Wish the interviewer had asked more punchy, specific questions that don't lead to general, global "we are the world" type of answers. I suppose Sir TBL did the he could under the circumstances.
His best answer IMHO was to the question what would you want the web to be in thirty years:
"When it's 30, I expect it to be much more stable, something that people don't talk about."
Reading the interview got me thinking, what question would I have asked him? Mine would be the one I asked on my blog today "What is your most wished for Firefox feature?" *
A good blogging question might have been "What's missing in the way blogging is implemented today?"
* Answer to most wished for firefox feature at
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/s_4.html
My three and a half year old newphew has already declared his number one wish for his fourth birthday, a laptop...and not a toy one either...he already has a couple of those.
The world indeed is changing.
No "sketchy" motivations, I assure you. I'm new to this Slashdot thing, but have noticed that most comments are fairly short and pithy.
When I see Slashdot topics on which I have a point of view and have written about already, and in my view may be of interest to readers of the Slashdot topic, I provide the link, rather than write or copy large chunks from my pre-existing post. This way, if folks are interested, they can read for more, or they can continue down the thread without having to scroll down a lengthy Slashdot post.
In terms the post on the space shuttle you referred to, I linked it to my post rather than the article in question, because I constantly update my old post with new links that offer new takes on the subject.
For instance, I found another article that offered a very interesting counter-point to the anti-shuttle article, and so I added it to the post to provide additional context for folks who might have an interest.
Finally, the ad money from my blog doesn't even pay for the monthly typepad fees, so I'm not doing this for the money...my time is worth far more, and this is indeed a labor of love, as most blogging tends to be. It's about the ideas and the discussion around them.
Apologies for the long explanatory post here, but you may be happy that there is no "more here" link on this post.:)
thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
Actually RosenSama, it runs Kanoodle ads, in partnership with Typepad, which is the blog hosting service...it's an "automated" option that Typepad offers on their site to run ads on individual blogs.
It's interesting to see that Yahoo! may have surpassed Google on this metric.
Over the past decade, Yahoo! has beaten other "hares" to date, including AOL and Microsoft's MSN. They're doing some innovative stuff, but also have some areas to catch up on. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_merits_o.htm l
Truly hope the landing goes through safely tomorrow.
In a broader context, need to take a fresh look at the space program. One of the best things I've read on this subject was yesterday. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_shuttle_.htm l
It's interesting this is starting to be pushed by schools in the US. So far, the pursuit of low-cost computers for education and other markets, has primarily been a focus for developing countries like Brazil, India, China and other Asian countries. The holy grail continues to be the $100 PC, which is still difficult to attain.
However Windows PCs have come down in price to about $500 for a desktop and about $700 for a notebook...low, but not low enough. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_9.html
Ad-sense is not the only area Yahoo! is playing a bit of catch-up with Google...the other is in the area of blogging. Yahoo! just recently decided to "open up" its blogging network to the broader web, much like Google has done for a while with its Blogger acquistion of a few years ago.
More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_360_pe.htm l
On the other hand, the company has also been doing things better than Google, including the recent Yahoo! MyWeb initiative which provides a whole new way to save things off the web and find them later.
So the feature and technology race continues...
Serenity definitely looks cool. With a broadband internet, we may be entering a time when cool, emerging shows dont get cancelled because they cannot find a big enough audience on TV or cable. Remember Star Trek was cancelled in the sixties for that reason and brought back via movies because of a core, but economically small audience.
With the internet, audiences can be smaller and still allow the producers and distributors to make a profit. The day of broadband doing an end run around cable and TV are near.
More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_broadband_co.htm l
The "quadruple play" is already a well understood investment play on Wall Street over the last few months.
The big battle ahead is cable and what used to be the regional telcos. They're both arming themselves with everything they can think of, including faster and faster, two-way broadband, internet telephony, cellular and broadband wireless services, along with hundreds of content channels...and each side is committing to spend billions to do it.
What investors are trying to understand is who remains standing with a semblance of a profitable business at the end of it. Each side is desperately trying not to end up being a "dumb pipe", but have a valuable "walled garden" of services to keep customers paying $50, 100 or more per month per household. Someone is going to end up losing these multi-billion dollar bets. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l
It's not just fake hosting services with malware and other phishing scams.
It's getting so that one gets suspicious of any kind of new service that crops up on the web. The other day, I got excited seeing this service that promised to turn my blog contents into a printed book. I tried it, but then got worried that it was a phishing scam. And cancelled my attempts to use the service.
What does mean for the promise of "web services" in general?
More on the "blog into book" experience here:
ahref=http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11.htmlrel= url2html-21790http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11. html>
Spy der, I agree with you...one of the main appeals of GTA is exactly that it's "open" and "endless". That's terrific.
But I'd also like to be given the option to skip through levels that I don't want to play and constantly replay, and move forward through the levels, so that I get the whole story's worth IF I WANT TO PLAY IT THAT WAY.
Later, when I have the time, I might play and replay all the levels the conventional way anyway.
But give the user the option TO CHOOSE.
Right now, it's just one way, i.e., take a ton of time, OR NOT PLAY THROUGH AT ALL.
I think that frustrates a lot of people who keep down a day job, have a family, and tons of other time obligations.
I'm just saying give folks the choice...they've paid for the game already, and the code is all in there. It's the customer choice to play it fast or slow.
By the way, this is more applicable with other games that are more sequential than GTA, like Doom3, etc. There, the only choice is to play through the levels or not at all. Again, that can take a ton of time, as we all know through experience.
The GTA brouhaha to me is about video games coming of age. They're no longer just about kids and teenagers, but for adults of all ages...it's a $25 billion business, and bigger than the movie industry...and it's just beginning.
Sure, more grown-up ratings might shrink the market a bit, but the industry needs to be more creative about expanding the market.
Besides figuring how to handle Easter Eggs, and adult content within games, the industry also needs to figure out how to meet the time constraints that adults have in playing games.
Yet, most games are in a time warp, with limited ability to save, locked levels (you gotta earn it mentality!).
It takes 2-3 hours to see a movie on a DVD and at least 20 hours to play a game. As a decades long gamer, I know it's there's fundamental difference between the two forms, and a totally different experience, but...
If I'm springing close to $50 for a game (vs. say $20-25 for a movie DVD), and I don't feel like investing the 50 plus hours to play/replay segments to earn the right to see all the levels, and understand the story, I should be able to have an "auto-play" or "fast-forward to the next level" feature.
This could significantly expand the market for games of all types, as more grown-ups can fit a game into their lives in terms of time. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/05/on_playing_pcco.htm l
Russell Beattie makes an interesting hypothetical case for the Sony PSP to be an interesting "video ipod", IF Sony were to take certain actions, in addition to upgrading the browser.
In my view there are business considerations that are larger than the technical issues that need to be considered. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_sony_psp_tur.htm l
The focus on a jock culture here is spot on.
In India, there is an distinct absence of jock worship...most it extends to is cricket.
Part of the reason is that sports has not until recently been as commercialized as in the US.
i.e., sports heroes typically didn't make a ton of dough in a career over there unlike here.
As a result, most parents and consequently, a lot of kids (who listen to their parents most of the time on career matters), drift to things where the die is cast in terms of secure career and life-time income...thus computers, science, etc. sits at the top of the list.
This is changing slowly as sports get more commercialized in India, but it's still likely a generation before anything changes meaningfully on that front.
Not sure how it is in China, but would venture to say it's similar.
How about creating or buying a ready-made "computer on a stick"? That is a USB memory stick...there's a fair bit of open source software, OS, apps, utilities etc., that can boot from a USB drive. You can put this together or buy one from third-party vendors.
Another inexpensive alternative would be to pass around a "how to" sheet to your group after you give them a demo off a USB drive. On it you could also include the PCmag reviews of OpenOffice reassuring Microsoft Office compatibility.
If you want to go the extra mile, you could even set up the Mozilla browser with all the open-source resources bookmarked like wikipedia, Wikinews, imdb, openmedia.org etc.
It's an eye-opener for those not familiar with open source. More here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_computers_on.htm l
yes, why DID this make slashdot? especially when michael robertson made this comment back in the middle of June...what's the relevance now? am I missing something, or is it just a slow news day at slashdot?
not sure why this post was news as well, other than it involves michael robertson, I guess of linspire/lindows/mp3.com fame (used loosely)...
only thing I can think of is slow new day.
Not sure I understand this, and it seems to be a relatively old story (last month already)...it seems to be more Michael Robertson's disappointment rather than Apple, with a tinge of sour grapes in the air.
Anyway, the world is rapidly changing to make the whole Windows vs. Mac box competition to be relatively less interesting. With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online.
Apple has already leveraged this move by becoming the number four vendor of personal computers, right behind Gateway on the recent numbers.
Now they just need to start to race Microsoft to making more of their applications web-optimized and OS-agnostic. iTunes is a basic step in that direction.
The portals are not standing still though...Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator is in my view a move toward making this new reality happen faster. More on that here:
http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_acquis.htm l
Slashdot Mirror
you need mac osX for Intel, which is currently available to developers only.
Wish the interviewer had asked more punchy, specific questions that don't lead to general, global "we are the world" type of answers. I suppose Sir TBL did the he could under the circumstances. His best answer IMHO was to the question what would you want the web to be in thirty years: "When it's 30, I expect it to be much more stable, something that people don't talk about." Reading the interview got me thinking, what question would I have asked him? Mine would be the one I asked on my blog today "What is your most wished for Firefox feature?" * A good blogging question might have been "What's missing in the way blogging is implemented today?" * Answer to most wished for firefox feature at http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/s_4.html
My three and a half year old newphew has already declared his number one wish for his fourth birthday, a laptop...and not a toy one either...he already has a couple of those. The world indeed is changing.
No "sketchy" motivations, I assure you. I'm new to this Slashdot thing, but have noticed that most comments are fairly short and pithy. When I see Slashdot topics on which I have a point of view and have written about already, and in my view may be of interest to readers of the Slashdot topic, I provide the link, rather than write or copy large chunks from my pre-existing post. This way, if folks are interested, they can read for more, or they can continue down the thread without having to scroll down a lengthy Slashdot post. In terms the post on the space shuttle you referred to, I linked it to my post rather than the article in question, because I constantly update my old post with new links that offer new takes on the subject. For instance, I found another article that offered a very interesting counter-point to the anti-shuttle article, and so I added it to the post to provide additional context for folks who might have an interest. Finally, the ad money from my blog doesn't even pay for the monthly typepad fees, so I'm not doing this for the money...my time is worth far more, and this is indeed a labor of love, as most blogging tends to be. It's about the ideas and the discussion around them. Apologies for the long explanatory post here, but you may be happy that there is no "more here" link on this post. :)
thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
Actually RosenSama, it runs Kanoodle ads, in partnership with Typepad, which is the blog hosting service...it's an "automated" option that Typepad offers on their site to run ads on individual blogs.
It's interesting to see that Yahoo! may have surpassed Google on this metric. Over the past decade, Yahoo! has beaten other "hares" to date, including AOL and Microsoft's MSN. They're doing some innovative stuff, but also have some areas to catch up on. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_merits_o.htm l
Truly hope the landing goes through safely tomorrow. In a broader context, need to take a fresh look at the space program. One of the best things I've read on this subject was yesterday. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_shuttle_.htm l
Title would be "Amoebic Shark". :)
It's interesting this is starting to be pushed by schools in the US. So far, the pursuit of low-cost computers for education and other markets, has primarily been a focus for developing countries like Brazil, India, China and other Asian countries. The holy grail continues to be the $100 PC, which is still difficult to attain. However Windows PCs have come down in price to about $500 for a desktop and about $700 for a notebook...low, but not low enough. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_9.html
Ad-sense is not the only area Yahoo! is playing a bit of catch-up with Google...the other is in the area of blogging. Yahoo! just recently decided to "open up" its blogging network to the broader web, much like Google has done for a while with its Blogger acquistion of a few years ago. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_360_pe.htm l
On the other hand, the company has also been doing things better than Google, including the recent Yahoo! MyWeb initiative which provides a whole new way to save things off the web and find them later.
So the feature and technology race continues...
Great to see another innovative company trying to break through the vertical industry structure of today's global wireless industry. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l
Serenity definitely looks cool. With a broadband internet, we may be entering a time when cool, emerging shows dont get cancelled because they cannot find a big enough audience on TV or cable. Remember Star Trek was cancelled in the sixties for that reason and brought back via movies because of a core, but economically small audience. With the internet, audiences can be smaller and still allow the producers and distributors to make a profit. The day of broadband doing an end run around cable and TV are near. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_broadband_co.htm l
Great Cingely post. Rupert has been "feinting" on Internet matters with his peers for over a decade. Notable is his speech to his peers a few weeks ago. See http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/04/ss_15.html His recent announcement of a Fox Internet unit also has these elements. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_news_corp_cr.htm l
The "quadruple play" is already a well understood investment play on Wall Street over the last few months. The big battle ahead is cable and what used to be the regional telcos. They're both arming themselves with everything they can think of, including faster and faster, two-way broadband, internet telephony, cellular and broadband wireless services, along with hundreds of content channels...and each side is committing to spend billions to do it. What investors are trying to understand is who remains standing with a semblance of a profitable business at the end of it. Each side is desperately trying not to end up being a "dumb pipe", but have a valuable "walled garden" of services to keep customers paying $50, 100 or more per month per household. Someone is going to end up losing these multi-billion dollar bets. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_wilting_wire.htm l
thanks AC! My bad.
It's not just fake hosting services with malware and other phishing scams. It's getting so that one gets suspicious of any kind of new service that crops up on the web. The other day, I got excited seeing this service that promised to turn my blog contents into a printed book. I tried it, but then got worried that it was a phishing scam. And cancelled my attempts to use the service. What does mean for the promise of "web services" in general? More on the "blog into book" experience here: ahref=http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11.htmlrel= url2html-21790http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11. html>
didn't know that...thanks GTA:SA!
Spy der, I agree with you...one of the main appeals of GTA is exactly that it's "open" and "endless". That's terrific. But I'd also like to be given the option to skip through levels that I don't want to play and constantly replay, and move forward through the levels, so that I get the whole story's worth IF I WANT TO PLAY IT THAT WAY. Later, when I have the time, I might play and replay all the levels the conventional way anyway. But give the user the option TO CHOOSE. Right now, it's just one way, i.e., take a ton of time, OR NOT PLAY THROUGH AT ALL. I think that frustrates a lot of people who keep down a day job, have a family, and tons of other time obligations. I'm just saying give folks the choice...they've paid for the game already, and the code is all in there. It's the customer choice to play it fast or slow. By the way, this is more applicable with other games that are more sequential than GTA, like Doom3, etc. There, the only choice is to play through the levels or not at all. Again, that can take a ton of time, as we all know through experience.
The GTA brouhaha to me is about video games coming of age. They're no longer just about kids and teenagers, but for adults of all ages...it's a $25 billion business, and bigger than the movie industry...and it's just beginning. Sure, more grown-up ratings might shrink the market a bit, but the industry needs to be more creative about expanding the market. Besides figuring how to handle Easter Eggs, and adult content within games, the industry also needs to figure out how to meet the time constraints that adults have in playing games. Yet, most games are in a time warp, with limited ability to save, locked levels (you gotta earn it mentality!). It takes 2-3 hours to see a movie on a DVD and at least 20 hours to play a game. As a decades long gamer, I know it's there's fundamental difference between the two forms, and a totally different experience, but... If I'm springing close to $50 for a game (vs. say $20-25 for a movie DVD), and I don't feel like investing the 50 plus hours to play/replay segments to earn the right to see all the levels, and understand the story, I should be able to have an "auto-play" or "fast-forward to the next level" feature. This could significantly expand the market for games of all types, as more grown-ups can fit a game into their lives in terms of time. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/05/on_playing_pcco.htm l
Russell Beattie makes an interesting hypothetical case for the Sony PSP to be an interesting "video ipod", IF Sony were to take certain actions, in addition to upgrading the browser. In my view there are business considerations that are larger than the technical issues that need to be considered. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_sony_psp_tur.htm l
The focus on a jock culture here is spot on. In India, there is an distinct absence of jock worship...most it extends to is cricket. Part of the reason is that sports has not until recently been as commercialized as in the US. i.e., sports heroes typically didn't make a ton of dough in a career over there unlike here. As a result, most parents and consequently, a lot of kids (who listen to their parents most of the time on career matters), drift to things where the die is cast in terms of secure career and life-time income...thus computers, science, etc. sits at the top of the list. This is changing slowly as sports get more commercialized in India, but it's still likely a generation before anything changes meaningfully on that front. Not sure how it is in China, but would venture to say it's similar.
How about creating or buying a ready-made "computer on a stick"? That is a USB memory stick...there's a fair bit of open source software, OS, apps, utilities etc., that can boot from a USB drive. You can put this together or buy one from third-party vendors. Another inexpensive alternative would be to pass around a "how to" sheet to your group after you give them a demo off a USB drive. On it you could also include the PCmag reviews of OpenOffice reassuring Microsoft Office compatibility. If you want to go the extra mile, you could even set up the Mozilla browser with all the open-source resources bookmarked like wikipedia, Wikinews, imdb, openmedia.org etc. It's an eye-opener for those not familiar with open source. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_computers_on.htm l
yes, why DID this make slashdot? especially when michael robertson made this comment back in the middle of June...what's the relevance now? am I missing something, or is it just a slow news day at slashdot?
not sure why this post was news as well, other than it involves michael robertson, I guess of linspire/lindows/mp3.com fame (used loosely)... only thing I can think of is slow new day.
Not sure I understand this, and it seems to be a relatively old story (last month already)...it seems to be more Michael Robertson's disappointment rather than Apple, with a tinge of sour grapes in the air. Anyway, the world is rapidly changing to make the whole Windows vs. Mac box competition to be relatively less interesting. With more applications and services moving off the desktop and into the network, the battleground is increasingly shifting online. Apple has already leveraged this move by becoming the number four vendor of personal computers, right behind Gateway on the recent numbers. Now they just need to start to race Microsoft to making more of their applications web-optimized and OS-agnostic. iTunes is a basic step in that direction. The portals are not standing still though...Yahoo!'s acquisition of Konfabulator is in my view a move toward making this new reality happen faster. More on that here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_yahoo_acquis.htm l