Category Archives: World

Nicholas Carr comments on Clay Shirky? My idea of interesting

  By Mr Wolfe | April 24, 2012 - 4:41 AM | World
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Want to know how I cure my boredom?  I go online and look for these two guys.  And speaking of all those things, I noticed that Nicholas Carr has responded to something Clay Shirky said about boredom and the Internet.  Well, ain’t that a coincidence!

Carr replies to Shirky like so:

“Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment”: that’s well put. We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

Perpetual boredom is an unattractive state. So is perpetual nonboredom.

The web does expand to fill all boredom, so if you’re bored (and let’s face it, you are) then slow down and watch Nicholas Carr share some more of his insights in this interview.

Source

Remember how I said the Internet was doomed?

  By Mr Wolfe | February 21, 2012 - 11:44 PM | News, World
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LAST TIME ON: THE INTERNET IS DOOMED

NOW, THE SAGA CONTINUES…

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

Guardians of the Net, take up your spears!  The Wall Street Journal has sounded the alarm, and this time it ain’t some American Intellectual Property bill.  The Communists are coming!

Nicholas Carr on the permanence of digital

  By Mr Wolfe | February 5, 2012 - 4:30 AM | Commentary, Metal Gear Solid 2, World
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Nicholas Carr and Hideo KojimaI found this interesting.  Fans of Metal Gear Solid 2 know that the game comments on the permanence of digital information, portraying traditional culture as fragile and transient, and digital culture as a swelling “flood” of eternally accessible garbage.  Physical records conform to the idea of evolution and natural selection, he suggests.  But yesterday, respected technology prophet and bestselling author Nicholas Carr flipped this idea on its head by suggesting that it’s actually old, physical culture that remains accessible, and digital information that becomes swept away in a stream of technological change…

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SnapKeys

  By Mr Wolfe | January 13, 2012 - 3:29 AM | World
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So I’ve been paying attention to the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, and this stuck out to me.  It’s a pretty clever alternative to the QWERTY keyboard, and although it uses predictive typing (room for error) it could really catch on once you learn the basic premise.

The idea is to take all the characters on a normal keyboard and reduce them to only four “buttons”–those that stand on one point (F, I, T, etc.); those that stand on two (M, N, X…); those that stand on a wide base (Z, U, L…); and characters with a closed circle (@, P, O…). Snapkeys introduces four new icons for each of these new typing areas, effectively reducing the full QWERTY board down to only this:

CNET image of SnapKeys

These cute, emoticon-esque figures are hoping to kill QWERTY. (Credit: Screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET)

You can fool around with the idea here.  In order to teach how it works, it gives you something to type (found between the header and the SnapKeys buttons) and doesn’t ask you to click on a specific letter.  Instead, you hit the square that contains your letter, and it predicts which one you want.  The second test is to see whether you can type a sentence while only thinking about the four “types” of letters you want, and let the predictive system do the rest.

Once you start thinking about the alphabet in terms of closed loops, long bases, two points, and single points, it’s quite fun.  The developers say that this system will render QWERTY obsolete on touch-screen devices within three years, and I believe it.  I always thought adapting the QWERTY system to a touch screen was awkward, and this is exactly the kind of ingenious system that I’d expect to replace it.

They also mention installing this software directly into steering wheels, although they admit they don’t know whether this would make things better or worse for road distractions.  Can I make a suggestion?  If you’re going to let people type on their steering wheel, make sure it’s only enabled while the vehicle is parked!  My goodness.

DOTA 2 makes six Ukrainians millionaires

  By Mr Wolfe | August 21, 2011 - 8:39 PM | Games, World
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I used to play Defense of the Ancients when WarCraft III was still burgeoning, leveling up my heroes and mostly trying to figure out what to do next, buying items and playing against a static A.I. instead of other players.  With the release of StarCraft 2′s map editor I heard some strong rumblings from the Blizzard community about whether or not it would be able to handle DOTA maps, but I never knew how popular the map had become while I was gone.  Ever since the name ‘DOTA 2′ surfaced — now belonging to Valve instead of Blizzard! — I have been eagerly following it.

So I’ve been watching The International DOTA 2 Championships with some degree of shock.  How can the grand prize for this thing really be $1,000,000 USD?  I know that ‘eSports’ have been growing over the years, but we’re talking about an closed beta of a sequel to a very old WarCraft map, with no sponsorships.

My hat is off to Valve for putting this together and having the balls to steal everything from the original DOTA right in ActivisionBlizzard’s face; and to the Na’Vi team for becoming absurdly wealthy this weekend.