Author: harold

CPU wars, 1080p features and Display-Lightning 9000 ports, whatever. Tablets fail on one major point: our human interface heritage.

READING

One of the very best and natural use of a tablet is to read something. On one hand it’s unreadable outside or not different from a laptop (iPad), on the other hand it’s B&W (Kindle). E Ink is awesome but just barely started to feature colors.

I’ll buy a tablet the day I can read Akira in Palm Springs without a problem. We’re a couple of years from this.

Reading anything, anywhere. That’s the goal of the perfect tablet. 

WRITING

I can’t believe how device makers are slow at taking small risks and set trends (I would have pointed out how iPads are exactly for big fat baby fingers and play on that). Of course the stylus is awesome. Not in itself but because humans have wrists, absolute marvels of mechanics, and that we learned to use them to write, draw, sketch and so much more that in thousands of years of that diet we’re now pretty good at using them, especially with a stylus.

You don’t want to use all that precision? You crazy.

I’ve always been bad at drawing, being lefty and having my hand ruining nice attempts traumatized me. The problem would be solved with magic electronic ink. If we could sketch precisely, sync drawings, ideas, lyrics, in the cloud/send them anywhere from a friend phone around to social networks, that would be super neat and a great addition to our digital lifestyle. And what ideas and ways of communication young generations would come up with a device like that? An encrypted handwritten new language? Collaborative penis drawings? Who knows.

Now that’s interesting! An electronic device that makes me able to do two really human activities I can’t do with my laptop or my smart phone as well, a real value that I don’t see in what tablet makers offer today.

Forget about watching movies on them, we have computers and TVs. Forget about games, we have computers and phones. Forget about surfing the web, we have computers and phones. These are not selling points, these are lame ass selling points.

Give us something we CAN’T do properly with what we already have. Add VALUE. Create an eco-system of devices.

I think that the first manufacturer to nail the reading/writing aspect of tablets will have a huge player if not a winner in its hands. HTC is on a good path. (too small, no e ink, next!).

White Privilege Diary Series #1 – White Feminist Privilege in Organizations (via @Nick_Lalone)

More often, however, splits emerge along racial lines — the white women simply aren’t receptive to the core ideas put forward by the women of color.  Those ideas are "too expensive" in money, time or resources.  They’re outside the boundaries of "the purpose of the organization." The white women "don’t think they’ll work" or don’t feel they’re "fair." The donors might object. And so on. White rejection is usually passive aggressive, and resembles the Transactional Analysis game of "Yes, but…"  The women who attempt to bridge are shut down by both communities because the women of color feel that "it’s happening all over again," and the white women experience the list of proposals as some kind of "attack."

I feel that very much (2% of black people in the game industry for the win! Smallest minority in 2005, I don’t think it changed much). At so many levels did I make bridges and it’s a schizophrenic task to defuse white people’s feeling that I’m attacking their views while at the same time trying to push my ideas which are often different because of being a minority. I really like simple things and getting straight to the point so something like that feels like a necessary and complex chore that I’d love to make disappear.

The thing is that there’s no end to that. Once we’re all grown-up we can’t change our views, it’s too late. We hit a strong lack of malleability at some point in our life. Look at how old people today screw us all with no remorse. We are pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden just to maintain a system that only profits our parents and grand-parents. Fucking selfish humans.

So yeah, I know the situation in interracial relationships will barely change during my lifetime as it’s not even going well in intergenerational relationships. Quite the opposite actually.

I should have been born in the future, I know.

(totally forgot to post this blog post.)

I’m listening. Watching, reading a lot about black people in the US. I’m sort of studying that stuff. Through documentaries, articles, Wikipedia, musician biographies –we are really over-represented in this area-, blogs, everything.

I said earlier this year that I was kind of loosing faith about the situation. Well I guess it didn’t change!

Look at today’s situation for a black dude on earth. Africa has been looted forever and now the continent is a terrible mess with wars, famines and poverty. Middle-east? Arabs and black people are not that much into a friendship. Asia doesn’t know black people  more than what the US are sending as cultural references, basketball players and rappers. For the rest, describing black people as monkeys is pretty OK for them and like everywhere, stupidly, the lighter the skin color, the better.

Australia? It’s considered as one of the most racist country in the world (if you’re white you don’t really notice that I guess). America Latina? Chile? Less than 1% of the population is Afro-Chilean. Argentina? 86.4% of the population self-identify as being of European descent. So yeah there are Black people in Brazil and it’s the country with one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world with 10% (almost exclusively white) of the population earning 28 times the average income of the bottom 40% (mostly black). Oh, and there’s a trend that shows something; 1835 Brazil black population: 51.4% of the country. 2000: 6.2%.

So there’s Europe and Russia. Both are kind of cold in large parts though. South Europe is not that cool with black people. North Europe is not that cool with black people. France in the middle, has the largest European black population. Makes sense.

And then there are the US.

Let me sum it up: arrived as slaves in the South. Got free, moved to the North, got jobs. Got fired, moved to the West. Got jobs, houses, palm trees and still heavy, grinding segregation. Got fired again, sold crack. During all that time, every single movement trying to change black people’s lives for the better is a failure. Assassinations, murders, black leaders have it all, even the FBI is involved in some cases, like it’s totally OK. Hope’s dead. People are tired, they just want to be happy now, not start a revolution. The 70s/80s are the decades in which a few black stars are going to hide the truth to the world about black America’s actual state.

From there everything goes down, more jobs get axed thanks to technology and under-educated black people, money has to solve everything, start of the crack-cocaine. Black men flowing to prisons, being killed (12 cops spraying an unarmed drunk dude’s car with 100 bullets a few months ago). Generations of black kids growing up in this shit and bam, you have a 50 Cent or a Charles Cosby. This is where I understood the hustling thing. I got it. You have to get your ass out of that hell, you need money for it, you do whatever it takes to get that money. It’s simple, it’s about survival. Nothing personal. It just became cultural. During that time, after ten years of the more-than-white Bush (remember Katrina?), Obama is the new black star like the 70/80/90s ones (The Holy MJ’s). He’s a tree hiding a dead forest (statistics are too awful, I’ll let you wikipedia it).

And that is all one of the freest country in the world with multiple ethnicities from the start, has been able to pull off for black people: a promise that it’s going to suck. It’s like being a lefty! Through history, all across the world it’s never been a good thing to be one, in practice or culturally.

I happened to be both. I’m pretty sane for someone conscious of all that. Or maybe it’s killing me softly.

89% of Hulu users and 42% of Netflix users watch shows & movies directly on computer. http://on.mash.to/ov6L51

That’s huge. Mid 2011, pretty much nobody is watching something on a smartphone or a tablet. And if we do the same charts with games, you can be sure that “classic computers” come far in first (just Facebook and Steam, bam) with consoles and tablets at the bottom. Considering the amount of bullshit we have to eat saying that PCs are so dead blabla, it needs to stop.

The computer, the PC, is going to be a central piece of the house as the fridge is today. A simple commodity (that’s why the all Apple hardware business will be in trouble: do you know your fridge brand? Soon nobody will care either with computers, it’s already happening because they’re all “good enough”). People like to have a machine that does it all and the PC is the one doing everything as good as you can. And it is now dead simple.

Different, smaller devices will connect to it but we will definitely have a computer at home that does a lot of things, like we do today but even more and in a perfect way, not with laptops, noisy towers and DVI-to-HDMI converters. We already have so much power, unused today except for some bad games at very high resolutions. Next step is not to make this technological power fit smaller devices but to distribute it over devices and monitors. Benefits will be greater for everybody (no overheating devices with poor battery life for users, easier for engineers, scalable for suppliers). This, is the beginning.

Imagine that each home has a computer box somewhere in a closet with xx cores and xx GPUs, running the TV, games from anywhere, internet and the AC system. Don’t be afraid, we will certainly have ways to make everything independent so that you can fix a part without breaking another. Don’t be afraid to have a computer taking control over your life, it’s already the case in planes. Imagine that each home at night is using its calculation power for distributed computing, warming the house and channeling the heat for the family’s next morning? How fucking cool would that be? That would be super efficient. Imagine that we cure cancer because your house and millions of others helped the process of understanding protein folding? Now that’s true glocal citizenship my friend.

Tablets and at a least extent smarphones are just accessories to our digital life. Like plates forks and knifes, we use them to consume but the food comes from one place, the fridge, the kitchen. The PC. The issues with the Cloud and privacy show that people are going to LOVE having their personal stuff at home, streaming to their devices around the world.

HomeCloud. It’s happening and the PC is the core.

Hi.

I played a Nintendo DS game which asked me to use the pad and the stylus at the same time. Except that there’s no way to change anything about it, the game controls or my left-handedness. Whatever, the game was awful. 

I got hooked on Gordon Ramsay’s shows. I now know the formula and can’t cook or prepare food without imaginarily hearing “fock me” or “WhatAShame” in my back.

Netflix is cool, unless you have a good TV and that you’re watching an old 1988 movie that just looks like a .rm full screen on your ten year old 21” CRT, buffering excluded (though sometimes, it happens). Not cool then.

I don’t care if Intelligentsia is an expensive hipster place with phonies hanging around, their coffee is good as fuck.

Sometimes I can’t believe how many different things I do with just a laptop and three USB ports.

I haven’t joined Google+ yet and I still can’t keep up with my news stream. So I’m good.

No time to work on my game but HELL, the more the game industry moves, the more I feel on a right track, right project, right angle. I’m just stuck with stupid tech problems but eventually, it will happen.

Also two weeks ago:

‘was awesome.

This isn’t healthy for me to not write. Though I’m quite busy composing for a Facebook game, I have too much shit in my mind. I feel that I learned just so much about myself and the world around in three years. I’d love to share my thoughts and findings and stuff but that would be pretty long. It reinforced everything I believed in though. I guess.

So here’s a picture of one of those sunset that L.A. has and a sound I did a while ago.

I can’t get enough of it.

Interlude by Harold

Dave is right on this one. There is something inherently wrong with the categorization of people: We are complex atoms, moving. Categorization is something simple and static.

When I tried to create lists with circlehack.com I immediately stopped over the obvious one, family. It’s already complicated for this one. I’m connected to so many different people I just can’t categorize them all, at all. Also I feel awkward to arbitrarily say "you, you’re into tech and that’s how we met" because it might not be the essence of our relationship right now. And what will it be in three years? Should I keep a constant look at my lists to match the present? Waste of time (not for Google or Facebook, obviously).

Categorizing people means that you assume you are the one knowing what they like. But maybe they like to read stuff from you because they like you and trust you so they read it. Otherwise they would not read something about this subject because they don’t care "that" much. But because it’s from you, they do. And you don’t know what interests who, it’s probably changing all the time. It’s organic. It can’t be processed with lists or circles. It can’t be processed efficiently with the help of algorithms (not yet at least and I think for a very long time).

I now understand more why Facebook never really got into this filtering, it’s not very human and overly complicated. As a user I’m glad I can just drop an article for everyone, to read. I think it’s richer this way. It’s good that my little cousin can read something about the war on drugs even if he doesn’t give a shit right now. Following him is interesting for me too. More knowledge, more change. As long as I can block some content if I want to –Foursquare’s check-ins-, I’m good. Less headaches (shit, is this dude still in this list I want to share this drunk picture to?).

Whatever happens to social networks, there will never be one and only one. What is more useful to me is how we can automate how we push our content and to what networks we share things.

I think services like ifttt have a great future.