computing

The mediastore will replace today's both DVD rental and music stores. It will only serve digital media, that customers will load onto their personal storage devices, such as USB flash drives or iPods. They will also be able to order it to be placed online, to later stream it from home.

The value of the mediastore will be the same as today's video or CD store: to find current media in an environment designed for findability.

What does this mean: {{{

     (#<img class="teximage" src="/files/tex/783f24a3c095bbbc53d30b932101494dbed5e0c4.png" alt="$ forAll ?PERSON1
     (# $" />implies
        (#<img class="teximage" src="/files/tex/6c8db462dbbc868fb7529c75fd1a70a7010e73cd.png" alt="$ isa ?PERSON1 # $" />Person)
        (#<img class="teximage" src="/files/tex/17606da0f1e8249e64f28e259e985e653a63af64.png" alt="$ thereExists ?PERSON2
           (# $" />and
             (#<img class="teximage" src="/files/tex/13cffa4604a6669caf2e41ab2f7d486b65aebfac.png" alt="$ isa ?PERSON2 # $" />Person)
             (#$loves ?PERSON1 ?PERSON2)))

Found at an OpenCyc tutorial.

The Microsoft bid to acquire Yahoo! is the latest desperate move from a dinosaur to avoid extinction. Actually, the only thing keeping that dinosaur alive right now is its cash, because it is plain to see that Microsoft just doesn't "get" the Web. It drove Hotmail to the ground years ago, it created a single sign-on system that everybody hates, and I don't think Live.com is much better than MSN.com - even the name is as bland.

When you're coding a function, start with the return statement and work the logic backward to reach the inputs. Since we're more concerned with the function's output, this reversal does shift the focus on getting the result required instead of starting off far away, at the input level.

If you're looking for folk expressions of infoart (and who wouldn't), check out XScreenSaver. This wonderfully simple system is the standard screensaver on Linux, and it shows how the stock Windows screensavers are an insult to the genre.

Each screensaver is humbly called a hack, and each hack is a small program that displays an interesting animation on the screen. Interesting is the key word here, and probably an understatement. Most people who are in the room become mesmerized by them - my cat too! I wish I was such a hacker.

It's more fun to compute

I am not a computer gamer. My favourite computer games were Pac-Man, Tetris, River Raid, Time Pilot, Commando, then Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. I pretty much stopped at the shoot'em-up, perhaps because I'm so lazy.

But when I played tennis on Nintendo Wii at a friend's place, I knew I had found a gaming platform I could start enjoying again. To me it was the fact that I was /standing/ in front of the TV, and moving my arms and my wrists to hit the ball, as in the real game. Suddenly a whole new dimension of computer gaming opened up for me.

Because things never happen on their own, it so happened that a few months later I was invited to meet Gregory Niemeyer, a computer artist from UC Berkeley who was demoing his new game on the streets of Cairo, courtesy of the Townhouse Gallery. The game is called the Return of Balance, and it allows players to control a virtual paddle by shifting their weight on a platform equipped with sensors. The paddle is used to deflect bouncing balls inside moving hoops - all this in software of course, displayed on a wall via a projector. It reminded me of my wind-surfing days when I learned to keep my balance, hence the name.