Eureka Man » Quick Links

Multi-touch Skepticism

Eureka Man — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:24:25 +0000

Apollo is stupid

Eureka Man — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:00:09 +0000

From Niall Kennedy’s (always excellent) analysis:

Adobe’s first big Apollo app is an Internet video application codenamed Philo. The pervasiveness of Flash Player created multi-billion dollar Internet video startups powered by the Flash video format. The Philo team hopes to expand the display size and quality of distributed videos and get publishers encoding using the latest Flash video encoders. Publishers can brand the entire video player, delivering MTV content in what looks like a MTV video player, or a Rocketboom-themed player…

Great!! thats just what I want – an MTV branded video player to play MTV videos and a Rocketboom branded video player to play Rocketboom videos. Awesome!

This is not the future of the web people, and it certainly isn’t the future of the desktop. Please try to resist.

Where are they?

Eureka Man — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:05:32 +0000

I’ve always heard considerations of scale used in favor of there being other intelligent life in our galaxy – There are so-and-so many suns with so-and-so many planets, many of which have the same conditions as our planet when life arose here. Surely there must be lots of other life and surely there must be intelligent life since it would be a coincidence for them to have had less evolution time than us relative to the age of the galaxy (assuming evolution has a tendency to beget intelligence).

It was interesting to hear Creon Levit mention a scale argument for the opposite conclusion on a Neo Files podcast. It goes like this: If there are many such intelligent civilizations, more advanced than us, then they probably have the ability to create self-replicating machines that can be sent out to colonize a suitable planet and prepare it for their more fragile creators. These machines could be programmed to launch identical probes to other planets. And the replicated machines in those probes could do the same. And so on. You get an exponential processs that could spread through the whole galaxy in a relatively short amount of time.

So where are they?

That’s User Experience

Eureka Man — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:45:30 +0000

I had never shopped at CD Baby before. I had a fun time. Now they get a blog mention and a link out of it. Site designers take note.

O M G

Eureka Man — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:01:13 +0000

I think I’m in love with Jeff Han.

The big secret is out

Eureka Man — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:26:08 +0000

Looks like we are out to out-Google Google.

For all the Prolog kids

Eureka Man — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:51:10 +0000

Anyone………..? Anyway, gotapi.com now has Prolog docs, thanks to me.

Joel on the “Off” button

Eureka Man — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:47:02 +0000

I like it. Joel tackles a pet peeve of mine, the myriad of ways to end your Windows session, as an instance of the general principle of less options == better UI.

A quick reminder about meta-ideas

Eureka Man — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:22:27 +0000

Doc Searls echos the meta-idea that I started this blog with.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence at ChaCha

Eureka Man — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 07:48:37 +0000

ChaCha is a new search engine that will connect you to a personal search assistant (a human!) to help you with your query. Matthias decided to test it out with a challenging query:

Status:

Looking for a guide …

Status:

Connected to guide: SomeGuide

SomeGuide:

Hi there. I will be helping with your search.

SomeGuide:

Hey, there. How are you today?

SomeGuide:

So you’re looking for the ‘answer to everything’?

You:

i am good

You:

and you?

You:

yes

SomeGuide:

I’m great. Thanks for asking

You:

SomeGuide, I am really curious what might be a good answer for everything

SomeGuide:

You mean in conversation?

SomeGuide:

Or ‘everything’ in an all-encompassing philosophical scope.

You:

yes, philosophical

You:

It sounds like a hard task, but I am looking for that to put into a slideshow for my next presentation

You:

as an opening quote

You:

it will be a technical talk about research opportunities

You:

for the future

SomeGuide:

Hmm, that’s quite a question…

…….

Go read the rest at Matthias’ excuse for a permalink. It has a happy ending!