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Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) -- [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry) 2010 Mario AI Championship...
Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....
Working Audio Data Demos -- the new Firefox has a very sweet audio data API and some nifty demos like delay pedals, a beat detector (YouTube) and a JavaScript text-to-speech generator. (via jamesaduncan on Twitter) Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation -- [T]he revenues and profits of...
"I Promise Never To Program A Computer To Play Something I Can't"
Gameplay parameters are sent up to the server, the application running in the Cloud mixes the appropriate beeps and booms into the audio output buffer, which then streams the game soundtrack to your device. The data being transmitted up is small, the server has all the CPU power, memory storage, and data bandwidth you could ask for, and the download stream is like listening to a digital radio station.
When I talk about The Cloud (Capital T, Capital C), I'm talking about a currently fictional technology. Despite advertising claims and vaporware demonstrations at trade shows, The Cloud (as I envision it) does not yet exist ... but when it does, it will dramatically change the way we do business, listen to music, and play games.
Aren't You Being a Little Hasty in Making This Data Free? -- very nice deconstruction of a letter sent by ESRI and competitors to the British Government, alarmed at the announcement that various small- and mid-sized datasets would no longer be charged for. In short, companies that make money reselling datasets hate the idea of free datasets. The arguments...
What's calling to me tonight is to honor my friend and colleague Doug Fieger, leader of the rock band The Knack who had a monster commercial hit with "My Sharona" in the late 70s.
In 2002, at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mark "the Red" Harlan, then Chief Evangelist for a scrappy little start-up called Danger, Incorporated, demonstrated an early version of a wireless internet device called the "hiptop" (later known as the T-Mobile Sidekick). He explained that it was a prototype, costing many thousands of dollars to produce, then he navigated to the Notes application, typed in a message, hit enter, and waited a moment while the Note synced to the Danger servers via wireless connection. Then he put the device on the floor, and dropped a bowling ball on it!
If you make a process easy enough, you can change the world. In 1995, two MIT graduates set out to make music-making easy. Now millions of people play their product, and the inventors are releasing the developer tools for free.
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