So this interesting tidbit quotes Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on the crazy mad success of World of Warcraft.

Seems the juggernaut really can’t be stopped…or the business model to defeat it hasn’t yet been formulated.

I’m going to get geeky now.

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Check this shit out (video, or there’s an article here).

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the wheelchair that walks up stairs, has been developing a prosthetic arm and the results so far are spectacular (or as Ramanan puts it, this is some crazy terminator shit). The arm is called “the Luke arm” and is inspired by Luke Skywalker’s bionic arm, which proves that truism about scifi, that it predicts the future not because it has magical powers, but because it inspires nerds who go on to invent crazy things that they saw in scifi.

The Game Developer’s Conference is underway, and lots of newsworthy things are going down, and many more will happen before it’s over. Kurzweil is speaking tomorrow, for instance. Gamasutra has a writeup of Mare Sheppard’s postmortem of N+, also. And a good place to follow along is waxy.org, as Andy Baio is using his new full-time blogger status to attend the conference and write up stuff of interest. His piece on indie games is worth reading, for instance.

Yup, there’s nothing like direct brain control of videogames to get the top ten lists fired up, as we see at Popular Mechanic’s list of ‘need to know’ tech for 2008. I don’t buy it though. As if the sixaxis wasn’t causing enough control problems – what about when I think about cheese and it makes my character jump off a ledge? It’ll be used eventually, no doubt (and it’s part of the reason why I won’t mind being just a brain in a jar at some point in the future), but 2008? Hells no.

The Singularity Institute, a Kurzweil joint, has a blog now. Worth watching. There’s also an introductory video.

This article about a pillowfight event at Nathan Phillips Square notes the huge numbers of cameras present: “there were so many lenses that when, as the number of participants started dwindling after about an hour, those with cameras actually started to outnumber those with pillows.”

It would be remiss, when talking of technologies that spread like the zombie plague, to not mention photography. At a recent show at a small venue, we couldn’t help but notice just how often camera flashes were going off. Nothing spectacular was happening – it wasn’t anyone’s wedding and no-one was on the red carpet, it was just people taking pictures of their friends – but when ten out of forty are taking pictures at any given moment, it starts to seem like the inevitable future is upon us: people taking pictures of people taking pictures.

There are advantages to the outsourcing of memory. But the proliferation of image capture causes many problems, summed up by the Borges character who can remember everything and remarks, “my mind is like a garbage heap”. You know that feeling when you’ve taken a ton of pics on your digicam and you can’t be bothered to sort through them for hours finding the good ones? So you import them and then don’t even look at them? There are two paradoxes at play: in the pillowfight instance, the urge to capture the event destroys the actual event; and with the Borges example, the ability to remember everything prevents you from remembering any one thing.

When I think of possible solutions, I come up with the idea of a “crowdsourced” version of the roller-coaster picture setup where you purchase your photo on the ride afterwards. If I could easily grab someone else’s photo of a given event, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the need to take a photo myself. But despite the possibility this could happen what with geotagged photos and whatnot, I doubt it will take off, since we all view our memories as personal. We don’t want to admit that a collective memory-image of an event will do just fine. This memory/photo is my own. Despite the fact that it looks like everyone else’s.

Have I not mentioned this here before? I should, stat. A home 3D printer will be available later this year for $5,000, and in four years for under a grand. Many things will change when these (and 3D scanners) are in every home. Intellectual property issues will get even uglier.

What happens after HD? Is a question I was wondering about, and happened to catch a post-NAB blurb on the topic.

Ultra HD, or “Super Hi-Vision” (what a name!), is what Japan’s public broadcaster NHK proposes.

It’s 7,680 × 4,320 pixels of resolution, as opposed to SD’s 640 × 480 and 1080 HD’s 1920 × 1080 px. 16 times the res of HD. One minute of uncompressed footage would take up 200 gigs of space.

I’m not sure you would really want to be super high if you were watching that.

I used to constantly have the argument with my film pals about whether digital tech would replace film, and they used to tell me it would never happen. (One of them is now a manager of digital cameras at a big camera maker.) One of the big arguments in favour of digital over analog tech is: although suchand such digital technology may not at present surpass the analog equivalent – say, HD is not better than 35mm film – just give it time and eventually the digital option will be both cheaper and much higher quality than the analog. You can’t fight the robots.

Finally got around to giving Joost a whirl. You probably already know what it is, but if not, it’s an IPTV app that offers on-demand programming and what they call internet features like search and chat. It’s from the makers of Skype.

I was frankly disappointed, but what I want from TV is not necessarily what everyone wants. And in terms of content, what they have right now is limited, so it may be early to judge. But frankly, they have their marketing going full-bore, so it might be worth pointing out that they’re not about to replace traditional TV for anyone without having all the big shows, or live news, or any of the strengths of TV. They have stuff from many smaller providers, and archive material from bigger names. i.e. “Much does Wakestock 2004”.

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I can’t say I’m super-jazzed about this thing. I understand it’s the early stages and it’s primarily intended to give iTunes show-downloaders a way to watch their stories on their couch. But iTunes shows are standard def. And the Apple TV only works with “widescreen” televisions. Unless the thing is targeted at people who were tricked into buying EDTV sets a couple years back, that means HDTVs. And what do current HDTV owners tell you? That their gorgeous displays are great for what little HD content there is, but it sucks watching SD on them. Ouch for Apple TV!

Of course, in the future everything will be awesome, and I’m sure the Apple TV will follow suit. Once you can download HD content from iTunes these problems vanish. But no matter what, it’s unlike Apple to ship a shitty 1.0 product, so I can’t view this box as anything but a misstep.

Last week I linked to a boatload of singularity-related articles and I’m still processing them. Near the bottom of Kevin Kelly’s rebuttal of Kurzweil there is a very perceptive comment from Jochen Topf:

We have already moved past some of these points: Only a hundred or two hundred years ago people could learn a job and expect to do the same job for the rest of their life. This is not true any more. We have passed the live-your-whole-life-the-same-point. And if we think this through and believe in the every-accelerating development, it is only a question of time, till we have to change jobs daily to keep up with development. But we humans can’t do that, so something has to give, something has to happen. Maybe the acceleration will slow down, maybe superhuman machine intelligence can keep up with the development and we humans will live in a world, that looks to the superhumans like the third world looks to us today.

So yeah, being fired every few hours? That’s going to be sweet.

Dude. I’m reading through this list of must-know terms for the coming robocalypse and I get to augmented reality and yeah: an adblocker for life. That’s niiiice. I’ll trade a truckload of Terminator machine-vision HUDs for one of those, please.

On a community I frequent there is a troll (natch), so someone wrote a greasemonkey script that will ignore any posts from that username. I’m thinking that one could be handy in meatspace, too. What, is annoying guy talking to me? I don’t see him anymore.

Passive-aggression for the 21st century.