On evil… have 18 minutes and an mp3 player ? If so you are going to love it.
Sony is demoing what looks to be a fantastic device in the form of their new e-book reader that uses e-ink electronic paper to give it a printed feel instead of a display feel. Of course, the device itself while being way cool will inevitably be gimped by sony to only support the sony proprietary lifestyle, and most all us geeks refuse to buy anything from a company that so clearly feels it’s customers are criminals who’s computers need a good deep rooting. Still, this development will be followed by others, and perhaps we’ll see something in the next year or two by a company that will let it’s users put their own documents on it. This would be a fantastic development, as it will almost certainly lead to a paperback sized wikipedia.
Now stop for a second and think about that. I recognize that there are accuracy issues with wikipedia, but as a source to get the general concept of people places and things, wikipedia is pretty impressive. In 2 years, we could all be carrying around electronic paperbacks that contain a veritable library of alexandria with snippets to volumes about everything we see around us. This goes a great distance towards making stupid mode (read: being offline) a hell of a lot less….well…stupid.
Beyond reference works, I forsee that a large number of people could find decent use in a device like this to get their news sucked down to it via RSS so that when we sit on the light rail, or eat our wheaties we can have a newspaper that doesn’t leave us with a 400 pound pile of trash yearly.
All in all, this device looks very cool, now hopefully someone other then sony can bring one to market that doesn’t inherently distrust you.
Bruce Sterling had a chat with some folks over at the Well.com discussing the state of the world in 2006. It is a great chat from one of the best writers of our time. I highly recommend taking the time to read it, its funny and you will probably find many new factoids (a definite plus for all you useless trivia junkies). My favorite quotation of the whole chat is about the Chinese and their really strange future demographics: “I’m not sure that I buy the mass-migration theory, but there’s never been a society anywhere, ever, with that kind of age and sex-ratio structure. China forty years from now looks like a lumberjack camp for geezers. I wish ’em luck with that.”
It seems that these days everyone has been talking about Wikipedia. How cool it is, its growing pains, or people getting caught trying to change history, but very few people seem to have noticed the quiet but epic growth of it’s younger sibling, WikiBooks.
Since it’s start in July 2003, the WikiBooks project has quietly amassed hundreds of books of varying quality from near empty outlines to reasonably good beginnings to books that (in their finished chapters) are better then some of the ones I remember from my college days. Unsurprisingly, the books are more complete and comprehensive if you are looking to learn certain programming languages or how to win a 1st person shooter. Still, this project absolutely reeks of potential.
By looking at the list of texts, clearly most of the wikibooks on the site today are in their infancy, but the framework is there, and it’s growing only slightly slower then wikipedia did when it was roughly the same size*. Expect big things from this project over the second half of the decade.
* about january 2003: Wikibooks stats, Wikipeda Stats
What a nice little article… over on the IBM developer works website Andrew Glover nicely compares and contrasts common Java idioms with their Ruby counterparts. For all those people out there who find the Ruby magic a bit daunting and who look at Rails and freak out when stuff seems to happen behind a curtain take a look at this article. I think it is a really nice comparison between the two languages that is a good super-light-weight introduction to Ruby for experienced Java developers. Also look at the bottom of the article for lots of other goodies introducing Ruby further.
