Mercurial

And I get this email

“@Neurokafka you DMR invaded brain washed corporate elitist! about 5 hours ago from TwitterFox in reply to Neurokafka”

okay, w.t.f. are you talking about?
What do you have against stand-up comedy? Larry Miller

and what the hell is DMR invasion, some sort of takeover of the Department of Mental Retardation, or Dept Marine Resources? Is this some sort of offshore drilling reference?
My GOD Man! sometimes your tweets (not just your tweets) are like some sort of ironic-cynical koan designed to induce seizures.

This deserves a blog, not a tweet, and since today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, from now on referred to as TLPD in the rest of this document, let’s talk about pirates and DRM, Spore, and IP assumptions.

Spore: magic concept, ambitious yet achievable, and full of unexplained possibilities. It is alike to a caricature of the Metaverse, yet it is extremely poor in activities. It is a common theme that, whenever a social virtual space appears, people forget that activities and meeting points are the most important elements when designing a community infrastructure, be it a building, a city, an enterprise or a game. As Jane Jacobs would say, The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

The facebook people got it - they walk to school, they walk to work, they interact with others. Yet apparently the people at EA have a limited exposure to old buildings, and probably it is their crunch time strategy affecting the products from Maxis, I don’t know. But while evil facebook will allow people to create communities through activities and enjoy the addictive space that it creates, all that Spore allows you to do is click and click and click. It may have worked ten years ago for SimCity, but now we have RealCity. Times, they are a’changing.

And now to Spore DRM: you have to have an approved PC to run that? Are you oput of your mind, EA? Here are some links you might have encountered regarding that little debacle: Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM; EA Admits Spore Launch Botched by DRM; Still, Financial Damage Already Done; DRM: Buyers Beware, and, last but not least, Spore Most Copied game Thanks to DRM.

What’s that about TLPD then? Pirates are not interested in games qua games, they are interested in whatever brings them money.

• Users sharing their game with others? Cool! Monetize that!
• Users using your servers to exchange creatures? Good! Monetize that!
• Users asking you to allow them to give you money so they can get extra servers and faster interaction or premium access? Monetize that.
• Users talking about how cool your company is? That is something that you can actually transform into money!

So, you see, my tuíterin friend, Spore is bad business, old model, worse interaction.

September 19th, 2008 | Tags: Copyright, DRM, ip, spore | Category: Media, Technology, Trends | Leave a comment

They call it social networking, and according to boston.com, there will be research:

IBM Corp. is setting up a research center in Cambridge to develop better ways for businesses to use social networking software.
“It’s something that can have worldwide impact,” said Irene Greif, director of IBM’s new Center for Social Software.

Other article on Businessweek as well.

I’ll facebook Irene Greif, to see what she envisions. Do you think she has a twitter?

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: enterprise, research, social media | Category: Social Networks | Leave a comment

For those times when you do not want to search through a million ads in craigslist, CLhack.

Because, seriously, with all the spammers? I need a more informative interface to give me the info in 1 second or less. I don’t like to browse! Immediate gratification ftw!

via lifehacker

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: IA, mashup | Category: IA | Comments (1)

Twitter gets a 420% growth over the same period last year, as reported by Mashable! Of course, that is after the failwhale made a gracious exit, and all the Pr companies discovered the possibilities of spam through unestablished channels.

Furthermore, there is this addictively task that consists of nothing more than the writing of short brief stories, a speech of impossibly short discourses, a conversation involving small utterances that require a little bright bulb and nothing more. For this is ADD, attention deprived dialog, a little bit of salt on your morning news to make them more palatable.

I’m off to tweet. Chau, tuíteres.

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: growth, social media, twitter | Category: Social Networks | Comments (1)

Ah, at last a Colombian film for the Oscar. Of course it falls within the violent archetype, but at least…

No. Anywhoo, here is a blurb:

a film revolving around corrupt cops, hired killers, betrayal, revenge, and the drug trade with a bit of South American witchcraft thrown in for good measure…

OK, talk to me on this one: how’s withcraft different from the hexes in USA? How is typical from South America?

I like better this review, that, although scathing, makes me even more curious:

The movie emphasize the gritty and nasty with its over the top violence that seems to glamorize gross brutality for the sake of violence, as though it’s the cinematic love letter to violence that only the death-row prisoners would admire for depicting absolute nihilism. Maybe that’s the actual point of the title.

September 16th, 2008 | Tags: colombia, Films | Category: Films | Comments (1)

The famous TC50 are already creating a huge reaction; A funny one? twíttere rands, who says

Read the company description — tell me how long until you are forced to punch yourself in the face. My record: 15 words - http://tr.im/1a5

.

It makes a beautiful poster, though.

September 8th, 2008 | Tags: social media, twitter, wordle | Category: Media, Technology, War | Comments (1)

The rumors of the potential demise of SaaS seem to be exaggerated. True, there is a glut of companies, and the current business model doesn’t seem to give space to consolidation of services and customers.

The traditional providers of business software implementations are all happy and cushy in the knowledge that their cumbersome implementation, with their multi-million dollar contracts and hundreds of consultants per implementation, are here to stay: It is difficult to consider the current business without that massive attention to detail and customization on installations.

But SaaS is too young, and the processes are amenable to change still.

Businessweek’s Sara Lacy, in her article On-Demand Computing: A Brutal Slog points out the various problems that different vendors are experiencing, and the steep barriers to entry that this industry seems to have:

“SAP thought customers would go to a Web site, configure it themselves, and found the first hundred or so implementations required a lot of time and a lot of tremendous costs,” Richardson says. “Small businesses are calling for support, calling SAP because they don’t have IT departments. SAP is spending a lot of resources to configure and troubleshoot the problem.”

This is the quote that jumps at me, along with the 10 years $100 million figures: is it too soon to think of IBM and their mighty boxes, of enormous top-bottom infrastructure that gets subverted seamlessly by an innovative and surprisingly simple product? I think of dinosaurs and little animals that take their place, of open source and in-house modification instead of exorbitant consulting fees.

If configuration and user interface is the problem, there are deep issues of software architecture, openness and user experience that must and will be addressed. But all this is infrastructure, not technology.

July 18th, 2008 | Tags: SaaS | Category: Business, Economics, Management | Comments (2)

I am almost ashamed: I have spent the brief interludes that daily life affords to try to connect my wireless gain using my trusty Ubuntu on my crusty Dell, and yet no wifi.

Yes I have read them all, and I have had as much success as s cold fusion physicist: it works, but I can’t repeat the miracle.

On other news, I started twittering again, which interesting enough of a change of pace. After the Reddit Apocalypse and their dismal views on economy, life and the future of the planet, it is refreshing to see the aggregation of random tidbits, not enough to distract but intriguing enough to explore.

Reddit fails at social media by bypassing community - you contribute and engage, but seldom with people, just with random pieces of comments. Memes arise and die within days, and the collective knowledge fades as rapidly as the collective mood changes. In Twitter at least I get a lot of links to blogs and the like. It’s got more focused content.

July 16th, 2008 | Tags: twitter | Category: Social Networks | Leave a comment

Why is it that work becomes so boring after a while? Why projects remains exciting, no matter how exhausting and demanding? Why is the thrill of a deadline better than the monotonous drone of the routine meeting and the impossible boring coworker?

It is all about you brain cells and their connections. Whenever you (or your activities) create new pathways, life is better, explosive, immersive, brilliant.

Repetitious tasks are death, though, and not only figuratively: they mean that little by little your pathways reduce, and your options disappear, and one day you wake up transformed into a cockroach, afraid of light and with an apple embedded on your body. That’s why meetings are emetic, and projects are exciting, even after the 16 hour a day crunches and the impossible goals: those mean growth.

Painting, as Paul Graham suggests, may have worked for 20th century dictators, but now we need more, a certain definite brain workout, and one that pay s the bills and nourish the soul, one that provides excitement and gold, one that goes along with expansion and learning of new disciplines. We need work for intelligent humans that need to learn.

June 24th, 2008 | Tags: brain, Career | Category: Career, Chronicles from The Island | Comments (2)