> "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.
Uh, poor designers work the same way. "Oh, I get a portfolio item, THANK YOU" is not a business model.
The real story is that bad-to-average design is no longer scarce. The tools are ubiquitous, and many people play with them. So you're going to see a tiered economy: the wannabes doing spec work for minimum wage on places like istockphoto.com and the golden glorious few doing high touch client-focused work for $200 an hour. Similar to whats happening in photography and journalism, and for much the same reasons.
Investigate West. The Watchdog Institute. DocumentCloud. The Climate Desk. The Investigative News Network. The Texas Tribune. ProPublica. The Center for Public Integrity.
Turn off your TV, motherfucker, because the revolution has not been televised.
As a half-ass sailor who telecommutes, it sounds like cruising up and down the US, Japan or EU coast for a while is a pretty good option. Being in sight of land also makes supply and safety a lot less like a full time job. If you want endless open ocean views, just don't look to starboard.
Check out HopeLab, which is a hardware & software shop doing pretty much that, as a public benefit.
They started with clinical trials of software that was anecdotally doing cool things for cancer patients (Chemo Warrior, or something like that, that roleplayed nuking cancer by taking meds. Results: kids took their meds on schedule.)
From what I've seen of them (I saw their CEO present once) are committed to a) making the games attractive to kids by doing really good behavioral observation and dialogue and b) doing real clinical trials to evaluate results. Their latest effort is a suit with accelerometers that logs activity then downloads it, earning points, rewards, unlocking levels, etc. They aren't making much noise yet, but they're pretty far along with the hardware (one of their testers took it surfing). I believe the goal is a commercially successful product, perhaps in partnership with another platform.
> Who said US doesn't pull stunts like China? >> China is *bad*. The U.S. is *bad*. But to say that the U.S. is "just as bad" is ridiculous and obviously false
it would be nice if it took a different approach; Give the Harvard MBAs and MIT and Caltech Ph.D engineeers working at Cisco and IBM opportunities to innovate
Dude, where's the money in that? Raytheon for the win.
Nothing indicates that they are busy vetting anything: emails bouncing does not indicate that they are moving slowly because they are committed to the process.
Uh, when a company gets huge volumes of good press off a promise to do something, involving tens of thousands of people in that process, then yeah, they have an obligation to actually do the one thing that required their input: pick winners and give out the money.
That "sense of entitlement" we feel is because we, the public, are in fact completely fucking entitled to expect Google to finish the job.
Yeah, that's pretty much what she did. Wasn't double blind, but she used real Faraday cages and placebo cages in fiberglass, along with another non-caged control. Should be easy enough to replicate, only with uninformed interns watering the plants.
I'm a big fan of real names in public discourse where there isn't a lot of heavy persecution going on -- say at US newspaper sites, or other places that discuss issues important to the functioning of a democracy. In these places I think putting some skin in the game is useful to investing people in their comments. The folks at edemocracy.org are good at developing these ideas.
But what about World of Warcraft requires that level of investment? It's, by design, a place for people to try on fantasy identities. How would more personal investment in the process improve things? Stupid stupid stupid.
Cant' wait for a new college graduate to rack up forum posts while looking for a job, only to realize his Google results now focus entirely on his gaming. Guess who will stop being helpful in forums: everyone.
Not by accident that Reporters Sans Frontiers has launched an "anti-censorship shelter" online, consisting of VPN, onion routers and training docs. Sound familiar?
Wikileaks is essentially a pilot project. They have demonstrated the need. The day-to-day work will be picked up by long running groups with funding models and full time staff and a CEO who doesn't go out his way to piss off every anti-secrecy activist who so much as murmur reservations about their comprehensive lack of transparency.
> Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products.
Have you been in any generic office lately? Or for that matter, watched The Office? Take a look at the logo on the IP phones on every damn desk in the place. Long game, office drones ditch the phone entirely, replace with an IP video conferencing device (aka, tablet). It's not an iPad killer. It's a 7900 series IP phone upgrade.
It might take a while, but I kind of like the idea. And given that the totally vanilla 7900 series runs $200 bucks or so, the price isn't that far off.
Rather a lot of geopolitical groupings (such as those used by the World Bank) regard "Middle East and North Africa" to be a unique region from "Sub-Saharan Africa". In the development community, MENA is a commonly used (and much less problematic) shorthand for "the Arab world" or whatever.
50 years ago, the physical process of manhandling a document into a printed book was expensive, especially for books with tiny markets (ie advanced textbooks). At that time publishers filled a useful niche: taking the hateful task of formatting text, printing books, and mailing them away from the authors.
Today: lulu.com et al. does all that pretty well. The academic publishing industry is a legacy system we'll chuck sooner or later. Academics can self publish (with a little help from a university consultant ). Students can use books in softcopy, and I suspect the self-published authors, supposedly the people that benefit from tight copyright rules, will be far more permissive than the doomed publishing industry.
Alternatively, Steve Jobs and/or Amazon can design us the next publishing system. But I hope not.
There are plenty of billion dollar open source businesses. The problem is how the business community is counting the money. More precisely, how they're measuring value. There are a number of open source projects with adoption rates and value-to-customers that multiply into the multiple billions -- web servers to Wordpress. The "problem" is that almost all of that billions of dollars of value is given back to the users. This is a problem for would-be billionaires, but pretty fucking ideal for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.
Uh, poor designers work the same way. "Oh, I get a portfolio item, THANK YOU" is not a business model.
The real story is that bad-to-average design is no longer scarce. The tools are ubiquitous, and many people play with them. So you're going to see a tiered economy: the wannabes doing spec work for minimum wage on places like istockphoto.com and the golden glorious few doing high touch client-focused work for $200 an hour. Similar to whats happening in photography and journalism, and for much the same reasons.
Yes, but only the right has a TV network devoted to spreading The Crazy.
> Investigative journalism is dead.
Investigate West. The Watchdog Institute. DocumentCloud. The Climate Desk. The Investigative News Network. The Texas Tribune. ProPublica. The Center for Public Integrity.
Turn off your TV, motherfucker, because the revolution has not been televised.
You assume the person working is also the person driving the boat.
As a half-ass sailor who telecommutes, it sounds like cruising up and down the US, Japan or EU coast for a while is a pretty good option. Being in sight of land also makes supply and safety a lot less like a full time job. If you want endless open ocean views, just don't look to starboard.
Cruise ships are fast. They typically zip from port to port and then anchor while swapping people out every 3 nights. Sailboats are not fast.
> What they should really do, is physical games.
Check out HopeLab, which is a hardware & software shop doing pretty much that, as a public benefit.
They started with clinical trials of software that was anecdotally doing cool things for cancer patients (Chemo Warrior, or something like that, that roleplayed nuking cancer by taking meds. Results: kids took their meds on schedule.)
From what I've seen of them (I saw their CEO present once) are committed to a) making the games attractive to kids by doing really good behavioral observation and dialogue and b) doing real clinical trials to evaluate results. Their latest effort is a suit with accelerometers that logs activity then downloads it, earning points, rewards, unlocking levels, etc. They aren't making much noise yet, but they're pretty far along with the hardware (one of their testers took it surfing). I believe the goal is a commercially successful product, perhaps in partnership with another platform.
http://www.hopelab.org/innovative-solutions/gditty/
Also, they say the name will change before launch.
> Who said US doesn't pull stunts like China?
>> China is *bad*. The U.S. is *bad*. But to say that the U.S. is "just as bad" is ridiculous and obviously false
Hey look, data!
http://report.globalintegrity.org/China/2009
http://report.globalintegrity.org/United%20States/2009
Or does that ruin it?
it would be nice if it took a different approach; Give the Harvard MBAs and MIT and Caltech Ph.D engineeers working at Cisco and IBM opportunities to innovate
Dude, where's the money in that? Raytheon for the win.
Nothing indicates that they are busy vetting anything: emails bouncing does not indicate that they are moving slowly because they are committed to the process.
Uh, when a company gets huge volumes of good press off a promise to do something, involving tens of thousands of people in that process, then yeah, they have an obligation to actually do the one thing that required their input: pick winners and give out the money.
That "sense of entitlement" we feel is because we, the public, are in fact completely fucking entitled to expect Google to finish the job.
RTFA - not a lot of paranoia in the story.
Yeah, that's pretty much what she did. Wasn't double blind, but she used real Faraday cages and placebo cages in fiberglass, along with another non-caged control. Should be easy enough to replicate, only with uninformed interns watering the plants.
I'm a big fan of real names in public discourse where there isn't a lot of heavy persecution going on -- say at US newspaper sites, or other places that discuss issues important to the functioning of a democracy. In these places I think putting some skin in the game is useful to investing people in their comments. The folks at edemocracy.org are good at developing these ideas.
But what about World of Warcraft requires that level of investment? It's, by design, a place for people to try on fantasy identities. How would more personal investment in the process improve things? Stupid stupid stupid.
Cant' wait for a new college graduate to rack up forum posts while looking for a job, only to realize his Google results now focus entirely on his gaming. Guess who will stop being helpful in forums: everyone.
Not by accident that Reporters Sans Frontiers has launched an "anti-censorship shelter" online, consisting of VPN, onion routers and training docs. Sound familiar?
Wikileaks is essentially a pilot project. They have demonstrated the need. The day-to-day work will be picked up by long running groups with funding models and full time staff and a CEO who doesn't go out his way to piss off every anti-secrecy activist who so much as murmur reservations about their comprehensive lack of transparency.
http://en.rsf.org/reporters-without-borders-unveils-25-06-2010,37809.html
The cisco 7940 voip phone on my desk runs $250.
> Cisco doesn't have a history of making consumer grade products.
Have you been in any generic office lately? Or for that matter, watched The Office? Take a look at the logo on the IP phones on every damn desk in the place. Long game, office drones ditch the phone entirely, replace with an IP video conferencing device (aka, tablet). It's not an iPad killer. It's a 7900 series IP phone upgrade.
It might take a while, but I kind of like the idea. And given that the totally vanilla 7900 series runs $200 bucks or so, the price isn't that far off.
Citation needed.
Yes. If it was all that easy, we'd be doing it in Death Valley.
Rather a lot of geopolitical groupings (such as those used by the World Bank) regard "Middle East and North Africa" to be a unique region from "Sub-Saharan Africa". In the development community, MENA is a commonly used (and much less problematic) shorthand for "the Arab world" or whatever.
50 years ago, the physical process of manhandling a document into a printed book was expensive, especially for books with tiny markets (ie advanced textbooks). At that time publishers filled a useful niche: taking the hateful task of formatting text, printing books, and mailing them away from the authors.
Today: lulu.com et al. does all that pretty well. The academic publishing industry is a legacy system we'll chuck sooner or later. Academics can self publish (with a little help from a university consultant ). Students can use books in softcopy, and I suspect the self-published authors, supposedly the people that benefit from tight copyright rules, will be far more permissive than the doomed publishing industry.
Alternatively, Steve Jobs and/or Amazon can design us the next publishing system. But I hope not.
There are plenty of billion dollar open source businesses. The problem is how the business community is counting the money. More precisely, how they're measuring value. There are a number of open source projects with adoption rates and value-to-customers that multiply into the multiple billions -- web servers to Wordpress. The "problem" is that almost all of that billions of dollars of value is given back to the users. This is a problem for would-be billionaires, but pretty fucking ideal for the rest of us.
Nope. That's just the 3G model.
Knowing a random string may be a valid email addess is not nearly the same as knowing Michael Bloomberg's email address. AT&T gave up the latter.
S/he meant Free Market As In Speech. You mean Free Market As In Beer. The first version is better.