Published May 22nd, 2009
in Uncategorized.
From Google’s Rubin: Android ‘a revolution’:
When Android was a start-up company, it was always a razor/razor blade business. The razor, the free thing, was the open-source operating system. In Android’s original business model, the blades were basically provisioning systems that we sold to wireless carriers that had hooks into the open-source operating system. That was an unproven business model, I would say, and certainly the feedback I got when we were going for venture financing was that it was an unproven business model.
I was willing to give it a go, but then Larry and Sergey and Eric came along and said, “it’s much more aligned with Google’s core business and Google’s business model, and you’ll have a much easier time executing within Google.” And retroactively, I agree.
Furthermore:
Remember people used to trumpet “write once, run everywhere”? Well, I think we’re actually there. I think when we start talking about the possibility of exploring things like Netbooks and car navigation systems, you have potentially different processor architecture types. You have Intel, you have ARM, set-top boxes have MIPS.
I think that we have an open ecosystem, we have an open-source platform, we chose the right license, there are no viral aspects, it’s absolutely 100 percent free, it’s complete, it’s everything you need to build a phone. When you add all that stuff up, all those ingredients, potentially–I think the jury’s still out–we can make a really successful product.
Additionally: Why Google chose the Apache Software License over GPLv2 for Android
Published May 6th, 2009
in Gaming.
One of my favorite pieces of writing is by Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader, describing his initial journey to join the rebel group:
Perhaps you are asking what happened to my intention to turn back and abandon the guerrilla life, and you might suppose that the vision of that first dawn in the mountains made me abandon my idea of fleeing, lifted my morale and firmed my revolutionary conscience. Well, you are wrong. I put my plan into operation and went down the hill. What happened is I mistook which side to go down. Instead of going down the slope that would take me back to the road and from there to “civilisation”, I went down the side that took me deeper into the rainforest and that led me to another hill, and another and another . . .
Seriously though, read the whole thing, it’s pretty cool. But anyway, I just wanted to point out a thematically linked passage in this article about game design from a 2007 issue of Wired:
“This, he says, is bad: It means that people were wandering aimlessly instead of progressing through the level. “People were lost,” Pagulayan says. “There wasn’t much deep analysis to do here.”
To solve such problems, the designers must subtly direct player movement by altering the world in small ways. In this case, they decided to change the geography of the Jungle level so that in certain places players had to jump down a steep ledge to reach the next area. This way people can’t go backward, because they can’t climb back up the ledges. Pagulayan shows me a map from the next testing round, after the fix was implemented — and sure enough, all the dots are clustered in tight bunches, right where they are supposed to be.”
So it goes.
Published May 6th, 2009
in Uncategorized.
Great news everyone, Honda is bringing back the Insight hybrid! Oh wait… waitaminute… what is this crap? I seem to recall the *real* Insight being a crazy machine from the future with only 2 seats & some sweet rear wheel covers and it got 60-70 MPG in 2001! Meanwhile, this horse-shit compromise of a Prius-nipple-wannabe has 4 (boring!) seats, no wheel covers and only manages “40+” MPG. I call shenanigans on that. Oh well, at least it has a “totally meaningful” web 3.0 FOURTH WALL BREAKING ad campaign on Vimeo (the “alt-est” of the web video networks!)
In other news, VW is bringing back the Scirocco and this new version actually *does* look pretty sweet! Except… Oops! It’s not available in North America.
Whatever, fuck all this noise though. Once my dumb Toyota Matrix lease is up, I’m totally converting an old CRX to 100% electric, unless Honda does it first, which I doubt.
