“technology”
89 posts under this tag.
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.
(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)
134 sayings by John McCarthyWP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.
Here 8 of the very best:
As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.
Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.
If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.
People mourn when a person dies, but no-one mourns the billions of intestinal bacteria that his death dooms. Speciesism, I calls it.
It’s possible to program a computer in English. It’s also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.
If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.
Had to resize a photo just now on my macbook and I still don’t know how. Decided it would be easier to find and finally use one of the many online photo editors now available. It was. Which speaks volumes about why the web is the next platform.
A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.
Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).
Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.
Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:
“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”
and anime’s general stance towards piracy:
“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”
Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry’s biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.
Frustrated record companies have responded by trying to get their artists to spend more time promoting records and less time touring and endorsing products, says Jeanne Meyer of EMI, another big record label. “Sometimes you’ve got a tug of war going on,” she says. Yet the more labels spend on marketing pre-recorded music, the more they raise their artists’ profiles and boost their other, more lucrative, sources of income. Pre-recorded music, no longer the main cash cow, increasingly serves merely as a marketing tool for T-shirts and concert tickets. The best seats for The Police’s world tour this summer cost over $900; the group’s entire catalogue on CD costs less than $100.
The shift away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.
The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.
I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)
To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodificationWP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.
Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)
Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows EndWP, AM.
Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!
Remember that wacky koanELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?
Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.
Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.
Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.
I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.
According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.
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