mssv

  • The Death of Publishers

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    4–5 minutes

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    49 comments on The Death of Publishers

    Update: Virginie Clayssen has done a wonderful French translation of this post on her weblog teXtes.  Adrian Buys an eBook Reader A couple of weeks ago, I idly visited mobileread.com and discovered something incredible – Tiger Direct in the US were selling Sony eReaders for $100, a discount of $250. Thanks to the rampaging power…

  • How many seconds?

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    2–4 minutes

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    1 comment on How many seconds?

    I’ve heard it said that the iPhone has inferior features to other phones. On paper, there is some substance to this. Compared to the flagship products of Nokia and HTC, the iPhone lacks: 3G a high megapixel camera (competing phones usually have 3-5 megapixels compared to the iPhone’s 2 MP camera) video recording ability video…

  • Avoiding dress collisions

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on Avoiding dress collisions

    Last month, Laura Bush turned up to a party at the White House in a $8,500 Oscar de la Renta dress, which three other women also happened to be wearing. Laura Bush quickly changed her dress, but the damage was done and the story of this amusing accident quickly spread across the Internet. I was…

  • Singularitarian

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    3–4 minutes

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    1 comment on Singularitarian

    “[When] there are wireless chips in my clothes, when I get up in the morning it’s going to simplify my life enormously. There’s all this stuff I won’t have to consciously think about anymore. If I don’t know where my cowboy boots are, they will tell me.” – Bruce Sterling I quite like Bruce Sterling’s…

  • Internet World

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    3–4 minutes

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    3 comments on Internet World

    I was at the Internet World conference in Earl’s Court this afternoon, speaking about Alternate Reality Games. It’s a bit of a grandiose name for a conference that is essentially aimed at SMEs, but they’d managed to round up a pretty interesting bunch of speakers, including people from the likes of Yahoo, MSN, Blockbuster, Virgin,…

  • The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

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    5–8 minutes

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    2 comments on The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

    (As I mentioned in my last post, I have this big backlog of posts I want to make. One of my notes says ‘zelda’. I’m not sure what this means any more. Could it be about the Phantom Hourglass trailer I saw at GDC? Or maybe it’s about the Zelda music they played at Video…

  • Deconstruction

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Deconstruction

    (Quick post while I write the huge queue of posts I’ve got backlogged) I recently got hold of a new Intel iMac. I’d been wanting a new computer for a while now, and it seemed like getting a top of the line computer (as opposed to more middle-range ones) which would presumably stay fast for…

  • Aliens hacking Earth via SETI

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Aliens hacking Earth via SETI

    Scientists, be on guard … ET might be a malicious hacker – nice to see people starting to think about the possibility of a viral attack by aliens. Doesn’t seem too outlandish to me (honestly) and brings to mind shades of Vernor Vinge.

  • DARPA Grand Challenge

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    1–2 minutes

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    3 comments on DARPA Grand Challenge

    I was delighted to read that at least three teams had gotten to the end of the DARPA Grand Challenge, which saw autonomously-driven cars run along a 211km course – which, importantly, they didn’t know in advance. And yet what spin does BBC News put on it? They say that the technology will be used…

  • Notes from a Small Symposium, and others

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    5–7 minutes

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    1 comment on Notes from a Small Symposium, and others

    The past Thursday saw me make a flying visit to Cambridge for a quarter-day symposium on wireless gaming. Returning to Cambridge is always a strange experience for me; I spent three years of my life holed up in a few square miles of town, so it all feels very familiar, despite the fact that half…