670 karma · joined June 20, 2010
If I am going to spend a year of my life developing something I intend to sell, I should make sure it's a good idea not only to make it, but also to try and sell it in a form like a fat client. If I do it anyway and no one buys it, regardless of the reason it was bad business.
Nobody weeps for the carriage makers because we like our cars. No one will weep for the media makers who couldn't adapt to the new market forces.
Treating piracy as anything other than a force of nature will only leave you drowned when the DRM dam breaks. All the examples you cite of being willing to pay content distributors are examples of businesses who have adapted to the new realities of the market.
I don't think businesses should be forced to give away things for free, I just think they don't need artificial monopolies in order to profitably contribute to science and the useful arts.
Copyright is a monopoly granted by congress' interpretation of the constitution's directive to promote progress of science and the useful arts. I think it's time to reinterpret.
What happens when you don't just torrent a model to print, but you distribute your job to hundreds of printers? We have all seen what happens when you network a bunch of cheaper and lower quality things relative to a monolithic system, and I can see this happening with digital fabrication as well.
In any case, I feel like these kinds of reactions happen with the advent of every new communications "technology." When the masses get some new tool in their hand they overwhelmingly produce a bunch of shit. After the dust settles some small percentage of those people rise to the top by creating quality which is then happily consumed by everyone.
For me the best example is looking at the historical reactions to the printing press. At that time the only books were hand scribed by monks and they were all religious texts of high quality. When the printing press came out many people were upset that books would ruin education for everyone because so much crap would be printed. We all know how that turned out: a lot of crap WAS printed, but tell me the printing press was a bad idea. Now I'm not saying infographics are the next book, but they are a new communication medium.
direct link to video:
direct link to project:
source code:
Really though, disappointed? These are prototypes for the next generation of interaction, most people aren't even close to doing just one of the 5 ground breaking ideas he presented, and you expect him to release fully baked products?
I'm working on making it easier to share discoveries by powering the water project with a gist backend: http://enjalot.com/tributary/2165875/sinwaves.js
So many genius ideas in the first 15 minutes of that talk... people will be working for years to realize these things!
Just like real companies, bootstrapping sounds like the ideal situation but it's not the reality for most people.
Have you seen d3.js? It has a similar force layout component, I'm curious as to your motivation for writing your own (although it looks and works very nice!)
When learning something new you need to be able to associate the new concept with things you already understand, and visuals can give you an intuitive sense of how things are behaving (especially in time)
I don't think the visuals could necessarily take the place of training to use the abstract symbols or lines of code any time soon, but I think they are a really necessary step in the right direction to get more people to approach math.
I've been pleasantly surprised how well the designers have taken to the workflow, and its great to take advantage of the flexibility of git especially when we don't have the time to roll our own backend to cover all those bases.
3D printers are in their infancy as others in this thread have stated, but they are starting with an open source ecosystem which only appeared later in programming and digital media. Now anybody can produce music, video and code with free tools using free samples and resources and share their products with the world however they see fit. Likewise people with 3D printers will only be limited by the current state of the open tech and the materials they can afford.
Just like with open source software and creative commons media the established players wont be able to stop the hackers from making. The only question which remains is how important these "hobbyist" trends become to the mainstream.
I'm no teacher but if I was I'd much rather spend my time getting kids excited about stuff and then point them to the resources they need to get going. I'd also have more time to answer questions so the kids wouldn't get as frustrated or stuck.
Second, judging a programmer solely (in an atomic fashion) by their code is the exact same thing as judging a teacher solely by test scores. How do you know the code was not written at 2am the night of a release to stop vital information from being deleted every time a user submits a form.
On the flipside how do you know that the elegant code wasn't the combination of effort and discussion of several coders all considered to be in the top n% of some mailing list.
I think my point is really that we all tend to rush to judgement of professions outside of our own, when in reality we share the same human problems that are incredibly hard to formalize and hence provide a systematic solution for.
This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place.
Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.
This is kind of a ridiculous statement, I'm sorry. The very definition of opensource precludes any kind of cover. The critical piece of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is the extinguish, and by being opensource that isn't possible.
Google is pushing technologies in certain directions, as other commenters have noted, but it lacks a threat because the second Google does something evil with their proprietary tech, it either gets forked or replaced.
And for the record I don't consider semi-technical entrepreneur to be the definition of hacker I apply to myself. For me it's more about someone who can take two things and make something new with them, regardless if they should be able to or not.
In any case, its a form of cultural identity, so its up to those who identify with it to define it. If the mainstream doesn't recognize it, its our responsibility to fix that.
The key thing to focus on is the imbalance of power SOPA creates and how that will end up getting in the way of Uncle Art's evening entertainment. So far the shoplifting shutting down the store analogy is the most pointed I've heard, but still not a catch phrase.
mind reading interfaces (ECG Headsets)
camera based (like the kinect)
fabric sensors
Not to mention the leaps that machine learning will bring. As we have more and more semantic interfaces with technology things that seem magical now will soon be routine.
What this article does inspire for me is the need for better 3D prototyping with home 3D printers and CNC machines. These are the tools you need to come up with better touch interfaces, not yet another SDK. I think we will see more and more of those as well, so here's hoping for a brighter future for interaction design!
Chinese and Indians fall into "model minority" stereotypes, which have their own set of evils (you are X so you must be good at Y is it's own kind of dehumanization). So someone making a gut call might have underlying prejudices for Asians and against blacks.
In other words, when is the last time a white person has crossed the street to avoid a Chinese/Indian person walking towards them. Ask a black guy when the last time that happened.
I think there are also many cultural differences at play, as well as people's perceptions of those cultural differences.
Startups take their own kind of crazy, and it really helps to be surrounded by people that tell you its ok to be crazy or are at least as crazy as you. And if you are going to be around crazy people, you will probably want to know that they are the same kind of cazy :) Being from different cultures (or assuming you are) will make it harder to sense this.
I was surprised by Vic ending with "that's why we didn't fire him." The thought of firing Yegge over a rant would signal extreme shortsightedness to me...
I don't think you have to worry about the young developers, to them (us?) it's one more tool we can use to make cool things.
Things move fast, I just came back to web app development after 2 years doing GPU programming in school. I'm super excited by how far things have come, and I see an accelerating trend for the better.
There is an excellent library called d3.js for manipulating SVG, the learning curve is steep but it is really powerful. More libraries like these are/will surface to abstract away the painful DOM interfaces.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, the web looks richer than it ever has and it's still more convenient to program for than a cross-platform native application. Just my 2 cents.