the onda

I was particularly struck by a recent Radar piece on our rampant consumerism in the technology industry and the notion that the economic meltdown might forever stamp 2008 as the year of "peak consumption."

While I agree that it is true that most of us geeks are always looking over the horizon to the next generation of gadgets where Moore's Law can unleash the next layer of functionality, having chewed on it for a couple of days, I'm not sure that it is all about just consumption for its own sake. Rather, it seems to me, most of us are on this never-ending upgrade cycle because of the sense of wonder and possibility that it inspires in us. Is that a justification for all of the e-waste and environmental cost of pursuing this illusory perfect gadget? Absolutely not. Does it absolve us of the need to think through the whole lifecycle of the components (especially the toxic ones) in our laptops and cellphones? Certainly not. But it does help to explain the psychology of the dynamic in terms that are not just Big-Gulp ugly.

Speaking of child-like sense of wonder, I recently read Ted Nelson's 1974 Opus, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, and discovered this wonderful little blurb addressing just this very topic:

Finally, on the subject of getting rid of old (but still desired and usable) devices, check out this wonderful site I've recently discovered. As a middleman to eBay, they provide a great service that is both useful and good for managing the problem referred to in the Radar piece (I had a great experience with them and a Macbook Air recently).

At the other end of the spectrum from banal iFart applications, Charlie Rose has a great 1 hour interview with Bill Gates on subjects as broad Microsoft's battle in search and his foundation's work in eradicating polio.

I love Charlie Rose not because he is a hard hitting interviewer, but because he is smart and egoless and can get just about anyone to open up. This is a great skill to have with someone like Gates who can be prickly and automaton-like in interviews, but who nonetheless has a lot of worthwhile things to say.

If this isn't a call for us to stop screwing and get serious about putting all of this computing and communications to good use, I don't know what is.

I've blogged about how much fun World of Goo has been (to be surpassed only by the recently discovered iPhone game Rolando). Gamasutra has a great post on the value of rapid prototyping in the creation of WoG's predecessor, "Tower of Goo," which was borne out of a Carnegie Mellon project on experimental gameplay.

Though the piece is nominally about techniques for designing video games, anyone involved with building any kind of consumer software should be very interested in this piece, especially those who work in the very malleable and fast moving environment of web services. I've often invoked the principle of "tracer bullets" on teams that I've worked on to try to get folks thinking about the minimal amount of work possible to get something that might demonstrate value in front of real users. From now on, I'll also be including references to this piece.

Some of my favorite pieces of advice in the post:
* give yourself less time than whatever you think the minimum time you need to get something out (< 7 days seems like a good rule of thumb).
* formal brainstorming sessions suck and aren't worth the time. Intersperse the creativity while you work.
* fake as much of the magic as possible; users care about the experience, not your great engineering.

And some of the things I learned from the piece:
* get a team of generalists who have the right attitude; they will be much better than skilled specialists with the wrong attitude.
* prototype in parallel to make sure people aren't blocked while prototyping.

I swear that if all of the VC-backed consumer Internet startups took this advice to heart, as a sector we would waste 50% fewer investor dollars than we currently do. Which might imply 2x the number of successes.

A great read.

IEEE Spectrum magazine has a great, lucid, and wildly entertaining piece by Stanley Williams, an HP researcher who has spent the last decade researching the "memristor" a new type of fundamental electronics component that is bound to shake up computing. A memristor is essentially a programmable resistor with a memory; programmable via the voltage applied to it and capable of maintaining its programmed resistance without any current in the circuit.

Williams does a great job of explaining why the applications for such a component go far beyond the obvious ones (like smaller more efficient memory) to cases where we might finally be able to approximate the analog computing model used by the brain so the piece is a real mindbender. But it's also an incredibly entertaining read; though my father often gives me articles from this magazine, I have to admit that most of what I try to read from there has the effect of an elephant tranquilizer right before bedtime. By contrast this piece was super approachable and a real page-turner at the same time.

Finally, it's good to see a big tech company R&D arm doing this type of crazy fundamental research. During my time at HP, I've spent a lot of time with the HP Labs folks (a real feature of this job), and I've often found it a little sad to see how much pressure most of the researchers have to deliver something "implementable" back to the businesses as soon as possible. The fact that Williams has been given the leeway to spend more than 10 years chasing this elusive 4th fundamental component makes me feel like we are doing something right.