Posted on November 20th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Games, General/Misc., Tim.
This is something I wrote a long time ago (December 19th, 2005) and never hit the “publish” button.
Everyone is excited about the newest generation of consoles. Microsoft is going all out with XBox 360, and Playstation 3 will doubtless be amazing. The underdog, in this generation of consoles, will be the Nintendo Revolution. Or will it?
XBox 360 costs $399 (The core system doesnt exist, so dont talk to me about that). Rumor has it that PS3 will cost upwards of $499 (Although I think a price point of $399 will make it much more competitive with XBox). And how much does the Revolution cost? Probably around $150. It’s no secret that Nintendo doesn’t want to compete with Sony or Microsoft. Who can blame them? Nintendo follows no one’s rules but their own. Nintendo is not getting sucked into the console arm’s race for the most spectacular graphics. It’s fairly likely that the Nintendo Revolution will have graphics only marginally better than the original XBox.
I still put my money on Nintendo. In fact, I don’t know for sure whether PS3 will win over 360, or vice versa, but I do know that Nintendo Revolution will do just fine, regardless of what happens to the other consoles.
Nintendo has always been an innovator. This has been the key to their success, and has also been the cause of many laughable failures. They have a philsophy that seems to be willing to try anything. Products such as Virtual Boy, Nintendo DS
I can’t decide if I was psychic, good at picking up industry activity, or if this was obvious. To this day, it’s hard to find a Wii because every console is sold out.
Posted on May 1st, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Programming, Tim.
There’s been a buzz lately, and I think it’s only going to grow. That buzz is RIA, or Rich Internet Applications. Applications like Gmail and Writely have shown that an internet application can be a powerful tool for productivity and collaboration. The problem though, is that the current HTML + AJAX solution simply sucks. Enter the two RIA contenders, Silverlight and Apollo. These tools are going to make it easy to develop a rich user experience from an internet application.
For what it’s worth, my money is on Silverlight. When Microsoft announced that Silverlight applications will use CLR, and that CLR will be available on OSX, my jaw dropped. The ability to write a rich internet application using the amazing power of C# and the Common Language Runtime is amazing, and the fact that this will work on OSX shows that MS is serious about making this a viable platform. On top of this, I’m sure that there is going to be an extremely intuitive RPC mechanism to interact with ASP.Net webservices (and PHP/Ruby/etc. webservices). The boost in developer productivity is going to have a direct impact on the quality of applications that will be developed in the next few years.
Posted on April 29th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Politics, Programming, Tim.
Scott Adams has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers. He recently wrote an article Is Copyright Violation Theft?, which Dare Obasanjo later commented on as well. It’s always interesting to hear this story from the content producer’s perspective. Scott Adams makes quite a bit of money from his work, and I believe that it should be his right to control distribution of his work. He argues that if he did not have the potential to make a good living from his creative work, he would never have been motivated to do the work in the first place. He understands one of the basic tenets (as explained by Greg Mankiw) of economics: People are motivated by incentives. If Scott could not make money off Dilbert, it’s unlikely that Dilbert would have ever been created. If people did not have the right to control their creative work, they would be much less motivated to create.
In my opinion, this view can be equally applied to software. People are motivated to create software through the incentives they get through having control of the intellectual property of the software they create. The incentives are obvious for companies like Google, IBM, and Microsoft. For open source software, however, the incentives are less clear, but are present nonetheless. The Free Software Foundation, for instance, vehemently defends the GPL. For them, the incentives may be less financially driven, but the underlying enabler is the ability they have (through US copyright law) to control the distribution and use of their work. I find it interesting that an organization which so strongly defends its own right to control its work is so vehemently against the rights of musicians and authors from protecting their own work. On their sites badvista.fsf.org and defectivebydesign.org, they explain how DRM is an evil technology that prevents you from using your computer. DRM is a technology which allows content producers to specify how they want their work to be used and distributed (and thus protect their rights under US copyright law).
So this begs the question, is the campaign against DRM a technology issue or an ideological struggle? This is plausibly a technology issue, since DRM technology in its current incarnations pretty much sucks. Then shouldn’t there be a push to do DRM technology in a technologically sound way? With all the smart people out their working on Linux and related technologies, can’t we come up with a way to ensure that copyright holders can maintain control of their work in a technologically sound way? But what if this is an ideological struggle? Then it certainly seems as if the FSF is somewhat hypocritical, since it seems to believe it has the right to control its work, but musicians and artists do not.
My two cents.
Posted on April 16th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: Politics, Tim.
Via Greg Mankiw:
“The unfettered free market has been the most radically destructive force in American life in the last generation.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton on C-Span in 1996
“What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”
– Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961