Um novo ecossistema

Because you won’t have a “computer” in the current sense of the word. You’ll just be surrounded by a swarm of devices that give you access to your data whenever and however you need it

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Este é o final de um excelente texto sobre a estratégia da Apple e sua pesada aposta no cloud computing. De tanto ver as empresas líderes se fuderem (Microsoft e Palm são bons exemplos), Steve Jobs tá se mexendo. E a recusa ao Flash, da Adobe, é só mais um sinal.

We are in a hammer and nail situation

Tem vezes que você acha que tudo está igual, né?

“If we think our only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”.

PUTA POST, LEIA!

Ainda nem cheguei ao final…

Sobre realidade aumentada

Garanto que o que vai abaixo, escrito por Charlie Brooker, é o melhor texto que você vai ler sobre o tema:

Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What’s more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

And don’t go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It’s a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut’s vanished and you’ve got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.

Some people will say there’s something sinister and wrong about all of this. They’ll claim it’s better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they’ve never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they’re right, we’ll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.

In other words, over the coming years we’re all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there’s no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I’ll scarcely notice.

Via The Guardian.

Nick Carr rulez!

Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.

O cara é muito foda! Nesse texto, ainda tem uma parte foda, que mostra bem a força da palavras escrita:

Even our telephones have turned into word-processing machines. The number of text messages sent between phones now far outnumbers the number of voice messages. Who would have predicted that even just twenty years ago?

Que assim seja

We need to look in the cracks of our plans and propositions.

We need to swallow our pride and ask the darkest, deepest, ugliest of questions.

We need to get to the logical truth of it all, before we can try and persuade the rest of the world we have something worth celebrating.

Never, ever stop this struggle.

Via Jonathan McDonald

Aplausos, por favor

Irritantemente bom!

A forma como a comunicação coloca as pessoas dentro da experiência é embasbacante.

Goodhart’s Law: once you measure something, it changes

Goodhart’s Law is one of those neat formulations that codifies something I’ve been trying to put my finger on for years: “once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.”

That is, once you start measuring GDP as a way of gauging social welfare, people will start to figure out ways to make GDP go up without improving social welfare (say, by swapping dirty financial derivatives). Once Google starts measuring inbound links as a way of evaluating the importance of web-pages, people will figure out how to increase the inbound links to unimportant pages (splogging, blogspam). And once you measure fat or calorie content as a proxy for the healthfulness of food, manufacturers will figure out how to decrease fat and calories without making the food more healthful (reducing fat by adding sugar, reducing calories by adding poisonous artificial sweeteners).

Do Boing Boing

All That Glitters Ain’t Gold

Graduation project together with Leon de Korte called “All That Glitters Ain’t Gold.”The project shows the dark side of the creative industry, in a playful way.

Sim, isso é um projeto de graduação e faz parecer que o que fizemos durante a faculdade foi só um trabalho primário.

Uma aula de arquitetura

Projeto brilhante de Gary Chang:

Gary Chang, a talented architect from Hong Kong, has equipped his tiny 330 square foot apartment with a sliding wall system that allows him to create 24 different room configurations.

As the suspended wall units are shifted around, the apartment transforms into a kitchen, library, laundry room, dressing room, an enclosed dining area or a lounge with a hammock.

Via

“The Conduit Metaphor”

Mais um excelente post de Ivo Quartiroli, desta vez sobre palavras:

Much of the communication industry – the Net included – is based on the rationale that more communication equals more understanding which equals a better world. This comes from the assumption that ideas, concepts, meanings and feelings can be expressed and transferred by language. This is what has been called “the conduit metaphor” by Michael J. Reddy.

Ivo então cita uma passagem de um livro sobre esta metáfora:

Ideas are objects that you can put into words, so that language is seen as a container for ideas, and you send ideas over a conduit, a channel of communication to someone else who then extracts the ideas from the words… One entailment of the conduit metaphor is that the meaning, the ideas, can be extracted and can exist independently of people. Moreover, that in communication, when communication occurs, what happens is that somebody extracts the same object, the same idea, from the language that the speaker put into it. So the conduit metaphor suggests that meaning is a thing and that the hearer pulls out the same meaning from the words and that it can exist independently of beings who understand words

Fedcho o post com mais aspas do Ivo:

The reality is that for the conduit metaphor to work we would need to share a very wide set of attributes: the same language, the same interpretation of words, a compatible level of culture, a similar background, a similar kind of sensitivity. So similar that perhaps the real point of communicating by words is actually to get closer to our self-understanding.

The conduit metaphor is what makes us write in blogs and social networks, thinking our message can be sent and “uploaded” to other human beings and will reach them in the way we intended. We don’t actually know about how this message will be interpreted, then we become surprised when there are misunderstandings and when wars get ignited.