http://versionthis.com/~npilon An approximation of super-polynomial thinking Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:23:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tim O'Reilly, in Microsoft Missing the Boat on Mobile: The future is not like the past, and any strategy that is designed to protect the past will eventually fail. Anyone looking at delivering electronic media should think very carefully about what this means. If your business plan relies on delivering your electronic ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/09/05/apt-quotation/ Everyone who develops software should watch this talk of r0ml's keynote from Tuesday night at OSCON '08. While it's presented in a comedic fashion, he makes a lot of really excellent points about the absurdity and impracticality of the software development methodologies we try to shoehorn our work into. The ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/30/r0ml-at-oscon-2008/ NYC Resistor is a group in NYC that created a "hackerspace", a dedicated hang-out where hackers can get together and work on projects. From their lightning talk, it includes both hardware and software hacking, and results in all kinds of crazy projects. It looked cool and fun, and more things ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/29/random-cool-stuff-from-foo-camp/ A lot of the other things I saw at FOO Camp were interesting products that spawned interesting ideas in my head. For example, there's We Tell Stories. A venture by, of all publishers, stodgy old Penguin Books, We Tell Stories experiments with using a variety of digital media to... Tell ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/27/telling-stories/ This morning's keynotes at OSCON weren't nearly as good as last night's. In particular, I've got a bone to pick with Christine Peterson. She talked about sensing systems, and coming government attempts to both mandate and regulate sensing - making sensing the sole provenance of the government, and using sensing ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/23/ignoring-government/ Possibly the best session I attended at FOO Camp was given by Brian Fitzpatrick. Fitz talked about The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping, and tied it together with his experiences with his old house in Chicago and software development. I'm not going to talk about the talk itself except in the ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/19/unlikely-connections-beekeeping-old-houses-and-everything-else/ And this is one of many reasons why Francesco Marciuliano is an underappreciated genius. The others mostly have to do with his ability to slip Internet pop culture references into a mainstream newspaper comic strip. It's really a shame he stopped doing Medium Large. http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/14/sage-advice/ This weekend was FOO Camp '08 which I, as an employee of O'Reilly Media, was privileged to attend. And, frankly, wow. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. I missed the sessions on Friday and a couple of the Saturday sessions, but everything I managed to attend was, ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/07/14/foo-camp-08/ Clay Shirky's post about Gin, Television, and Social Surplus triggered some interesting thoughts about game-playing based on my reading of Rules of Play. In his discussion of how we're starting to make use of our cognitive surplus, rather than wasting it on "gin" like TV, Shirky mentions video games. He seems ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/06/28/playing-games/ There's been a lot of effort and thought put into working out why World of Warcraft has been so much more popular than other MMOs. Most numbers put them at ten times the active subscriptions of their closest competitor, though I don't know of any that break it down by ... http://versionthis.com/~npilon/2008/04/27/the-world-of-warcraft-and-the-third-place/