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Geek heaven
My column on Supernova is now up, here. A taste:
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The danger here is that the dynamo of the Silicon Valley boom-bust cycle, in its hunger for Next Big Thing fuel, will seize upon Wi-Fi, blogs and Web services and then spit them out, chewed-up and spent -- before they've ever had a chance to mature and show off their potential. |
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Smart match
Okay, I'm awfully out of touch with pop culture today compared with the days when I was a theater and movie critic. So maybe I'm the last one to learn what I just read about the plans of New Line, the movie studio behind Peter Jackson's smashing "Lord of the Rings," to follow up on that success. The Wall Street Journal says the studio has planned an adaptation of Phillip Pullman's beautiful "His Dark Materials" trilogy -- with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Bring it on!
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Pirates ahoy
Tim O'Reilly's new essay on piracy offers much wisdom. "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." "Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues." Read the whole thing here.
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Big worlds
Joel Spolsky has posted a new essay on programming: "Lord Palmerston on Programming." Joel writes about how vast the pools of knowledge programmers need to master to become really expert in each of the many programming "worlds" that are popular today. Choice quote:
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People who only know one world get really smarmy, and every time they hear about the complications in the other world, it makes them think that their world doesn't have complications. But they do. You've just moved beyond them because you are proficient in them. These worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. Lord Palmerston: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it." |
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