later, you hit
the start menu and choose Co-Citer, which includes print, find and
other goodies.
This app is incredibly feature-packed, and an absolute stable/smooth
joy to use. Sure has cut back substantially on the 'paper-notes'
syndrome which used to surround my laptop!...' " [PDA 24/7]
Nice freebie that could help with personal knowledge management.
Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows and requires Internet Explorer
5+. [The Shifted Librarian]
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.NET report card.
Every couple of years Microsoft wraps a marketing label around all the
major initiatives in the company. In 2000, the label was .NET; in 2003,
Longhorn. As developers and IT managers ponder what the "Longhorn wave"
might mean to them, InfoWorld decided to assess the current .NET wave.
Its goals were many and ambitious. At the core of .NET, the Common
Language Runtime (CLR) and its associated Framework (class library)
would usher Microsoft developers into the world of managed code, whose
benefits were already well-known to their Java counterparts. In
parallel, Web services would become the pivotal integration technology,
and XML the lingua franca of data representation. These were, and still
are, the central themes. Don Box, architect of Longhorn's Indigo
communication subsystem, put it plainly on his weblog: "We're betting
that the future is managed code and XML." [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This story, which began thirty weblog items ago, is (at least for me) a compelling demonstration of weblog/journalism synergy. I first tried this approach in 1996, for a BYTE cover story.
In the pre-blog era, NNTP newsgroups were the venue, but it's the same
principle. When you're dealing with an evergreen topic, and you're not
worried about getting scooped by the competition, why not go ahead and
outline your ideas in advance? The ensuing conversation will clarify
them, and put you in touch with people who can share interest and
expertise that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to find. ... [Jon's Radio]
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The one thing your business needs to grow. Want to grow your business? Harvard Business Review's Frederick Reichheld says
there's one thing that's dramatically more important than anything
else: are your customers willing to recommend your product or service
to a friend? If they are, he contends, your business will grow. If they
aren't, it won't.
Williams Moore's "Brand Autopsy" weblog for that link and commentary on that article.
This rule even applies to Microsoft. Expensive marketing can attempt
to overcome this trend, but in this day of word-of-mouth networks that
are very strong, if you don't have the best product in a category, word
will get out very quickly. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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Jarvis says to get rid of word "consumer" in corporate talk. Jeff Jarvis is right.
The word "consumer" is a nasty word and should be removed from
corporate dictionaries. Our customers are really more like partners
anyway. Think about it. It's why we focus so much on building
"platforms" here. We only succeed if you build stuff on top of our
platforms. That's what makes the complete product.
Look at the Pistachio factory I visited. Yeah, it's run on Microsoft
platforms (Windows is all over the place there) but if our customers
didn't build software to run the factory (we didn't do that) then we
wouldn't be there at all.
It's a partnership. Not a one-way push channel.
The faster we can figure that out, and enable our partners to build
cool stuff, the better off we'll both be. That's why I like .NET so
much. It helps our partners build cool stuff (like the NewsGator news aggregator that has completely changed my life). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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XBox Live turns into a new business networking tool. Jeff
is all over the blogosphere tonight. Jeff Sandquist's idea to have
networking sessions on a virtual golf course (the good old boys'
network is back, just online) is gaining some strength. Greg Reinacker says "A
friendly game of golf, between folks from Microsoft and ISV's. Friendly
banter. Competition on the course. Relationships are made, which are
the foundation of a successful business. I wish I had thought of it.
Count me in."
Amanda Murphy joined
in the fun too. She says it's a good way for her to participate in the
geek community since she gets left out of all the fun geek dinners. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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cocoa.mamasam donation.
The best Cocoa programming resource that I know of—I use it pretty much
every single day—is the searchable mailing list archives at cocoa.mamasam.com.
I hadn’t noticed until today that they take donations, so I donated
$30. It’s easily worth it—this site has saved me many hours of
head-scratching. It’s a very nearly indispensable part of my
programmer’s toolkit. [inessential.com]
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Aunt Tillie's OS X adventure. 
In a pair of recent essays,
Eric Raymond tears into the open source community -- rightly so -- for
its failure to deliver software that Aunt Tillie can use. He's spot on.
One of his comments got me wondering, though:
If
the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows
programmers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the
impossible entries. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac
programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out,
signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you
really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate
enough to own one. [Eric Raymond: An Open-Source Horror Story]
As it happens, I'd never tried printing to a Windows XP queue on my
home network from my Mac, and I wondered how well those Mac programmers
Eric talks about handled that case. So here, for your Flash viewing
pleasure, is Aunt Tillie's OS X Adventure.
... [Jon's Radio]
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Monday, March 01, 2004 |
Michael Doran writes:
The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the
fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful
princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother
Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Relations between these two
leaders are visibly tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher
profile. But at home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret
police, casts a longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke
in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire
system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.
NOTE: seems to me that Abdullah, as the reformer, has a big set of cross-hairs on his forehead. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Googlish Search Tool for Outlook. Find Anything in Outlook in Seconds!
"OK, I'm officially excited. I have so much 'stuff' in so many
folders in Outlook that I often spend way too much time searching. Yes,
I use all sorts of organizational schemes, ctagories, flags, labels,
and other tricks to try to make it obvious (to me) why I filed
something where I did. But, I often end up hiding stuff from the person
who needs it most... me!
Here's an elegant solution. Lookout
gives you the kind of satisfaction Google provides when searching the
web when you need to find anything in your Outlook folders - including
public folders. The program indexes your Outlook .pst files and public
folders and makes everything searchable (and find-able).
Lookout adds a Google-ish toolbar to Outlook and makes finding anything a snap....
It's fast. It's free (for now). And it works." [Marc's Outlook on Productivity, via Scobleizer]
Mostly just a note to myself to remember to install this at work
tomorrow, but it's also interesting to see how Googlefied everything is
becoming these days.
How many new verbs and adjectives can we make up based on Google?.... [The Shifted Librarian]
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Making Citations Easier. A Cite to Delight in
"After enduring a few book projects and several whitepapers, we know
the pain that is footnotes. Apparently, so do the folks over at
Encyclopædia Britannica (example). We’ve noticed recently that they have introduced a helpful feature: Ready-made citations....
While online news sites might not think of themselves as academic
resources, people are turning the Web first for information. Why not do
things that will help them credit you properly?" [Hypergene MediaBlog]
An interesting and very valid idea. In fact, it's probably something
libraries providing primary, digital resources should consider. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Born to Be Mobile. Half the World to Have Mobile Phones by 2015
"Four billion people, or half the world's population, will
communicate using mobile phones by 2015, up from the 1.3 billion or so
who have them now, the industry's top executive predicted on Wednesday.
By 2008, the world will already have two billion mobile users, said
Jorma Ollila, chairman and chief executive of Finland's Nokia, which
makes about two out of every five name-brand handsets worldwide....
Most of the growth in the mobile phone industry will come for basic
voice communications in emerging markets, especially China, India,
Indonesia, Brazil and Russia, he said. China outpaced the U.S. as the world's largest market for mobile phones almost two years ago....
Ollila of Nokia said that, in developed countries where the
proportion of the population using mobile phones is already high,
wireless communications will overtake fixed-line communications in
terms of the volume of voice call traffic. This is already the case in Italy, the Czech Republic and Portugal, he said." [Reuters, via Daily Palm] [The Shifted Librarian]
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Nice to See the Treo 600 Making a Difference for a Doctor. Treo 600
"After a few months of watching and waiting, I did finally get a
treo 600 It is a useful tool that combines the cellphone and PDA....
While I do find the device useful as a PDA (it's got all of the old standbys installed: epocrates, 5mcc, shots)
... and of course a phone ... the best thing about this device is
something that I thought was just a toy beforehand: Instant Messaging.
Huh? (you say) ..
For physicians who are not always in the office, this device can significantly improve your life. Since I work at the Miracle Center 1/2
time ... and I'm at the office 1/2 time, I'm often getting pages from
one when I'm at the other. I can't leave a meeting, or interrupt a
patient visit to make a phone call, but I CAN respond to an IM quickly
and without too much distraction.
Nurse Kathy and I had several little conversations last week with
IM. It saved me four or five phone calls ... and got her immediate
answers to her patient care questions .. so patients got better
service." [Family Medicine Notes, via PubSub: "treo 600"] [The Shifted Librarian]
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HBR's 2004 Breakthrough Idea #9: The MFA is the New MBA. An arts
degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the world of business.
Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools in
search of talent. And this broadened approach has often come at the
expense of more traditional business graduates. For instance, in 1993,
61% of McKinsey’s hires had MBA degrees. Less than a decade later, it
was down to 43%, because McKinsey says other disciplines are just as
valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With
applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corporate
positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree.
The reason: creativity is now seen as a bigger determinant of success than business logic. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Serving the Higher Numbers. Social Trends in Mobile Useage
"Mobile devices are all about connecting people to other people - so
to gain a deeper understanding of where multiplayer mobile gaming is
headed, I’ve been getting myself up to speed on the key social trends
among mobile users worldwide. A few weeks ago, I ran across an article
called Wireless fosters a societal evolution
that got me thinking about mobility from a different angle. Intrigued,
I ordered the research report referenced in the article: The Mobiles: social evolution in a wireless society.
It’s a fascinating read — and one of the best resources I’ve run across
for understanding worldwide social trends in mobile useage.
In this study, ethnographic researchers looked at how mobile
behavior had changed worldwide from 2000-2002, across a variety of ages
(teens, young adults, older adults) and locations (Australia, China,
Italy, Sweden, Brazil, and the US). One of
their conclusions is that wireless communication changes the nature of
how relationships and community are created and maintained - AND
that these social patterns are tied into how deeply each person has
adopted a 'mobile lifestyle.' Here’s a brief summary of the 'Mobile
LifeStyle Stages' and associated social patterns from this report:
Stage 1) Wireless Why? (low awareness / low integration)
These
people recognize that a mobile lifestyle exists, but they haven’t
decided whether or not they want to be part of it. They haven’t taken
the time or don’t see the need to integrate wireless into their
everyday lives and don’t really think much about that either. Socially,
Stage 1 people use a cellphone to stay in touch with 'intimates' (e.g.
a spouse, family member or close friend) but don’t do much
time-shifting or develop new social patterns - they map their existing
social patterns onto their wireless devices.
Stage 2) The Gadgeteers (high awareness / low integration)
These
people are fascinated with the gadgets, the devices of wireless - but
they haven’t yet smoothly integrated their devices into their lives.
They’re made the decisions to opt into the mobile lifestyle, have only
just begun to actually change their behavior. Socially, a Stage
2 person might use a cellphone to make and confirm last-minute plans,
but is worried about giving up face-to-face contact in favor of mobile
conversations.
Stage 3) The Almost-There’s (high awareness / high integration)
This
group’s mobile devices are highly integrated into their lives, but
they’re still highly conscious of their presence. As they grow more
comfortable with their mobile lifestyle, they will become less aware of
their devices and will move on to the next stage of lifestyle
development. Socially, Stage 3 people are now part of a virtual
community that’s held together by mobile communications. Often, there’
a rush of excitement associated with building a large network of
contacts. During this stage, people’s mobile connections expand
rapidly, often including multiple shallow relationships.
Stage 4) The MOBILES (low awareness / high integration)
These
people integrate wireless into their lives and don’t think much about
it. They’ve had access to wireless devices for a number of years, and
are at a life stage where they’re comfortable with themselves, their
position, and how they choose to live their lives. Socially,
Stage 4 people have moved past the rush of excitement brought on by
mobile connections; they’re comforable with their mobile lifestyle,
they’ve pruned their contact lists, and use it to deepen existing
relationships and maintain a smaller, deeper network." [Many-to-Many]
Obviously libraries have gotten pretty good at serving Stage 1s and
2s, but we have to get better at serving the 3s and 4s. Is your library
preparing for a world with more 3s and 4s in it? [The Shifted Librarian]
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Nintedo's shipping a Game Boy Advance skinned to look like a
first-generation Nintendo Entertainment System controller, with a suite
of classic NES games.
Someone's posted the whole of June, 1938's Action Comics #1 (including
the first funnybook appearance of Superman) to the web as a series of
medium-resolution scans.
These
pets make pitbulls look like tweety bird. According to the headline of
this page of three pictures, these guys are money collectors in
Nigeria. 
Looks like the guys over at 
Bernal Spheres are theoretical space-habitats that curve in on
themselves, making fantastical, topsy-turvy eschroid landscapes. Here's
a page with some nice pix and details.
I
like to play with a hunk of Silly Putty while I procrastinate in front
of the computer. But these Magnetoids look (and sound) really neat. 
Noted without comment. A follow-up to 
Ann Wizer pays Jakarta's trash-dump pickers to find and wash
plasticized packaging materials from the piles, then assemble them into
tote bags.
If you get busted driving drunk in Ohio, you get these rad-looking yellow license plates with red letters on them. 
London graffiti writer Banksy is a true stencil genius. His site --
frustrating to navigate -- is still a stunning walk through some of the
finest art you'll see on the street or in a gallery.
Dan
Mushrush sez: "A company is selling homes made of shipping containers
for $76k -the lot -the installation. Luxury appointments are
available." 
Photographer and QTVR enthusiast 
"Piercing," a dark, beautiful, wordless online comic by 
Stunning, elaborate paper toys to print, fold and glue. I really like the Wrigley Field, too. 
More foldable, glue-able PDFs -- this time, it's ultra-fab Japanese paper robots.
ClearPC's
"Secret Agent" PC-case is a transparent acrylic PC case shaped like a
briefcase. Great for LAN parties and airport security.
