shortsample

JFK Reloaded is a simulation of Oswalds view of JFK that scores you on how closely you can recreate the assassination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqV-tNL0vbE

My friend Zach sent me this. I think its quite interesting.

http://shufflebrain.com/GDC2006.htm

After using the iphone for about 2 weeks, I found that its less functional (The keyboard is slower and requires more attention) then my sidekick, but more fun.

Amazon web services are cool because they let individuals do things that previously were impossible. They are working their hardest to break down the barrier of entry to many different software projects. For instance, they let you leverage their web crawlers and web searchers. Mechanical Turk is also quite cool. You can enlist the human web to complete tasks for you.

here
and here are good examples.

Putting humans behind robotic tasks is interesting. Putting robots behind human tasks is also cool.

http://www.cracked.com/article_16153_7-greatest-home-shopping-screw-ups-all-time.html

The PC has given way to the notebook. I am sure that personal computer sales are way down. Everyone wants notebooks. Will cellphones replace notebooks?

The most impressive games used to be on the PC. It always lead the way in graphics and technology. These days consoles (xbox360 ps3) have lots of reliable dedicated horse power. Will consoles replace PC’s as the primary leaders in games?

PCS are general platforms. They can be configured to be game machines, servers, webbrowsers, development workstations, etc. They are also creative platforms. If you look at these new specialized platforms like the iphone, xbox, and apple tv you will see that there are big buttons, and simple menus. They are primarly designed for content playback. At one time, PCS were king because no matter what you wanted to do, PC was the answer. Now, you play your games on the xbox, read your email on the iphone, you might not need an awesome machine just for webbrowsing, in fact, there might be a specialized way to do that too.

I think the role of PCs is being weakened. It could easily be religated to creative tasks only. This would mean that you use the PC to build products, or content for other platforms. How many people need PC’s when this is its role?

I was always amused that the computer kept its name. When you could first buy a home computer, there was very little software and really, the best way to describe the thing was ‘computer’. Software and networks changed all that. People didn’t think they were going to go ‘compute’ something, they were going to send an email, play a game, write a report, etc.

We are constantly redefining our words in order to keep up. The cell phone is going to be the same way.

I posted a breif article at the beginning of last year about the iPhone.

A year or so has past. I have been using one for about a week now (its a requirement of a small gig I found myself into). My original observations were.

1.)Consumer barriers… expensive and you have to switch carriers

It is a bit pricy. However the price has dropped to 399. At this point the value of product is totally on par with the price. Its just a little frightening to have such a small expensive product. Switching carriers is a pain. Tmobile wants $200 bucks early termination.

2.) Delicate.
I am very hard on portable electronics. I don’t like to have gadgets take up too many brain cycles. My stress level has gone up one point carrying the thing.

3.) Face grease
Not really a problem.

Now, the upside.

The iphone (and future products like it) really do represent a brand new platform in the world of personal computing. This is the first major leap since the graphical user interface. In a previous post I talked about all the older products and services phones were absorbing. Lets look at it from a techincal side.

megapixel ccd
multi touch
vibration
audio in and out
geolocation
internet
high speed video decoder chips
unix operating system
powerful complete sdk
large local storage
battery
on and on. Its a Tricoder

I have always concidered melodyne to have some quite magical technology. They are one of the only software music companies that has products that are truly revolutionary.

Gizmodo refers to their latest application as ‘photoshop for music’. However I would consider applications like Adobe Audition and ProTools to be more analogous to photoshop. Melodyne is a level deeper then this. They have tools that allow you to decompose and reconstruct music signals in ways that are simply never seen before.

Melodyne is showing a holy grail of music software technology here. It increases the usability and flexibility of music components by an order of magnitude.

DNA would be like photoshop if photoshop could take an image, decompose it into actual 3d objects, edit them, and then recompose the image.

here, link.

I love this video. We are still talking about this stuff. I just wish we used the term sysop more often.

here

I am not an expert on this stuff but, I am knowledgeable enough to be frustrated.

Any creative person needs know about trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Here is my birds eye view of these things.

Trademarks allows a company to prevent other companies from using a distintive symbol and misrepresenting it.

Copyright allows creators to control when their work is copied. By default, nobody can copy something they didn’t create without permission.

Patents allow creators to control an invention.

These items are frustrating to creators like me because they are infinitely complicated and its difficult to know when you are playing by the rules. In fact, the rules seem largely defined by larger companies.

The internet is starting to create a larger barrier for big companies to push others around. Here is a good example of how this can happen.

Millions of people have now become more aware then ever about this small audio cable company. They will see more sales then ever. Monsters lawyers caused more good fortune for bluejeanscable then they could have ever imagined. I expect they will have to work quite hard to meet their new demand.

This could never have happened without the internet.