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You Have Huge GutsYou Have Huge GutsYou Have Huge Guts 04/09/2004 04:04 PM In 1996, the Doom videogame was retold as a comic book, and the result may be the worst of all time. "My cause is just. My will is strong. And my gun is very, very large." (04-03) This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)You Have Huge GutsGrok Headline matches for You Have Huge GutsDo You Have the Guts to Buy?Do You Have the Guts to Buy? 04/01/2005 11:15 AM Paul Elliott offers a challenge to growth investors. Gillmor gutsGillmor guts 12/19/2004 03:40 PM Dan Gillmor is leaving the SJ Merc to launch a project that continues the best of blogs. Few have the courage to risk so much for this. He has earned praise for the work he has done, and respect for this next step that he is taking. War protest with gutsWar protest with guts 03/19/2003 10:26 PM Some gutsy australians has been demonstrating against the war in a peculiar fashion. Way to go for demonstrating the futility... T Rex guts excavatedT Rex guts excavated 03/24/2005 04:51 PM Cory Doctorow: The remains of a T. Rex with intact blood vessels and blood cells have been recovered: Link (Thanks, Alex!) On The Guts of a New Machine (Aside)On The Guts of a New Machine (Aside) 12/02/2003 01:29 AM One thing that I noticed for the first time today was the distinct similarity between the navigational style of the iPod and the horizo ntal-heirarchy menu-driven interface to Tivos. Is there a memetic forebear to both of these that I'm unfamiliar with, or is this simply an emerging standard in navigating through libraries of content when you only have a few physical buttons and real-life interface elements to deal with? MS guts longhornMS guts longhorn 08/27/2004 07:10 PM i wonder if XP SP2's slipping was part of the cause The Guts Of A New MachineThe Guts Of A New Machine 12/02/2003 12:37 AM The iPod became an instant classic by combining high design and powerful technology. But as Apple has learned before, that formula alone doesn't keep you on top. By Rob Walker (New York Times via MyAppleMenu) On The Guts of a New Machine (Part Two)On The Guts of a New Machine (Part Two) 12/02/2003 01:30 AM My second response to a chunk in The New York Times article The Guts of a New Machine concerns the comments of Rob Glaser from RealNetworks. You can read my first response (on rapid design processes) here. Three visions of Apple & the music player market in five years: Nor will music bought through Apple's store play on any rival device. This means Apple is, again, competing against a huge number of players across multiple business segments, who by and large will support one another's products and services. In light of this, says one of those competitors, Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks, ''It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.'' It's an interesting position this, but I wonder if it's true. I mean, the iTunes Music Store has clearly been a bit of a success in the States, even if it's not going to topple retail CD sales any time particularly soon. An awful lot of people already have tracks from it, and - given Pepsi's deal to buy and give away 100 million tracks and MacDonald's rumoured deal for a further billion - a hell of a lot of other people are going to join them pretty soon. It seems clear that if Apple sell or distribute that number of tracks during this early period then it'll help them sell iPods straightaway. And later it should have an equally positive effect when people come to replaced their devices - the retention levels should be directly improved as a result. At least this much seems obvious - the more tracks you own, the more you then have to lose by transferring to a player that can't read them. Now that's already a different sense of the future than that held (in public) by Rob Glasner. And it doesn't take a genius to try and push that a bit further. Given the scale of their lead, you could easily argue that the possibility exists for Apple to create de facto bought-music standard that is attached exclusively to their products. They'll have a lock-in. At which point the question emerges - how long is it in their best interests to maintain it? Now, I've painted a fairly rosy picture of Apple's use of DRM and non-device-independent music files so far, but there are clearly disadvantages as well. History has shown us (with a few notable exceptions) that unless consumers and companies have little or no choice about whether to use them - things based on non-proprietary and vaguely open standards seem destined to 'win' in the long-term. They'll get used on the most devices and in the most interesting and dynamic (and obviously inexpensive) ways. In fact just last year I was arguing that Apple's resurgence was a direct result of steering away from this kind of proprietary activity (Apple and the Pirate Everyman). Their moves towards open standards seemed to be based around creating the best hardware and software for exploiting the (perhaps problematic / perhaps not) confusions and collapses around intellectual property. But of course there's no reason why the style of DRM'd AAC that Apple use couldn't be subsequently opened up as an available format for use in other devices. And I don't doubt that if there was an economic rationale for doing something like that then they'd do it in a heart-beat. Say - for example - the restrictions were stopping more people buying the devices than they were retaining. So with that in mind, here are two more very very lightly-sketched out possibilities for Apple's future treatment of their DRM'd non-device-independent AAC format: (1) Apple have leveraged their current dominance in legal downloads and players into a technology that they (perhaps) license to other players resulting in a situation like with plugins or (kind of) like Microsoft OS's, where almost no music player in the world can afford not to pay to play Apple Music Store tracks (compensating for the corresponding loss in iPod sales). (2) They just open the doors to other companies building players that can play Apple Music Store tracks. There are clearly technology issues around both of these issues (like - I believe - the way that the sale and subsequent approval of Music Store tracks are handled over the internet direct with Apple. But fundamentally, I can see no reason why the current chain between track and player could not subsequently be broken (or reinforced) according to the needs of the market. Importantly, I'm not going to articulate my position on whether Apple's DRM-based, non-player-independent approach to the selling of music is the right or most moral one. If you find these issues interesting, then Jim Griffin and Cory Doctorow have a lot to say about it in a variey of places, including in the Aula Exposure book. On The Guts of a New Machine (Part One)On The Guts of a New Machine (Part One) 12/02/2003 01:31 AM I've been reading The Guts of a New Machine, the latest (and longest) article on the iPod perpetrated by the New York Times. It's an interesting article that does the journalistic job of covering a variety of angles well while trying to find some unifying theme - but that makes commenting on it in general almost impossible. It itself has no thesis - no argument to make. So instead of addressing the piece as a whole I'm just going to jot down a few thoughts that occurred to me as I read specific chunks. I'm going to do this in multiple posts as it should make commenting more practical. On rapid product development and coherent product vision "The iPod came together in somewhere between six and nine months, from concept to market, and its coherence as a product given the time frame and the number of variables is astonishing. Jobs and company are still correct when they point to that coherence as key to the iPod's appeal; and the reality of technical innovation today is that assembling the right specialists is critical to speed, and speed is critical to success." This chunk of the article (not a quote from anyone) interested me, because of the perceived dislocation between speed, the right staff and coherence. The process seems to me to have been successful in producing something coherent and clean almost because of its brevity. In my experience, three months is about as long as you can reliably expect any individual person to care about their part of the project more than they care about anything else - even if they're given total free space not to have to think about anything else (multi-tasking is the evil enemy of creativity in my opinion). Only clear delineations between stages in a project (and strong management over those transitions) can really help maintain people's levels of constructive engagement if you need a project to go any longer. When I see the iPod and hear the time it took to think through it, I can almost smell the initial back-to-basics workshops, the brainstorming around what MP3 players could and should be at their core. You can feel the desire to understand something - grasp a vision - and the reason that sensation still sits at the heart of the thing is that there wasn't enough time for that vision to erode before it got to market. The iPod's design to me isn't really about simplicity or coherence at all, it's about getting to the essence of the thing and sparsely sketching it out without letting the cruft or baroque tendencies unfold. Where human beings are involved, design is a process in time, and the quality of that design can be affected directly by too-little time, too-much time, and not know what to do with the time you have. Storing Data In Cow Guts?Storing Data In Cow Guts? 07/21/2004 04:20 PM Microsoft guts LonghornMicrosoft guts Longhorn 08/30/2004 08:39 AM SLEEPING SOFTWARE giant Microsoft has decided to release Longhorn in 2006, earlier than planned. However, because it is coming out earlier, Longhorn will be trimmed of some of the more innovative stuff that has been seen in earlier builds. Cell phone guts set to get beefierCell phone guts set to get beefier 09/09/2004 08:47 AM SiliconValley.com Sep 9 2004 12:55PM GMT Chilean blob was whale-guts, not sea
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The field team used standard procedure as they excavated the bones,
wrapping them in plaster jackets before transporting them..
I
had thought, perhaps, that the TiVo users were getting a bit worked up
over the TiVo pop-up ads that are in testing, because last I heard
they only take up a quarter of the screen. Matt Haughey took this
picture of it in action, though, and now I get the ire. That's really
annoying, even if it is only when fast-forwarding. How are you
supposed to see what you're forwarding through? Even if you can hit
'clear' to make it go away, it's still needlessly messy. Matt has a
mock-up of what he'd like to see on PVRBlog and it's much more
reasonable.