Teradome.

"One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital..."

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:21:07 -0500

“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real.”

- William Gibson

As recorded by w3schools.com. /via

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:39:40 -0500

As recorded by w3schools.com.

/via

Last thing I'll say about Avatar

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:32:00 -0500

Apparently there’s some Avatar backlash after it took the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Drama. In my buddies’ Chatterous room, we had an epic argument about whether or not Avatar was a good movie. Obviously we netted out that it all depends on your definition of “good,” and how you set your standards for movies. This was my “closing statement”, modified with some of my preceeding thoughts to be a complete blog post:

You can say Avatar is a thrilling action movie, like an Indiana Jones film, where you have fairly one-dimensional enemies like Belloq & the Nazis. But there’s a number of things: first off, Belloq isn’t that one-dimensional, he has a history with Jones and he has a desire for the Ark that supercedes what the Nazis want with it. Ultimately, he’s using them, he gets moments to say so, and that fills in his character.

Secondly, his antagonist role is supported by the Nazi forces which are FAR from one-dimensional; Even if you present Nazis as pure evil, all of WW II comes along with them as subtext, it’s unavoidable. James Cameron doesn’t have this “shortcut”, he’s got to paint everyone in. But instead of drawing clear groups on the Human side he drops the conflict in as entirely Human vs Na’vi, even if Jake, Grace and useless unmemorable third guy are outliers.

The bad guys in Avatar are just bad guys because they’re bad. They want money, and we never actually know what the Unobtainium is used for. Does it push the story along? Sure, if that’s all you want. The general/captain/additional unmemorable character wants nothing more to execute his orders, he doesn’t even get the benefit of being tired of being on Pandora and wanting to go home, he just loves getting to shoot crap down and revels in the destruction he creates.

And this coming from the director who got a honestly moving performance from Arnold Schwartzenegger as an unstoppable killer robot.

It’s not that the storytelling is simple — Hell, Ponyo is a simple story, but it’s also real & honest, and frankly even more imaginative and inventive than Avatar — it’s that Avatar’s storytelling is just flat-out lazy. And that, to me, is a bad movie…or at least a movie that shouldn’t be winning Best Picture awards.

The numbers are ridiculous: In terms of getting new...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:38:00 -0500

The numbers are ridiculous:

In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the single most effective photo type for women.

/via OKCupid’s The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues - CNN.com

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:18:00 -0500

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues - CNN.com:

Spoilers ahead…:

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

“One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality,” Hill said.

This was my primary complaint about the plot of Avatar, even above the whole Mighty Whitey fantasy it lives within: It portrays humans as wholly cruel without good reason, where the outliers of this future either die, or discard their humanity entirely.

By “cruel without good reason,” I mean that squashing a native culture is not in any way balanced by a statement about how the “unobtainium” is necessary to keep humanity alive, or keep Earth going, or anything. The most horrible things in our history were still done in misguided attempts to try and do something good for someone, insanity aside.

It’s clear if Earth is a dead planet (which it’s not made clear, which is part of the problem) then having this material as an energy source is part of a desperate attempt to keep humanity alive. There’s a bigger story behind why a corporation/government would go to such extremes to get this material than just “this shit makes a lot of money.”

I could be wrong: Cameron certainly wants to make a political statement that these kinds of atrocities happen in remote, isolated places where corporations are operating without government oversight, and where reports of such activity will never make it back to the people who could force them to stop. Maybe they are cruel for no reason after all.

So the characters we root for are all aliens, and the humans are without hope. How should the audience related to these characters? They can’t. That’s what this article is highlighting — those who agree with our protagonist are left feeling the only option is to change sides, not to change policies, or beliefs, or habits.

I think Cameron wanted to make the Human -> Na’vi change a symbolic message of “you need to completely change the way you live if you want to make a change” but the human condition is so realized on the one side, that I think this point is getting missed by a lot of people, and what’s left is just plain misanthropy.

The real point about privacy

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:32:00 -0500

Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.

Anonymous Facebook Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.

Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?

Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look. I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.

Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?

Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.

Rumpus: What did they do?

Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.

Source: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on...

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:13:27 -0500

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Gorgeous!

"When we crunched the numbers a year ago, we determined it costs the New York Times about twice as..."

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:19:56 -0500

“When we crunched the numbers a year ago, we determined it costs the New York Times about twice as much to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Kindle.”

- Hearst Shows Off Its Snazzy E-Reader, The Skiff Reader | Business Insider

"At Disney this is called the 3 oclock question because the most common question asked at Disney is,..."

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:28:00 -0500

“At Disney this is called the 3 oclock question because the most common question asked at Disney is, “What time is the 3 o clock parade?” Apparently cast members get tired of answering this ridiculous question over and over again and so Disney trainers now proactively train cast members to be prepared to answer “3 o clock” questions.”

- commenter Lori Reed, on the blog post “First Impressions and Rethinking Restroom Questions”

"Is Google going to become the computing platform for the enterprise? Is a bank going to run itself..."

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:26:40 -0500

“Is Google going to become the computing platform for the enterprise? Is a bank going to run itself on Google? Is an airline going to run itself on Google? Is IBM going to run its supply chain on Google? Is Bharti Wireless going to run themselves on Google? Is the banking system of China that we’ve built going to be on Google? Is the Russian Central Bank that we’re building going to be on Google? No.”

- IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, on the idea of “Google Dominance”

There Is No Page Fold

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:02:28 -0500

There Is No Page Fold:

Clever.

/via @cynthiapink

This is the kind of work at Tumblr that reminds me why I...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:25:00 -0500

This is the kind of work at Tumblr that reminds me why I switched to them for my blogging.

It’s also the kind of work that makes me wonder why Retweeting is so limited. As I’ve said before, “we know how Retweeting should exist because it already does: it’s called Tumblr Reblogging.”

Inspired by Wordpress’ seriously clever use of Loren Brichter’s new Tweetie options, we’re launching our own Tweetie and Twitterrific compatible API. This Twitter-like API should make it easy for a lot of existing Twitter clients to start supporting Tumblr.

The really cool thing - because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

Retweeting = Reblogging

Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary

Favoriting = Liking

“@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”

Conversations = Reblogs

marco: The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:09:43 -0500

marco:

The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta testing.

About time. Backing up is critical for a blogging service like Tumblr. Importing is also desperately needed, but where there’s export, import can’t be too far away (right?). The most interesting part of this?

Download (Mac OS X, requires 10.5 or higher)

…

Sorry, there’s no Windows version yet.

Says a lot about Tumblr traffic, no?

The devil you know

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:47:04 -0500

I’ve given up on Jolicloud, Moblin, and the other “netbook Linuxes” for now.

Most people think Linux does not make deeper inroads with consumers because of the lack of “critical” applications, like Microsoft Office. That’s part of the problem, sure, but the more fundamental issue is that consumers don’t understand the value proposition of Linux. This is the conclusion I came to a few years ago. Now, after having test-driven a few Linux-based operating systems for this netbook, my opinion has only been further solidified.

Most Linuxes are perfectly fine systems. There’s nothing wrong with them technically. And from the user’s perspective the front-end and defaults work (e.g., on Ubuntu) seem to be driving a fine user experience for those who really want a computer, and not just “an email and photo machine.”

The problem is that they try to be Windows. Consumer Linux tries very very much to be Windows sometimes. And the reality is that the more an OS says “hey, I’m just like Windows!” the more that the consumer goes “well, why don’t I just keep using Windows then?”

The Apple fan will spot the similarity to the iPod evolution immediately: competitors kept releasing similar players to the iPod, but the whole product platform never sat still. It was a gross underestimation by the entire industry of Apple that they would simply make an audio player, and then stop to bask in its sales. They didn’t expect Apple to try and lead so aggressively, so their efforts making their own devices only let them catch up to where the iPod had just been.

In many ways Consumer Linux fell into the same pit, because it focused on mimicing the Windows experience. That’s not to say it shouldn’t have tried to create a better desktop experience for beginner/intermediate users, or shouldn’t try to leverage users’ previous experiences to help it feel familiar, but it shouldn’t have gone to such great pains to be like Windows in its attempt to become accepted. It never tried to lead in something really new.

Nowadays it’s painfully obvious that being the same is not the thing that makes one switch. It’s being different. What is the value proposition from switching from one thing to another that is promoted as being “just like it?” There isn’t one. The price of that OS image may be free, but the setup, researching, etc. costs of switching don’t make up for it. If the destination is “the same experience,” then what is the motivation? Lacking any business-grade upkeep costs, where there are hundreds of seats to license, the price of Windows for an individual at home really isn’t that exorbitant.

In the end, the netbook should have been the opportunity for Consumer Linux to break through, but no one was willing to start from scratch to make it a truly new experience that meets the limitations and constraints of this new platform. Big, dashboard experiences were still essentially launch pages that opened small, cramped windowed applications as usual. Moblin finally seems to be taking a stab at the issue, but may be too late. Jolicloud’s main promise is performance and that’s a problem of today, not tomorrow. Consumer Linux spent too long in its early days trying to be subversive and disruptive to Microsoft that it wasn’t trying to actually be tangibly different or better for its users.

Only Chrome OS is ambitious enough in its attempt to make people think differently about how a second computer should fit into their household. Which is why it’s the only project left that still holds my interest. It’s trying to be disruptive, too — but they clearly believe they’re building a better experience for users.

But hey, Windows 7 for netbooks is here too, and really, it ain’t that bad.

Although I was a much bigger fan of Cliff Hanger, which was a...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:33:00 -0500

Although I was a much bigger fan of Cliff Hanger, which was a laserdisc game based off of the Lupin the 3rd movie “The Castle of Caligostro”, it couldn’t have been made without this, the game that started it all — Dragon’s Lair — and now you can have it for only $5 on your iPhone.

How amazing is that?

As Destructoid put it:

Well, this screws up my head. When I was young and used to sneak off to the arcade to look at games and bum quarters, I remember staring in awe at Dragon’s Lair cabinets, and I remember reading that state-of-the-art Laserdisc technology is what made this game possible. It was light years ahead of anything we’d ever have at home.

And now it’s running on a phone.

P.S., please release Cliff Hanger for the iPhone, thx.

(via Daring Fireball)

A Power Computing advertisement from Macworld 1997. I’d...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:45:00 -0500

A Power Computing advertisement from Macworld 1997. I’d definitely be afraid of Sluggo if he could punch at 225 MHz.

It took a very long time for me to decide to purchase a netbook, but now I have done so. Right now,...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:44:07 -0500

It took a very long time for me to decide to purchase a netbook, but now I have done so. Right now, I am the proud owner of an Asus Eee 1005 and I must say it’s incredibly sweet. Once I realized that I was already a two-machine person (the mini HTPC and the MacBook Pro) before, the decision to go back to a two-machine setup (the MacBook Pro HTPC and a simple netbook) instead of constantly plugging/unplugging the single machine was made much, much easier.

During my trip to J&R where I tested keyboards & trackpads like a mofo — this being the critical factor of choosing a netbook — I was surprised as the absolute flood of customers checking out these things. It became clear that the netbook is the new reality. The critical needs for a computer are covered by these: writing that paper, checking your bank balance, video chatting with your parents, etc.. It’s only the media experience that’s left, and that’s where the new models are headed. Before, there were only clunky Linux builds for these things, and now there are choices a-plenty. If I were a hardware manufacturer, I’d have been unnerved by this shift for sure.

But these shifts are good. They’re growing pains in a still incredibly immature field. It reminds me of the shift from the CD-ROM era, and how we all moved to the Internet right at the time when everyone finally had drives and CPUs that were fast enough to handle good Cinepak compressed video. The explosion for multimedia CD-ROMs (remember the original Blender, anyone?) never happened because the Internet supplanted it.

The Internet was the superior choice, of course. And wherever netbooks & mobiles & ultraportables ultimately lead us, that style of computing will be superior to the laptops and desktops of today.

"I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And..."

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:54:00 -0500

“I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And if in doing so, more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.

As soon as you grasp for that growth, you’re gonna view your customer differently, you’re gonna view your product differently, you’re gonna view your business differently. Everything that is the most important – you’re going to view that differently.”

- Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms owner (via 37signals)

This goes back to a saying of mine: At some point, you have to decide if you’re in the product-making business, or the money-making business.

(Companies that treat their customers poorly are always in the money-making business.)

Dell offers a custom build of Chromium OS for the Mini 10v

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:03:43 -0500

Dell offers a custom build of Chromium OS for the Mini 10v:

I gotta say, even though the build is completely unsupported, it’s this kind of attention to what your customers are interested in — basically that netbook owners are the tinkering/hacking type — that really affects people’s opinions of your company overall.

Dell wasn’t on my list for potential netbooks, but now they are.

dpstyles: Screenshot from a checkout terminal at Target...

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:20:06 -0500

dpstyles:

Screenshot from a checkout terminal at Target (Milford MA). They use game mechanics (scoring / personal leaderboad) to encourage faster checkout times:
See the DNA-esque string in the middle?

G = green = fast
R = red = slow(er)

Here’s her last 10 check-outs - fast, except for a few random stragglers.. The big “G” is the prob the calculated average-time-per-checkout (last 10?) while total must be all 44 checkouts. I wonder what the 88% stands for…

Girl running the checkout scored a “G” on Chelsa - said the whole thing “makes work feel like a game” :)

This is absolutely brilliant.