Clippings.reblog

PlayStation generation rates '70s and '80s games

1up.com has posted the second in an article series called "Child's Play", where they invite kids to test and comment classic games from the '70s and '80s.

Donkey Kong is "lame." Tetris is "boring." Space Invaders "needs a superbomb or something." And why play Pong when it's more fun to "jump up and down on one foot"? , said the youngsters during the first experiment in November 2003.

Via Newstoday.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Gavin on December 30, 2004 | edit

Mobile Content "Almost Like Early Television"

David Harper's mobile lit company Wireless Ink gets some ink of its own in today's New York Times' "A Library and Cinema in Your Pocket." He's a realist when it comes to what folks will read on the phone.

"Are people going to read 'War and Peace' on their telephones? The answer is probably no. Right now the content on mobile devices is almost like early television. What they did then was to sit down and do a radio broadcast for the television screen. But there was a picture. Our mission now is to get feedback."

Reporter Doreen Carvajal calls the current wave of efforts to match color screens and content "reinventing quaint old formulas with the aim of reaching youthful customers."

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, ReBlogged by Gavin on December 09, 2004 | edit

Raising Dead Media

In 1995, science fiction authors Bruce Sterling [www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades] and Richard Kadrey set out to accomplish a peculiar but intriguing goal: to widely encourage the study of so-called "dead media", by starting something called the Dead Media Project. [www.deadmedia.org] In a series of early writings and lectures on the project,[1] Sterling explained that it was motivated by the observation that the world is presently "experiencing a profound radiation of new species of media" which is scarcely being tracked, let alone understood. "We have no idea in hell what we are doing to ourselves with these new media technologies," he exclaimed, "and no consistent way even to discuss the subject. Something constructive ought to be done about this situation."

HorizonZero Issue 18 : GHOST

Posted by Gavin on December 08, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Mother of the Matrix" Victorious

The following article reports that Sophia Stewart has recently won a case against the Wachowski Brothers et. al. for infringing copyright. Stewart claimed that the Warchowski brothers copied a her manuscript, "the third eye", copyrighted in 1981.

Not that I was under the illusion that the matrix was an original work, considering the similarity to Ghost in the Shell (see http://webmirror.kobran.org/matrixgits/page1.html), not to mention the debt they owe to Gibson...

link. "Mother of the Matrix" Victorious - Globe Link - Entertainment

Also see: http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=58221

Also see: http://www.daghettotymz.com/matrix/matrix.html

Posted by Gavin on December 07, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Spime

Adam Greenfield on the Spime.

If spam simply isn't annoying enough to suit your needs, or you're the kind of person who's disappointed by the disarming ease you encounter when upgrading your laptop's operating system to a new version, then boy does Bruce Sterling ever have a vision of the future for you.

Link:v-2 Organisation | media culture | Spimed

Posted by Gavin on October 18, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Net Art

Net Art - URL:http://www.calarts.edu/~line/history.html

ACMI - 2004 AUSTRALIAN CULTURE NOW - NETWORKED

Whitney Artport: Commisions > IDEA LINE by Martin Wattenberg

computer fine arts

Posted by Gavin on October 15, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

vintage apple advertising

Originally posted by joshua from Eyebeam reBlog, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 23, 2004 | edit

deconstructing the hard drive

Electronmagnetic network takes a closer look at the typical computer hard drive.

URL: http://electronetwork.org/education/decons/harddrives.htm

One of my old hard drives, which suffered a fatal crash.

Posted by Gavin on September 11, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

N-gage sales figures

Report of N-Gage sales figures from October 2003. Considering Nokia predicted 6-9 million units by the end of 2004 compared to the reported 1 million to date.

URL: Nokia's N-Gage Sales Figures

For my referece. search of nokia.com for reference n-gage sales figures.

Posted by Gavin on September 08, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Pinsky s Pixel

Robert Pinsky's recent poem "Pixel," celebrating the 50th anniversary of the picture element, is really worth a read, despite the inability of Wired to properly typeset poems online. (You can read this edition decently if your monitor has about 1600 pixels of horizontal resolution; otherwise, the "printer-friendly" page — you ...

Originally posted by nick (mailto:nickm@nickm.com) from Grand Text Auto, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 08, 2004 | edit

'World's first' mobile with its own hard drive revealed

Users will be able to store a wide range of different media types on it, including digital music files and photos.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 08, 2004 | edit

New Media Histories

As noted by other posters @ GTxA, the art and science distinction is still a discussion point even within a field developed from this assumption. How can this be addressed?

Originally posted by mary (mailto:mary@maryflanagan.com) from Grand Text Auto, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 06, 2004 | edit

Atari 2600 E.T. History

The Atari Museum and Snopes have interesting briefs on Atari burying millions of unsold E.T. cartridges out in the desert. The game was terrible and eveyone knew it.

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 06, 2004 | edit

A Brief History of Gaming & Academia

Lauren Gonzalez over at Gamespot has put together a lengthy feature on the history of the relationship between gaming and academia. If you've only recently discovered GGA, you might find the article useful as a condensed version of the sorts of things we seem to talk about often here.

Many of the big names of game academia pop up in the feature. Janet Murray, Michael Mateas, and Gonzalo Frasca each get significant coverage, and Gamespot provides a good selection of quality links to gaming-theory-related websites (including us). Among the more unusual sources Gamespot talks to is Paul Miller (DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid), due to his recently published book Rhythm Science, who claims that modern youth culture is based around the idea of "replication," although exactly what that means, Gamespot never reveals.

The main shortcoming of the article is that when it discusses the relationship between game academics and game developers, it only gets the opinions of academics. Perhaps this is warranted by the academics, who readily admit that few decision makers in development pay them much serious attention, but as somebody with a foot in each world, I'd really like to see somebody delve into the nature of this relationship a bit more studiously.

Originally posted by ClockworkGrue from game girl advance, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 05, 2004 | edit

[LifeHack] A screen turned into a todo list

Since once my screen is out of order, I turned it into a cool to-do list. Actually, I did not take any advantage of its size and just duct-taped the todo list I had in my pocket (which is a fake one-sided dollar bill)

The to-do list is simple:
- Run Catchbob experiments
- Rewrite my Journal of CSCW paper taking the reviews into account
- Rewrite my Journal of Multimedia paper taking the reviews into account
- Write my phd research plan (gosh) that should include CatchBob experiment design
- Write an article for the CSCL Symposium workshop about space
- Write my literature review oultine + references

Originally posted by icon from pasta and vinegar, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 02, 2004 | edit

software structures

head over to the whitney's portal site to view a nice collection of work by Casey Reas (groupc.net), Jared Tarbell (levitated.net), et. al. Obviously, Casey is now at UCLA, and did a great workshop with he and Ben Fry's...

Originally posted by will from USC Interactive Media Division Weblog, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 02, 2004 | edit

Vintage Computing: IBM's SSEC

I just completed Kevin Maney's The Maverick and His Machine, a bio of IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. It included lots of interesting bits about early commercial computing. Little known today, IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was first placed in a NYC window in 1948. There pedestrians could watch as the machine was fed problems. It was also carefully designed to look interesting. The device was used as a model for the computer in the 1957 Hepburn/Tracy move Desk Set, a early example of computing in film. Many companies placed their 'electronic brains' in their lobbies, visible to all, at this time. The computer was also well known for introducing the idea of having lots of blinking lights, to show it was actually doing something. To be sure the lights were not window-dressing, patterns could be read to determine various machine states, and logic could be stepped through by reading the lights. As late as the mid 70s, a CDC mainframe computer I worked on at the Pentagon still had arrays of lights on its panel. Here is more tech detail and pictures. Herbert Grosch's Reminiscenses. From IBM's archives: ...The IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was dedicated in 1948 by Thomas J. Watson at IBM's headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue in New York City. The SSEC combined the speed of electronic circuits with a storage capacity of 400,000 digits and integrated for the first time electronic speed, vast memory capacity and highly flexible and convenient programming (or sequencing) facilities......

Originally posted by Franz Dill from Future Now, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 01, 2004 | edit

SANYO Will Adopt HD DVD Standard to Develop Next Generation DVDs

SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. (SANYO) has decided to adopt the HD DVD standard promoted in the DVD forum, an international association that brings together some 220 consumer electronics, entertainment, software and other related companies around the world. SANYO will develop next generation DVD players and recorders using the HD DVD standard, and aims to first launch in Japan HD DVD players in 2005: and recorders in 2006: and then expand into the North American market.

Originally from Physics Org, ReBlogged by Gavin on September 01, 2004 | edit

A couple of archives of old computers and ICT.

Mind Machine Museum

old-computers.com

The Computer History Graphing Project

Computer History Archive

The World Wide Web History Project

Posted by Gavin on August 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Survival Research Laboratories new DVD, new baby

David Pescovitz: The Bright Lights Film Journal reviews "Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem," a documentary chronicling the first ten years of the pioneering machine art/performance group founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. SRL is an ad-hoc collective of brilliant engineers, including former BB guest blogger Karen Marcelo, who stage mind-blowing mechanized spectacles where "humans are present only as audience or operators." Check out the Bright Lights Film Journal article here.

Boing Boing offers our congratulations to dear friends Mark and Amy on the birth this week of Jake Edward Pauline, a feat of biomechanical engineering. Link

Originally posted by David Pescovitz from Boing Boing, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 22, 2004 | edit

Enigma Machines

There are currently two enigma machines, versions there of, for sale on ebay.

URL: eBay item 2262956938 (Ends 23-Aug-04 06:18:52 AEST) - NEMA ENIGMA CODE MACHINE EXCELLENT CONDITION

URL: eBay item 2263806832 (Ends 28-Aug-04 06:00:00 AEST) - BC543 Cipher Machine - WWII Hagelin Crypto m209 Enigma

Posted by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Happy Birthday, D&D

Xeni Jardin: BoingBoing reader Ateo says:

Dungeons & Dragons turns 30 this year and tonight is the start of GenCon too. NPR did a story, and Gamespy is doing tons of articles on the history of the game this week as well.

Link to the official D&D site

Originally posted by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | edit

ISEA 2004: Histories of the New Keynote

We just finished the panel with Michael, Nick/Scott, Jill, and yours truly. Now the keynote for ISEA's "Histories of the New" thread: Shuddhabrata Sengupta on "The Remains of Tomorrows Past: Speculations on the Antiquity of New Media Practice in South Asia" Starts with a reading of Kipling's "The Deep Sea Cables." ...

Originally posted by noah (mailto:noah@queeg.com) from Grand Text Auto, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | edit

history of mobile media

My camera's ill but uploading a few phone pics to Flickr I noticed there are other people posting photos from here as well. This is the keynote I'm in right now. Erkki Huhtamo is talking about the history of mobile media, taking a media archaeological approach. Only five years ago ...

Originally from jill/txt, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | edit

new media s indian history

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an excellent story-teller. He's giving a keynote on "The Remains of Tomorrows Past: Speculations on the Antiquity of New Media Practice in South Asia", and he's telling us about how the Indian telegraph developed, bringing out the histories of people who have been downsized to footnotes, ...

Originally from jill/txt, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | edit

Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media

some very rough on the fly notes on Erkki Hutamo's talk: Title: Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media media archaeology - secret histories, dig beyond historical narratives, motivated history , nondeterministic history, cyclical, returning over time. premises of media archaeology - media do not exist independently of the ...

Originally from personaldebris, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 21, 2004 | edit

The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society

In his new book, social scientist Rich Ling provides a sound introduction to the social study of mobile phones, arguing among other points that SMS faces a bleak future.

Originally posted by Howard Rheingold from TheFeature.com, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 20, 2004 | edit

120 Years of Electronic Music | markd

Obsolete.com put together a nice list with short descriptions of some of the seminal electronic musical devices of the last 130 years.

Originally from COLL.COLL, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 18, 2004 | edit

Get the lowdown on HDTV

We’re not even gonna pretend that the switchover from regular TV to high-definition is anything other than a pain in the ass. It’s not that the TVs costs too much or that there’s nothing to watch anymore, it’s just that it’s hard for even the geekiest geek who doesn’t happen to work in the television industry to keep up with all the different acronyms, formats, and competing standards. Fortunately, Tom’s Hardware Guide has, well, a guide to getting down the basics of HDTV, like the difference between 720p and 1080i.

[Via Digital Media Thoughts]

Originally posted by Peter Rojas from Engadget, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 18, 2004 | edit

Hasselblad Going Digital

Classic Swedish camera manufacturer Hasselblad has announced the purchase of a company Imacon - normally not news for us, but it signifies a move for the camera company towards digital, who apparently was caught somewhat off guard by the extremely fast migration of users from film to digital cameras.

Or there might be a herring shortage, I don't know. When Fredic sends me translations I just smile sweetly and nod.

Read - Hasselblad satsar p digitalteknik [SVD]

Update: Here's some more info about the acquisition, this time in Jolly Old English. (Thanks, Mark!)
Read - Press Release [HasselbladUSA]

Originally from Gizmodo, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 18, 2004 | edit

It's 1999 All Over Again

When PDAs and mobile were young, companies big and small made the mistake of assuming that users wanted the same things on their mobiles as on their desktops. This year the direction has changed but the mistakes are the same.

Originally posted by Eric Lin from TheFeature.com, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 18, 2004 | edit

Internet Heading to Light Speed

If you want a faster internet, you need faster switches. A new nanotechnology opens the door to optical switches and a much speedier network. By John Gartner.

Originally from Wired News: Top Stories, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 18, 2004 | edit

Sony KLV-20WS2 Wireless TV

Another wireless TV from Sony, despite a general public "eh" for its existing "Location Free TV" product line that launched earlier this year. This model is even less portable, but it's not exactly designed to be lugged about. Instead, all the component parts - like the DVD player and wireless headphones and remote - use either 802.11a or 802.11g to communicate with the display. The 20-inch LCD has a rather lackluster 640 x 480 pixel display, though, so don't expect to stream any HDTV signals to the unit should you decide to import it from Japan when it goes on sale in September.

Read - Press Release (Japanese) [SonyJP via I4U]

Originally from Gizmodo, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 17, 2004 | edit

Visiting Timeland

Since the first introduction of visual Web browsers, a great many visual interfaces have appeared in which image objects are represented in geographic space as points on maps, nodes to be zoomed into. Especially as publishing images to the Web from mobile devices has become a practical reality, requiring some way to represent to the user the sum of information available at any given moment, these schemas have proliferated (at least in prototype, here my own). This is natural; maps are familiar, intuitive and rapidly scannable interfaces to what is potentially an unwieldy wealth of content. We know how to use them, most of us - they don't present much in the way of cognitive hiccups. What's more, our expectations regarding material deployed on the screen's X-Y axis and how to manipulate it ("up is north," "click here to scroll map") merge easily, perhaps all too easily, with our knowledge about how to use paper maps. Timo Arnall's innovation, in collaboration with Even Westvang, is to switch axes - to conceptualize a large number of images as moments from a passing stream. They call it "Time that land forgot," and I call it hauntingly beautiful. (Article continues; 305 words to come.)

Originally from v-2 Organisation | Adam Greenfield, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 17, 2004 | edit

It's Just the 'internet' Now

By changing its style to lowercase the 'I' in internet, Wired News is placing this medium squarely where it belongs: on an equal footing with radio, television and Gutenberg's wonderful innovation, moveable type.

Originally from Wired News: Top Stories, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 17, 2004 | edit

Memories of the Future

Ars Electronica's 't+25 timeline' project is part of the festival's 25th anniversary celebration, and is in accordance with this year's theme, 'TIMESHIFT - the World in Twenty-Five Years.' The net.art site asks viewers to make predictions of what is to come over the next 25 years, and/or to vote on the validity of predictions others have already made. Although Philip K. Dick might've warned against such predictions (in nearly all of his books and short stories, when I think about it), without Jules Verne's dreams of the Nautilus, who knows when we would have ventured 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? But surfing these would-be sci-fi writers online might not show what you expect; so far, and in line with growing distaste for the current US administration amongst digital communities, nearly all of the entries are cynical big-brother-like predictions of corporations, AIDS and Bushes still ruling the world. Oh, but apparently one good thing is that Linux eventually wins out over Windows. - Nathaniel Stern

http://www.aec.at/predictions

Originally from Rhizome.org Net Art News, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 16, 2004 | edit

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design: Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext

"The paper discusses Otlet's concept of the Office of Documentation and, as examples of an approach to actual hypertext systems, several special Offices of Documentation set up in the International Office of Bibliography. In his Traité de Documentation of 1934, one of the first systematic treatises on what today we would call information science, Otlet speculated imaginatively about online communications, text-voice conversion and what is needed in computer work stations, though of course he does not use this terminology." (W. Boyd Rayward - The Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Originally from Planet HCI, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 16, 2004 | edit

In Trying to Make Art, Success Can Be as Damaging as Failure

“We’re all familiar with the idea of being trapped by failure — or fate. There’s the grinding poverty into which so much of the world is plunged. But there are also the vast numbers of people with decent jobs who nonetheless feel pinned into lower-mid-level positions that they don’t like or don’t feel reflect their best abilities, yet to which they are bound by family or financial obligations or simply by the fear of trying something scary and new.”

Originally posted by Bill (mailto:keaggy@gmail.com) from xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 15, 2004 | edit

Reinvention through technology

"We will have to create the Zambia, out of our youth, that can square up to these challenges - we ourselves. We have no choice but to forge ourselves in daily action, creating a new type of Zambian out of our youth with a new technology as long as we embody the highest virtues and aspirations of the people and do not wander from the path."...

Originally from Content from Africa's Bloggers, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 14, 2004 | edit

Add-on lenses for your cameraphone

Either totally brilliant or totally stupid (without actually trying it out it’s hard to say which), a company in Hong Kong is selling add-on lenses you can affix to the camera in your cellphone using sticky pads (yes, sticky pads). The options include a telephoto lens (which magnifies things a full 1.5X!), a soft filter lens, a macro lens, and a two weird kaleidoscope effect lenses.

[Via PDA 24/7]

Originally posted by Peter Rojas from Engadget, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 13, 2004 | edit

Nanotechnology Speeds Up Internet 100 Times

Using a new hybrid material made of nanometer-sized "buckyballs" and a polymer, Canadian researchers have shown that nanotechnology could lead to an Internet based entirely on light and 100 times faster than today's. This material allowed them to use one laser beam to direct another with unprecedented control, a featured needed inside future fiber-optic networks.

These future fiber-optic communication systems could relay signals around the global network with picosecond (one trillionth of a second) switching times, resulting in an Internet 100 times faster. Please note this discovery appeared only in a lab: we'll have to live with our current networks for some time. This overview contains more details.

source [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on August 13, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Korean teenagers buy new handset every 16 months

According to a survey released Tuesday by Korean Consumer Protection Board on middle-high school and college students cell phone use shows that a mobilel phone s average life cycle is only 1 year and 4 months.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 12, 2004 | edit

Technology creates stress: report

A growing number of career women are suffering from what has been dubbed "frantic life syndrome"

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 12, 2004 | edit

Bangalore and the Indian Tech Boom

Brier Dudley at the Seattle Times has written a pretty decent overview of the growth of India's growing technology sector. It does a decent job...

Originally posted by Alex Steffen from WorldChanging: Another World Is Here, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 11, 2004 | edit

Engadget: our first cellphones

So we were all hanging around the Engadget HQ watercooler reminiscing like we often seem to, when we started talking about our first cellphones, and about those pre-millennial days when they only did one thing: make phone calls. No email, no Bluetooth, and definitely no camera. Normally we’d selfishly keep all these entertaining anecdotes to ourselves, but we thought we’d force everyone to write them down to share on the site. And of course we’re dying to hear what your first cellphone was, too. Extra points to any of you out there who actually had a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.

Originally posted by Ryan Block from Engadget, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 10, 2004 | edit

NVIDIA Gives Details On New GeForce 6

An anonymous reader writes "According to Firingsquad, NVIDIA will be announcing a new GeForce 6 card for the mainstream market at Quakecon this week. Like GeForce 6800, this new card will support shader model 3.0 and SLI (on PCI Express cards), so you can connect two $199 cards together for double the performance. NVIDIA will also be producing AGP versions of this card as well."

Originally posted by Hemos from Slashdot: Games, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 10, 2004 | edit

A vision of home helper, 65 years ago

Electro, the Mansfield Westinghouse robot who was a sensation at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, is to be housed in large display built around him and open to the public from Sept. 7 to Nov. 20 in...

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 10, 2004 | edit

predict the future at ars electronica's "timeline +25"

Welcome to the Ars Electronica t+25 timeline. You are welcome to post a prediction for the next 25 years here, year by year. Or you may vote on the predictions already posted. Anyone can write. Anyone can vote.

The t+25 timleline is part of the Ars Electronica Festival, 2-7 September 2004, held every year in Linz, Austria. Ars is the oldest and largest art and technology festival in the world, and this year is Ars' 25th anniversary, with the special theme "TIMESHIFT: the World in 25 Years."

The t+25 is online as a Beta Version. Registration is not required. Voting is based on a simple one vote per computer entry per day basis. We will be monitoring activity and may exercise the option of filtering entries (we don't intend any editorial filtering beyond keeping it readable by a general audience). Please report any bugs or comments to t25admin@aec.at.

We strongly encourage you, while you're reading entries, to rate them. Your vote counts!

During the Ars Electronica Festival, t+25 will exhibit as a public installation, where attendees can participate. It will remain accessible online during this time. When the Festival ends on 7 September 2004, t+25 freezes.

The t+25 timeline is a cultural experiment. Please join in!

Originally posted by rsg from Eyebeam reBlog, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 10, 2004 | edit

Sun Working to Obsolete Motherboards

perl_camel_jockey writes "Sun is developing a new technology that promises to increase computing power by eliminating the need for physical, soldered chip-to-chip connections on the motherboard. Called 'proximity communications', it portends the ability for chips to talk to one another wirelessly just by being next to each other. Potential applications in computer design abound. Apparently this is part of Sun's Hero program, recipient of a $50 million grant from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program to rejuvenate supercomputing in the US and regain the lead lost to Japan, in particular to NEC's Earth Simulator, ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world."

Originally posted by CowboyNeal from Slashdot, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 06, 2004 | edit

Secrets of ENIAC

Yesterday I went to the opening reception for Secrets of ENIAC, photographs by Benjamin Pierce, a professor of computer and information science here at Penn. The photographs are extreme close-ups, details of macros, showing a strange industrial landscape within the vacuum tubes of this early computer. They're now exhibited ...

Originally posted by nick (mailto:nickm@nickm.com) from Grand Text Auto, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 06, 2004 | edit

The Big Little Tease

Some investors and starry-eyed venture capitalists tout nanotech as the new biotech. Don't believe them. By Michael S. Malone from Wired magazine.

Originally from Wired News: Top Stories, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 06, 2004 | edit

60GB 1.8-inch Hard Drive from Toshiba Sets a Record

Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD), the industry pioneer in small form factor storage, today announced a new family of 1.8-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) that deliver the industry's highest capacities in this category with its 30GB "MK3006GAL" and 60GB "MK6006GAH." These drives also feature improved shock tolerance, power consumption and vibration control for better performance in mobile consumer electronics devices.

Originally from Physics Org, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 05, 2004 | edit

Rumor Control: Nokia N-Gage Not Being Pulled From Stores

So a rumor has been going around that Electronics Boutique had been instructed to pull the Nokia N-Gage QD, the updated version of the ill-fated original N-Gage. Shipping units back to the factory is never good; however, it's not nearly as bad as some are letting on (N-Gage being pulled completely from market entirely, etc.). According to our sources inside EB (the guy I called and asked), the first shipment of N-Gage QDs with T-Mobile service had a somewhat convoluted sign-up process on the phone -- convoluted enough that many people couldn't get their accounts activated. The first batch was shipped back, updated with easier sign-up software (like later models already had), and shipped back to the ElBos for sale.

So yeah, not the end of the world. I'm sort of disappointed, too. (Not that I hate the QD -- it's actually sort of nice -- but I lament any lost opportunity to pick on N-Gage.)

Related
Nokia N-Gage QD Review [Gizmodo]
Nokia Pushes N-Gage QD For Cheap [Gizmodo]

Originally from Gizmodo, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 05, 2004 | edit

Memories of memory

I saw this picture on Boing Boing. It's a ancient (about 30 years old) hard disk that probably fit about 256K according to a Boing Boing reader.

This iDuck can hold 1000X as much as that disk drive.

And these little 0.2mm RFID chips hold 128K each.

I wonder when they will start selling memory at the drug store in Petabytes per gram...

Comment - TrackBack

Originally from Joi Ito's Web, ReBlogged by Gavin on August 04, 2004 | edit

The Early History of Smalltalk (Alan C. Kay)

The Early History of Smalltalk (Alan C. Kay)

[Eyebeam reBlog]

Posted by Gavin on August 04, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Photonic chips go 3D

Building computer chips which use light instead of electricity will be possible in a few years, thanks to the new techniques developed by two separate research teams from the MIT and Kyoto University. Both have built photonic crystals that can be manufactured using processes suited to mass production. Technology Research News says that "the techniques could be used to make smaller, more efficient communications devices, create optical memory and quantum computing and communications devices, develop new types of lasers and biological and chemical sensors, and could ultimately lead to all-optical computer processors."

source[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Posted by Gavin on August 04, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Recomposing the University

"Far removed from the clichéd image of the ‘ivory tower’, today’s universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the conversion of students into ‘consumers’. In the name of democratisation and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour force. Here, in an email exchange, Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova, themselves employed in US and British universities respectively, describe the way the system works from the inside and look at the possibilities for getting out of it. Far from being a simple question of domination, they contend, the conditions of ‘mass intellectuality’ – also shared by many knowledge workers elsewhere in the ‘social factory’ – create enormous scope for new alliances and forms of resistance. "

Source [METAMUTE : M28 : Current]

Posted by Gavin on August 02, 2004 | edit

Film piracy zine from 1975

Mike Sizemore has uploaded a scanned in issue of "Private Screenings," an old mimeographed film collectors' mag from 1975. The issue is the special on film piracy -- that is, unauthorized duplication of actual FILMS. It's a fascinating look into the world of plus-ca-change-plus-c'est-la-meme-chose.

Link

[Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on July 30, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Gallery of retro science book covers

This gallery of "How and Why" book covers makes me want to go straight to eBay. Link (via The Cartoonist) [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on July 27, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

GeForce 6800 lifts its skirt

The hardware site, Accelenation, shows us all how to write about new technology. The review hand-holds us through the features of the GeForce 6800, even explaining why we should be impressed by all the big numbers. It may seem a little technical at first glance, but by the end you get a good idea of the strenghts and weaknesses of the card. They also link to sites and documents that flesh out the card even more. If you want to buy the 6800, this is a must-read.

[Joystiq]

Posted by Gavin on July 26, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

A bit of perspective

Some terms have been changed to make this quote a bit less obviously ridiculous:

”The appearance of [phone] cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the “camera fiend” began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares.

One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: “PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR [CAMERA PHONES] ON THE BEACH.” Other locations were no safer. For a time, [phone] cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The “Hartford Courant” sounded the alarm as well, declaring that “the sedate citizen can’t indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around [the internet].”

Sound familiar? It was written about the Kodak camera when it first came out (obviously with the original terms in there)....

[Engadget]

Posted by Gavin on July 24, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Camera phones to take 40 percent of digital camera market by 2008

LG Economic Research Institute (LGERI) predicts camera phones will eat into 40 percent of the digital camera market by 2008, reports The Korea Times.

Recent rapid advances in camera phones are causing the Institute to be more "optimistic" about problems for the digital camera marketplace. The organization thought two megapixels would be the ceiling for camera phones, but the Institute admitted it was wrong since three megapixel handsets already have been introduced.

Chipmakers are working on six megapixel products (as I wrote previously about Qualcomm).

Five megapixels this year!

Wow -- the article reports that South Korean handset vendors plan to introduce five megapixel camera phones this year.

An Institute researcher, Choo Joon-il, says, "Over the long haul, digital cameras could maintain its foothold in the top-end market but in the mid-range market the competition will be stiff, but still in favor of camera phones."

Segmenting the market

Telecoms Korea has published more information about the report. The Institute divides the digital camera market into three segments for 2008: digital cameras with with six megapixels or more that will account for 30 percent of the market, four to five megapixels that will account for 50 percent and three megapixel or less that will account for 30 percent of the market.

Camera phones will dominate the low end -- three megapixel or less -- market but they will only "share" the turf in the middle ground, the four to five megapixel market, the Institute says. Digital cameras will dominate the high end.

In 2006, camera phones will comprise 40 percent, 230 million units, of the handset market, the Institute says.

Source[Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on July 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Cameraphone hysteria recapitulates portable camera hysteria of 1888

Amazing PBS piece traces the history of the reaction to the portable camera -- eerily familiar to the reaction today to the phonecam.

The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."

Link

(via Kottke) [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on July 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Remembrance of things past: Kodak cameras were banned

Thanks to a tip from Jim Sullivan of The Abbington Group, who pointed me to an entry by Jason Kottke who found on Redrick deLeon's Weblog an article on the PBS Web site about how the early Kodak cameras scared people enough to ban the cameras in some locations.

The article on the PBS site, "The Kodak Camera Starts a Craze," says:

"The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the 'camera fiend' began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares.

"One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: 'PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH.' Other locations were no safer.

"For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The 'Hartford Courant' sounded the alarm as well, declaring that 'the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children.'

"Hilariousness, however, was the key. Where the daguerreotype and its wet-plate successors had required stillness from their subjects, the Kodak camera was able to capture their spontaneity.

"So convincing were these new images of people that today it is difficult to believe that anyone had had any fun at all in the age of the daguerreotype."

[Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on July 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Seeing Cyberspace

URL: http://www.electronetwork.org/works/seeing/

Posted by Gavin on July 20, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Japan and US: two cultures of piracy

MIT professor Ian Condry has analysed the two “cultures of piracy” shaping the music industries in Japan and in the US. Both countries are inclined to blame declines in sales on music sharing among young people. The internet plays almost... [we make money not art]

Posted by Gavin on July 20, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Walkmen changed our social norms

This article on the 25th anniversary of the Walkman explores some of the fascinating social fallout from the rise of personal stereos.

"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."

Link

[Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on July 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

The Next Generation of Journalists Will Start as Bloggers

Ernest Miller of Corante has a spot-on take of the generational changes that will be coming to journalism by way of blogs:

If journalism is in their blood at a young age, they're going to start blogging long before they set foot in a J-School. School newspapers are passé, school blogs are cool...

They're going to expect trackbacks and conversations. They're not going to want to state the same facts that everyone else has stated ad nauseum, but only those elements that they can add to the conversation. Because of this, I believe that ultimately, bloggers will change the profession of big media journalism from within to work more cooperatively with blogging.

source:[Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on July 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Holographic Projectors

Technology Research News reports on a possible new display technology: holographic projectors. "The method could lead to pocket-sized, battery-powered video projectors that produce images...

[WorldChanging]

Posted by Gavin on July 12, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Samsung Electronics Unveils Next-generation Technology Breakthroughs

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leader in advanced semiconductor technology, presented a wide range of core next-generation technologies at the 2004 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, being held in Honolulu June 15-19. A total of 22 papers from Samsung were selected on such diverse topics as 50 nanometer (nm) and beyond next generation transistor process technology, new copper interconnection technology by introducing a new material Ruthenium (Ru), 70 nm NOR Flash and low-power DRAM technology, high capacity 64Mb Phase-change RAM (PRAM) and more.

Source[Physics Org]

Posted by Gavin on July 06, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

This Video Projector Will Fit Inside Your Pocket

Video projectors able to project high-quality images will be embedded in your cellphones and laptops within two years. This is the promise of a new technology developed at Cambridge University. These pocket projectors will have no lenses and no light bulbs. Instead, these future battery-powered tiny projectors will rely on holographic technology and special algorithms. In "Holograms enable pocket projectors,"Technology Research News explains that a 2D hologram will be created on a microdisplay and projected by using a laser beam.

This has been possible because the researchers have written special algorithms which generates the holograms a million times faster than standard ones. This overview contains more details and includes a photograph of a sport event and of the computer-generated hologram of the same event using these special algorithms.

[Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on July 05, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Wap Art

Via mediaTIC blog. Is there a Wap Art ? Is there a new way of Art : SMS Art or MMS Art ? The french Net Art portal called Uyio now offers the possibility to reference Wap Art creations at this URL.

Source: [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on June 30, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Wearing the phone

Between 1% and 5% of all cell phones sold worldwide are wearable devices such as wrist watches, pendants, and powder cases.This article in BusinessWeek online quotes an analyst of the consultancy firm Gartner, Mr Michael King,as saying that wearable cell phones will start making their way into the U.S. over the next 12 months and by 2007, 20% of U.S. cell-phone users will likely be donning haute couture phones.
Your Lapel Is Ringing

Source [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on June 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Coming Changes in Broadcast Industry

The unspoken secret, the elephant in the room, of WirelessUnleashed is that broadcast as we know it is circling the drain. In my humble opinion. And more capable, more powerful Internet access will amplify that sucking sound.

Doc Searls and Jeff Jarvis have been having a visionary dialog (blogalog?) about how post-broadcast TV and radio look.

Doc says that radio & tv stations should

send out RSS notifications with every single program they put on. Hell, every advertisement too. Might even create some demand for appropriate messages. RSS can be really, really huge for the industry. It might make the damn industry not only interactive, but accountable. Meaning, for example, you can count, and account for, your listeners. If you're an NPR station, maybe you can get the listeners to buy the "content" that only 10% are paying for right now.

Doc has more to say here, and Jarvis takes it to the next level here.

Source: [Wireless Unleashed]

Posted by Gavin on June 22, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

NIST Demonstrates 'Teleportation' Of Atomic States For Quantum Computing

"Physicists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated "teleportation" by transferring key properties of one atom to another atom without using any physical link, according to results reported in the June 17, 2004, issue of the journal Nature."

[ Science Daily ]

Posted by Gavin on June 22, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Cars To Be Assembled Atom By Atom

In this article, the Detroit News says that the adoption of nanotechnology by car manufacturers will produce safer, lighter and cheaper vehicles. While GM is already using nanocomposite materials for several vans, Ford is developing new nanoengineered catalysts to replace platinum. The newspaper gives other examples, such as auto-adaptive suspension systems, scratch-resistant paints or nanocoated windshields which will not crack. In fact, all parts in a car can be improved by using nanotechnology, according to the article. And if automakers are only going to introduce limited amounts of nanotechnology-related products in the next few years, their usage should be widespread within ten years.

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Posted by Gavin on June 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Dan Gilmore on Ubiquitous Cameras

Dan Gilmore, in today's San Jose Mercury News, has an interesting essay on the growing availability of micro-camera enabled devices such as cameraphones...

Source: [WorldChanging]

Posted by Gavin on June 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

South Koreans challenge Japan for camera phone sales leadership

The South Koreans are targeting Japanese handset manufacturers in their bid to become the world's leader in camera phones sales, according to an article in the Korea Herald.

Source [Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on June 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Self-Cleaning via Titanium Dioxide

Titanium dioxide is a white powder, something we eat and see frequently as a whitener for paint, processed food, toothpaste, and many other products. However,...

[WorldChanging]

Posted by Gavin on June 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Printable Silicon For Ultrahigh Performance Flexible Electronic Systems

"By carving specks of single crystal silicon from a bulk wafer and casting them onto sheets of plastic, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a route to ultrahigh performance, mechanically flexible thin-film transistors. The process could enable new applications in consumer electronics -- such as inexpensive wall-to-wall displays and intelligent but disposable radio frequency identification tags -- and could even be used in applications that require significant computing power."

Source [science daily]

Posted by Gavin on June 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Factoid: $65 - $75 of semiconductors in camera phones

While looking for camera phone information on the Web, I found this factoid: A camera phone contains $65 - $75 worth of semiconductors, according to an older (February 24, 2004) article in the Business Journal - Portland (free registration required).

The article also notes that cellular phones without cameras contain $22 - $25 worth of semiconductors.

The article, focusing on growth in the semiconductor industry, says Motorola can't obtain enough semiconductors for its camera phones, and the means there's a need for more chips.

Semiconductor slump over

The article reports:

"The deepest, blackest slump in the chip equipment industry may have vanished into deep memory when wireless phone giant Motorola Inc. declared Dec. 4 that its phone sales were constrained by an industrywide shortage of semiconductor components.

"That announcement was an emphatic indicator that something dramatic has changed in the semiconductor and semiconductor equipment industry. Suddenly, the glut of semiconductor manufacturing capacity that had kept equipment orders on ice month after month was gone.

"In its place? A manufacturing squeeze, and a mad rush for new equipment to satisfy demand for consumer and business devices and computers."

Source: [Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on June 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Camera phones threaten Kodak's disposable camera business

As Kodak's film sales plummet, one of the few bright spots for the Rochester, N.Y.-based company has been sales of disposable film cameras. But camera phones could cut into this business, according to an article on the WHEC-TV Rochester, N.Y. Web site.

Source [Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on June 17, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Telephia says camera phones spark upgrades, applications in Europe

Marketing research company Telephia reports in its "European Device Report" (see below) that camera phones are driving Europeans to upgrade their cellular phones and also increasing demand for emerging wireles entertainment applications such as MP3 players, videos and TV.

The report is based upon Telephia surveying 27,000 mobile users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. The survey indicates 11 percent of subscribers use their camera phones and 27 percent want that feature on their next phones.

Source: [Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on June 17, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Nokia debuts 1.2 megapixel 3G camera phone with optional external flash

Nokia today announced three new camera phones, including what it says is the world's smallest 3G (WCDMA) camera phone. The 3G handset, the 6630 (see left), includes a 1.23 megapixel camera with the option of an external attachable flash.

The "candy bar" shaped 6630 also features a 6x digital zoom for still photos and videos, manual exposure control, a rapid-sequence capability, 74MB of storage (including, I believe the bundled MultiMediaCard) and the ability to shoot up to 60 minutes of video. The handset also includes software to facilitate printing photos on Hewlett-Packard and Kodak printers.

Other features include an MP3 player and streaming audio capabilities. The 6630 won't be available until the fourth quarter of this year and Nokia says the unsubsidized priced will be less than 500 Euros ($612).

Other new phones

In addition to the 6630, Nokia's new camera phones (see below; photo collage from MobileMag) are the 6260 and 6170 -- both with VGA cameras. The 6260 is a clamshell design the enables the screen to twist; the 6170 is a clamshell without the twist feature.

The new handsets, announced at CommunicAsia in Singapore and in Helsinki, represent an attempt by Nokia to try to reclaim its leadership in the cellular handset market -- not just in terms of numbers of phones to be sold (where it still dominates) but also to be perceived as, once again, the developer of cool, exciting products.

If you've been reading the press reports, you know Nokia's sales have dropped dramatically and the perception is Nokia also has dropped behind more supposedly innovative handset vendors, such as Samsung and Sanyo, in developing camera phones and other more excitingly designed handsets.

[Reiter's Camera Phone Report]

Posted by Gavin on June 15, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Biometric Bodysuits, the future of Fashion?

A team of the Applied NanoBioscience Center at Arizona State University has built prototypes of biometric bodysuits. They can detect chemical attacks, deliver drugs to their wearers, or even perfume scents if your body temperature rises too much. The military version of the Scentsory Chameleon Bodysuit incorporates fuel cells to provide a lightweight source of power for the soldier's equipment. The civilian one can monitor your heart or blood pressure, deliver interactive games or simply work as a wearable computer.

You will even be able to download new colors and patterns from the Web to change your appearance according to this article from East Valley Tribune in Arizona.

Both versions should reach the market within a few years. More details and references are available in in this overview, including a photograph of the military version of the outfit.

Source [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on June 11, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

An Atari VCS Curriculum

Prompted in part by the all-encompassing "game canon" lists that were provided a while ago (specifically, the ones by Greg Costikyan and by Jesper Juul and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen), I've listed a dozen games for one specific early console - the...

[grandtextauto.org]

Posted by Gavin on June 08, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Procedural Literacy: An Idea Whose Time has Come (43 years ago)

Previously at GTxA we’ve discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Ken Perlin’s new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media...

Source: [grandtextauto.org]

Posted by Gavin on June 04, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Welcome to the 'Plogging' World!

No, it's not a typo. A plog is short for 'project log' like a blog is short for 'weblog' or 'web log.' And plogs start to be used as tools to manage projects, especially in the IT world, as discovered Michael Schrage of the MIT. He reports his findings in an article published by CIO Magazine, "The Virtues of Chitchat." Schrage found that if plogs are not really commonplace, they're not exactly rare. And they are even used to manage large IT projects, such ERP rollouts. I totally agree with him that a plog is of great value to integrate people in a team or to keep track of the advancement of a project. And you, what's your view? If you're a project manager, do you use a plog for better control? And if not today, will you use one in the future?

Source: [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Posted by Gavin on May 18, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

HP: The longer you moblog, the fewer photos you send.

From yatta at Unmediated:

Reiter's Camera Phone Report covers a study by an HP researcher indicating that the longer people have their moblogs, the few photos they transmit. While most users post about 14 pics during the first week of their moblog, the number drops to four photos a week within a month.

"We can hypothesize that this may be related to design of the moblogging services, or to issues with the actual device. For the service providers such results should be indicate the need for better incentives for the posting of content.

"While bad resolution and image quality may diminish the desire to share an image, another major issue is the large number of key presses from the time a picture is taken to the posting. Users may be unwilling to deal with the hassle of the interface beyond the first few pictures."

Reiter's also notes that Adar will be discussing his findings during the 13th annual World Wide Web conference in New York, May 17 - 22.

Sometimes it seems as if the widespread adoption of a tool has a lot less to do with features and a lot more to do with minimizing the friction you go through to complete a task. Blog-type tools have been around for close to a decade. But someone had to remove all of the non-functional chrome, dialogues, and keystrokes to open up its use. All of this is magnified once you try to run this stuff from a 2 inch display.

Source:[blogcount]

Posted by Gavin on May 17, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

MT 3.0: Backlash and Trackbacks (Liz Lawley)

I’ve spent most of the afternoon and evening reading through the literally hundreds of trackbacks to Mena Trott’s announcement of Movable Type 3.0 and its new pricing structure. It’s a pretty amazing process to watch. And if I didn’t like the folks over at SixApart so much, I’d enjoy watching this process unfold a lot more.

As I write this, there are already 547 trackbacks to Mena’s post. The vast majority of them are from MT users who are upset about the announcements—many of whom are actively pursuing alternatives, and posting URLs to other blogging platforms and instructions for migration.

This is certainly not the first time that a company has badly misjudged its customers (remember New Coke?)—but it may be the first time that a company whose customers are all online publishers has done so.

The real problem, as both Simon Phipps and Jason Kottke have pointed out—is that the personal license pricing is disastrous. And by making the personal licenses so unpalatable, they’ve alienated the very users that made them so successful.

They’ve also left a number of academic users with serious questions about how this pricing model will affect them. From the University of Minnesota UThink project to my own MT Courseware, academics who’ve vested significant time and energy into customizing MT are now pondering what their options will be. There does seem to be some encouraging news on that front, however. I’ve spoken with Anil Dash about the “significant educational discounts” that are referenced on the site, and the answers were reassuring. I’m not going to post specific numbers, because they want to work out details on a case-by-case basis—but I’d strongly encourage academics interested in upgrading to contact SixApart directly to find out what the cost for their specific installation would be.

People already running installations of MT 2.x don’t need to panic—what they have now is covered by their original license, so unless they want to upgrade there’s no reason to be concerned about the fees. Unfortunately, that wasn’t well communicated in the announcements, so a lot of folks are unnecessarily worried. (Yes, I checked this with them before writing that.)

This post from DrunkenBlog has a nice analysis of the economic issues at play in this process right now. What seems clear is that this announcement has created a significant change in how people perceive the blogging tools playing field. The folks over at pMachine have started a “Make the Switch” campaign; they’re offering free copies of their new ExpressionEngine software to the first 1000 “switchers,” and promise a competitive upgrade price to follow. Shelley Powers, Slashdot and MeFi have pointed a slew of users to WordPress and TextPattern.

On top of those “install it yourself” options, SixApart is also now facing competition on the hosting front from a much-improved new Blogger (complete with integrated comments!), and the final release of Tucows’ BlogWare.

I think we’re watching a significant moment in weblog history. Justified or not, the anger among MovableType’s users will push many of them to new tools, and has permanently changed the perception of SixApart by its customers. The users have spoken, and the landscape has shifted.

[Many-to-Many]

Posted by Gavin on May 16, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Technology as a transformative social force

This article of David Kirkpatrick in Fortune points to Bridges, a nonprofit consulting firm on IT and development. The story illustrates a project of real and practical IT solutions 'saving lives with a simple PDA'.

via ICTlogy

Source: [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on May 07, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Paul Saffo: Trading In A Cloud Of Electrons

In its latest issue, BusinessWeek Magazine publishes a special report, "E-Biz Strikes Again!," which states that after transforming the book, music and travel industries, the Internet is well on its way to deeply affect six more industries, such as jewelry or real estate sales. The online version of this report includes an interview of Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future, "Trading In A Cloud Of Electrons." In it, Saffo talks about the big changes that the Web has brought to business and culture. He also delivers some provocative thoughts about what's next. He says that services will replace physical products as business opportunities. For example, he thinks that the auto makers will give you cars for free, making money by selling you lots of services, such as a $30 chip which will transform your car into a Ferrari-class vehicle.

Source: [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Posted by Gavin on May 03, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Paul Saffo on What's Next

In its latest issue, BusinessWeek Magazine publishes a special report, "E-Biz Strikes Again!," which states that after transforming the book, music and travel industries, the Internet is well on its way to deeply affect six more industries, such as jewelry or real estate sales. The online version of this report includes an interview of Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future, "Trading In A Cloud Of Electrons." In it, Saffo talks about the big changes that the Web has brought to business and culture. He also delivers some provocative thoughts about what's next.

He says that services will replace physical products as business opportunities. For example, he thinks that the auto makers will give you cars for free, making money by selling you lots of services, such as a $30 chip which will transform your car into a Ferrari-class vehicle. This overview contains some selected excerpts of the interview.

source [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on May 03, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Spinning Out Faster, Better Chips

IBM and Stanford University set up a lab to harness a quantum property of electrons called spin. New chips based on the so-called spintronics technology will be faster than conventional electronics and generate far less heat. Amit Asaravala reports from San Jose, California.

Source: [Wired News]

Posted by Gavin on April 29, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

$10,000 1965 "kitchen computer"

Mitch sez, "Another Jetsonian Relic: A $10K kitchen computer ca. 1965. Notice the orange-and-black Star Trek: TOS design."

Link

(Thanks, Mitch!)

Source: [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on April 29, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Making Movies?

The NY Times recently described a Hollywood increasingly fascinated with Video Games as a less expensive alternative to movies-as-entertainment (Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination With Video Games). True, Ludology.org (April 12) questions whether movie moguls know how to make games. Nonetheless, there could be another angle here: on the front page of the April 9th Wall Street Journal (see: When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have 'Red vs. Blue') we discover Red and Blue is profitably making short internet movies based within Halo. Games as movie production platforms? What next, Virtual Worlds as movie studios? Casts of thousands?

Source: [terranova]

Posted by Gavin on April 28, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Moblogging for research

Dina explains how moblogging can help in a ethnographic study and explains in details the process of a moblog in research which is a prototype using MovableType. See her Moblogging Opportunities for Research Teams article.
"And i see huge potential for Moblogging or Photoblogs as a form of sharing, exchanging ideas and reporting - especially when you have a large team like we do on this study."

Source: [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on April 26, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Paper DVDs

Sony and Toppan Printing have developed DVDs consisting of 51 percent paper. Data is stored on the discs using a blue laser instead of red. The smaller wavelength of blue laser light means that 25 gigabytes of data can be packed onto each paper/polymer disk, more than twice the capacity of traditional polycarbonate plastic-based DVDs. Link

Source: [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on April 19, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

PDAs and other mobile devices will dominate computing in the years ahead

Mobile technology's evolution reminds us that change in distributed systems is nothing if not driven by demand, says David Stodder in Intelligent Enterprise

Source: [Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on April 16, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

The N-Gage QD

Ewan over at All About N-Gage spent some time with and writes up his thoughts of the next-gen N-Gage QD.

It's a phone.

After all of Nokia's mass marketing of the N-Gage and trying to make it out to be a brand new device class, and refusing to acknowledge that it was purely a console, or purely a phone (like the 6600), the design of the N-Gage QD gives the game away. It's quite clearly a phone.

Gone is the MP3 player--whatever. Gone is the FM radio--feh, I actually found that rather useful on my N-Gage TOS. Hot-swappable SD/game card. No more sidetalkin'--I'm still surprised nobody's pulled a DIY and modded the speaker hole.

Would I buy it again? Probably not; the original is still quite happily used for its gaming (25 years' worth, with all those emulators), as a backup phone on the road, and as a first class Series 60 when I try anything out (the 3650's memory stops some fiddling in its tracks). But I sure am glad to see that, while their initial focus group for the N-Gage TOS must have been small indeed, they took market feedback and ran with rather than away from it.

Source [MobileWhack]

Posted by Gavin on April 16, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

ReMixes: What the Web was for

As FreeCulture (the movement — nothing to do with me) points out, one weakness to the web that would nag Ted Nelson is the inability easily and always to point directly to a part of the text on a webpage. Trevor Smith has solved that with Free Culture, the book. Here’s a version of the book with each paragraph linked to an href. Very cool.

source [Lessig Blog]

Posted by Gavin on April 09, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Bots Open Door to Gaming History

A tinkerer devises a way for players to enjoy Infocom's classic text-only games using AOL Instant Messenger. By Daniel Terdiman.

[Source Wired News: Joystick]

Posted by Gavin on April 06, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Digital Paper E-Book

Next month Sony, Philips and E-Ink will be releasing the first digital paper electronic book in Japan, called "Librié" (see big pic). Its resolution is 170 dpi (newspaper quality), can download up to 500 book-length texts from a PC, has...

[Source grandtextauto.org]

Posted by Gavin on April 06, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Why write papers?

Andrew Chen writes
about his ambivalence, as a researcher who blogs, towards writing
academic papers. It struck a chord with me - I've had very similar
thoughts.

In my experience, if what you're into is interdisciplinary,
emerging-stuff research, as far as impact is concerned you're better
off blogging your ideas. When you do, it tends to generate trails of
links that automagically attract interested people from many different
directions (given a critical mass of bloggers who care about your
general area of interest), which enables your ideas to grow and sparks
creative collaboration.


On the paper/conference scene, from the outset you face the problem of
choosing a specialized forum, which likely does not match your ideal
audience very well. And even if your submission is accepted there's a
fair chance that it won't generate much interest or useful feedback
(apart from a couple reviews by people who probably don't care much).
In such a case all you'll get from the extra effort is an extra line on
your academic CV.


I feel that unless you're pursuing research that fits within a somewhat
mature line of inquiry, a research blog is to traditional means of
disseminating research as eBay is to yard sales: given equal effort,
your odds of getting what you need are much better.

Source[Seb's Open Research]

Posted by Gavin on March 05, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Nanotube Mix Makes Liquid Crystal

Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England have found that carbon nanotubes can be mixed with a solvent to form a liquid crystal. [Technology Review Reseach News Brief Feed v2.1]

Posted by Gavin on March 05, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

IT Protesters Outside Looking In

Pickets march in front of a downtown hotel to protest the shipping of IT jobs overseas. Although there is sympathy for their plight, those inside say economic realities make it likely that the practice will continue. Manny Frishberg reports from Seattle.

Source: [Wired News]

Posted by Gavin on March 01, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Scientists Turn Toilet Into Home Power Plant

Here's a crappy idea: Scientist Bruce Logan and others at Pennsylvania State University have invented a device that harvests electricity from the bacteria that feed on whatever is in your toilet water and other household waste water. The gadget includes a plastic tube and eight graphite rods running lengthwise through the tube that act as negative electrodes. As bacteria consume waste, they also gather electrons, which the device extracts from them and converts into usable electricity to power, say, the refrigerator that stores the food that becomes waste that produces more electricity for your refrigerator. It's the circle of life. [The Raw Feed]

Posted by Gavin on February 26, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Infineon unveils carbon nanotube power chips

Computer Weekly Feb 24 2004 12:12PM GMT [Moreover Science News]

Posted by Gavin on February 25, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Continuous Paper

A few hours ago I gave a talk entitled "Continuous Paper." It was at the History of Material Texts Seminar here at Penn, and dealt with the print-based heritage of computer interfaces. The full text is online....

Source: [grandtextauto.org]

Posted by Gavin on February 25, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

How Media Changes Cultural Identities

Two recent articles in the International Times Herald point to the ways that modern media are changing the ways people live in relation to national ...

Source:[Technology Review RSS Blog Feed]

Posted by Gavin on February 25, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Sales of LCDs exceed CRTs

In something of a milestone of sorts, global sales of flat panel LCD computer monitors is set to outpace sales of regular cathode ray tube...

Source: [Gizmodo]

Posted by Gavin on February 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Lab Notes: Research from Berkeley Engineering

* Weaving flexible transistors into textiles!

* Self-diagnosing buildings!

* Swarm mechanics!

* The father of electronic art, RIP!


All of it, right this way.... Link

Source: [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by Gavin on February 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Light-Storing Chip Designed

For years, researchers have been striving to make high-speed, low-power chips that channel light rather than electricity, but finding ways to briefly store light pulses has proved extremely challenging.

Source: [Technology Review Reseach News Brief Feed v2.1]

Posted by Gavin on February 23, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Pentagon's LifeLog Project Cancelled

Wired says that the Pentagon has Killed the LifeLog Project.
The controversial LifeLog
project was to record all of the data of a person's experiences
(sees,
hears,
does, etc). This would create a huge database that scientists could
use for any number of evil purposes. Civil liberties groups threw up
red flags on all of
DARPA's Electronic Frountier Foundation projects such as Lifelog and
were probably
thrilled that the project is cancelled. Other similar DARPA projects
such as FutureMap have also been cancelled. Some conspiracy
theorists believe the Pentagon will still secretly continue all
of DARPA's evil projects at somewhere like Area 51! Now I'm not a
conspiracy
theorist, but I'm pretty sure this is not the end of this line of
research.

Source: [robots.net]

Posted by Gavin on February 05, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

USB Gadget Really Sucks

A Japanese company is selling a mini-vacuum for keyboards that plugs into, and gets its power from, your PC's USB port. Your computer practically cleans itself!

Source: [The Raw Feed]

Posted by Gavin on January 27, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Gadgets in the Superchip Age

Novel chip designs and manufacturing techniques keep the 40 year computing explosion going strong. What consumer devices will they enable?

Source: [Technology Review Feed v2.1]

Posted by Gavin on January 27, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Looking into the mobile future

In one of those fun crystal-ball type articles, PC World takes a look at what technologies are in the pipeline for the coming year. Featured prominently are several developments in interoperability between various wireless technologies. 3G cellular networks and WiFi will overlap as users move between environments. And then there's "WiMax", the new 802.16 standard with range up to 30 miles. Cool beans!

Thanks, Trisha!

Source:[Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on January 24, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Quantum Dice Debut

Researchers have overcome a major obstacle to generating random numbers on quantum computers by limiting the possibilities in the otherwise unlimited randomness of a set of quantum particles.

Source: [Technology Review Reseach News Brief Feed v2.1]

Posted by Gavin on January 24, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

Treder: Time to Make a Choice About Nanotechnology

Betterhumans has published an excellent paper from Mike Treder on regulating nanotechnology. I like his phrase "nano-anarchy," a policy that would surely lead to some of the grim scenarios described in the article.

When Treder described the type of social disintegration that could occur, I was reminded of the Mongol Hordes who swept through Asia and Europe hundreds of years ago. While they didn't have radically advanced technology per se, they did have the advantage of possessing superior and novel military tactics, an advantage of information technology. They were untouchable, and their Empire was one of the most formidable in all of human history. Similarly, I worry sometimes that a small band of fanatics could take the world hostage with nanotechnology.

Interestingly, it can be argued that our civil liberties would likely disappear in a world of nano-anarchy. As 9/11 so blatantly showed, when disaster strikes, the knee-jerks with similar force. It's only through tight and accountable regulatory regimes that we can have the confidence to maintain civil freedoms.

Source: [CybDem]

Posted by Gavin on January 21, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit

The Broadband Home of the Future

With almost 23 million households sporting high-speed, always-on Internet connections, the broadband home of the future makes every room the center of the networked world. By Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.

Source:[Wired News]

Posted by Gavin on January 14, 2004 | Comments (0) | edit