Rough Drafts

“Anytime you lose a high-profile customer, that hurts in ways that are not quantifiable but that still hurt.” –Sageza Group analyst Clay Ryder, who clearly has no clue how to read a budget and calculate the loss of a major customer’s business. Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

MIT’s Technology Review has a little piece on the first computer game ever, 1962’s Spacewar for the DEC PDP-1. Also see Stewart Brand’s 1972 writeup.

What happens if oil isn’t cheap anymore? Our farming and food systems collapse, the suburbs implode, a period of violence ensues, and in the end, we’re all living in small farming communities, riding bikes and milking cows by hand. So says James Howard Kunstler, who predicts this all may start to ha

It’s 1:50. Plus 1,439 other minutes–all illustrated with multiple photos–at the curiously engrossing Human Clock. A new shot every minute, of course.

Bodies embedded in plastic for display in San Francisco’s Masonic Center are now decomposing, while on display, and they’re leaking. “The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic,” says ABC News. (via BoingBoing)

I’ve sat through Wagner operas that moved the plot forward faster. Sure, the computer generated imagery is amazing–but overwhelming. It quickly become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer all that impressive (Coruscant looks a bit like Las Vegas at night, oh and look, here comes another floating droid)

Sci fi author and EFF publicist Cory Doctorow (see my 2003 interview with him) has some good advice on writing. “Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book.” Plus three rules of thumb for novel writing: “… at […]

Wired News reviews Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You and wonders: If video games are making us smarter, why can’t we solve problems like Iraq and Social Security? The answer’s easy: Make a killer first person shooter called Iraq: The Game and a gripping multiplayer online game cal

John Scalzi is not worried about the state of book publishing in an age of easily made, widely-distributed digital copies: I write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician. The book is the container. It’s not destiny. Want to […]

Just came back from a few days at E3, the massive video game conference that happens every year in Los Angeles. As usual, it was an experience in sensory overload that left me exhausted and slightly depressed by the end. A few things of note: First person shooters are getting a little boring. Sure,

Looks like Clara, who took a Sharper Image robot vacuum I was reviewing to preschool for show & tell, isn’t the only kid who loves to play with Roomba. And why not? Roombas are cute, unpredictable, a little bit scary (but not too much), and they’re vacuum cleaners–an endless source of fascination fo

Only a few days late here. She was born in the Midwest in 1933, when her dad earned $12 a week and movies cost a dime. It was the Depression, but she didn’t know it. … My mother used to sit in the den of our house in the San Fernando Valley chain-smoking Kents and […]