“What can you do with a Kinect?”

Via Made By Many

Sobre matemática e nossa estupidez

Desse post aqui.

“How Mr. Q manufactured emotion”

O título desse post é do Dustin Curtis, que teve o inenarrável prazer de viajar – e conversar – com o tiozinho responsável pelo engenhoso sistema de som dos parques da Disney.

Via Brainstorm9

“The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function”

Exploda seu cérebro!

Crescimento é uma merda!

Via A Momentary Flow

O mundo é dos doidões

Um projeto me chamou a atenção sobre esse aspecto das cidades, por usar dados de uma forma um pouco mais complexa. Um aplicativo chamado provisoriamente Conductor, inventado por Alexander Chen. Com acesso aos itinerários do metrô de Nova York, Alexander quer transformá-lo em um instrumento musical. Quando passa, cada trem “desenha” uma corda, que é tocada cada vez em que um outro trem a “cruza”. O projeto ainda está em fase de concepção e usa linguagem JavaScript e HTML5.

Via Brainstorm9

Gates Vs Jobs

Acho que já temos um vencedor:

According to SAI’s Matt Rosoff, citing IDC estimates, the global PC market is about 100 million units a quarter.

That means that, in its third quarter of existence, Apple’s iPads already have ~7% of the global PC market.

Now let’s fast forward a few years.

At this rate, in a few years, iPads will account for, say 25%, of the global PC market–especially after Apple works the price down to $199 and every middle-class household has a couple of them just lying around. And Android-based tablets will probably account for another huge chunk of the market.

With that much of the global personal computing market running on something other than Windows, the rest of Microsoft’s monopoly control of the desktop and desktop apps will collapse. Windows will become just another platform.

Via Business Insider

“Vernacular video”, por Bruce Sterling

Here’s a very stern and sardonic Bruce Sterling at the Vimeo Festival discussing “vernacular video.” Bruce notes, “This speech goes on for 56 minutes, practically forever by vernacular video standards.” Despite that, I was riveted by all 56 minutes’ worth — Bruce takes an unexpected turn through the history of the Dick Van Dyke show on the way to explaining how to predict the future and then wraps it up with a sinister turn around the morality of cigarette sponsorship and what it is that vernacular video does that runs parallel to selling coffin nails.

Via Boing Boing

Mundo louco

Page 1

Andrew Rossi acompanhou por um ano a rotina dos jornalistas do NYT que cobrem a área de mídia. Promete.

Via Tiago Dória

Tchau Wintel, Olá Armdroid

A melhor análise sobre a CES 2011:

This year’s show, Dediu argues, marks the end of the PC-era: it’s finally being disrupted. The basic concept of disruption is that a low-end offering (in this case, tablets) emerges to displace existing solution (PCs). The reason this takes place is that the current solution has improved to such an extent that it provides more performance than a majority of users able to usefully employ.

This means that the iPad and its many clones were not really the main story of the show. The main story — which almost nobody covered — was that this year’s CES marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Intel.

This transition has been a long time coming in the PC industry. Ironically enough, both of these two big players have seen the writing on the wall for almost a decade. But as is so often the case, incumbents find it immensely hard to disrupt themselves.

…

Both Microsoft and Intel have suffered from the same problem that most successful companies face when dealing with disruption. They cannot find a way to profitably invest in low-end offerings. Think about it from Microsoft’s point of view: now that Windows 7 has been developed, to sell another copy, they don’t have to do a single thing. Because of this, it becomes very hard for any executive to advocate the complete development of a low cost OS that will run on tablets: not only would it cost Microsoft a lot to develop, but it would result in cannibalization of its core product sales. Intel has the exact same issue. Why focus on Atom, or an even lower-end chip, when there is so much more margin to be made by focusing on its multi-core desktop processors?

This would be fine — except for the coming extinction of the PC.

The wheels are just starting to fall off. At CES, for the first time, almost all of Microsoft’s OEM partners abandoned Microsoft exclusivity; and Microsoft’s next-generation operating system has abandoned Intel exclusively for the first time. There’s no reason to believe that either of the two companies are going to be able to turn this around. On one hand, ARM processors are perfect for powering these handheld devices. Manufacturers can customize to their heart’s content. And Android is on track to dominate the operating system space (though maybe not profitably). Both ARM and Android — Armdroid — are providing everything that tablet manufacturers need, and doing it more effectively and at a lower cost than Microsoft and Intel are able to.

Via Harvard Business Review