My two favorite tech news sites — Gizmodo and Ars Technica — are hosting a pre-keynote party in San Francisco on Monday night (the 14th) at Harlot, 46 Minna Street. 8-11.30pm.
Giz editor Brian Lam is promising to buy everyone a beer, and there’s schwag (likely shite) for early birds. I’ll be there, and so apparently will Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve.
Here’s a handy map to the bar.
UPDATE: I just discovered that the free schwag are copies of my books. Ooops.
Written by Leander Kahney on January 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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Fake Steve points us to a provocative Discover Magazine commentary by technology visionary Jaron Lanier, best known for putting the virtual reality bug in everybody’s ears at TED II way back in the ’80s. Lanier argues emphatically that open-source software doesn’t automatically yield creativity or innovation.
Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
I think he’s mostly right, although it’s worth noting that many of the works of art in software that he speaks of were built on the backs of open-source software. For example, the iPhone runs on the Mach Kernel, which is open-source, and then OS X BSD above that, all available in Darwin and featuring contributions from the open-dev community.
What Lanier speaks to instead is that different methods are suited best to different kinds of innovation. Vision-driven projects plotting new directions in interface design, radical improvements and others are best served in proprietary contexts. Under-the-hood improvements and refinement can be driven quite effectively through the work of open communities. This is something that Apple has demonstrated for a long time — it’s very hard to come up with the right questions to ask. It’s relatively easy to answer them once asked. Apple and other proprietary visionaries cited by Lanier are asking the right questions. The open-sourcers answer well-known questions that have bubbled up for years. It’s incremental improvement, but no less critical for the future of software and hardware development.
Written by Petemortensen on January 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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The revamped Spaceship Earth ride at Disney’s Epcot Center has a special “Steve Jobs section,” according to the lifthill blog, which tracks news about rides and roller coasters, and was invited to a special preview.
But once at the Steve Jobs area, which is supposed to depict the birth of Apple computer in a garage, the lifthill blogger noticed that the lone figure in the garage looked a lot more like Wozniak than Jobs.
The figure is facing the wrong way, so it’s hard to tell, but it’s wearing the same shirt as Wozniak in a famous early photograph copied below, and has similar hair and beard. Conspriacy theorists note that Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney– but I can’t believe he cares that a section of Epcot bears his name or likeness (or not).
Anyway, there’s no second figure in sight, so one of them is slighted. And so too is the third Apple-founder, Ron Wayne, but no one cares about that.
But what is that thing the dummy Woz/Jobs is sitting in front of? It ain’t no Apple I or II — the first and only machines Woz created more or less single-handed. It looks like a big wooden Mac, but none of the Mac prototypes looked like that — they were much more finished.
Higher-res pictures at lifthill.
Via Boingboing.
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Written by Leander Kahney on December 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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Not content to chronicle the fake life of Fake Steve Jobs, author Daniel Lyons has expanded his scope a bit this week by introducing guest blogger Fake Bono of U2, who showed up to present the totally non-existent White Beatles and Product (RED) U2 iPhones. The Beatles model comes with the complete Beatles catalog, plus the band’s solo work, and the U2 model comes with all of Rock and Roll. Read for yourself:
Edge and I hate to be left behind, so we’ve come up with an even bigger idea we’re going to pitch right here where Steve has to read it. Why just buy the Beatles? What you really want is to buy rock and roll. All of it. Presenting the U2 Rock and Roll iPhone. 64 gigabytes of Product (RED) iPhone packed with all of rock and roll. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, U2 of course, plus Nirvana and Pearl Jam all the way up to the complete Arcade Fire and Mike Doughty. If it rocks, it’s in here.
Yeah. Seven posts in all, and now Fake Steve has posted an elaborate tale of account hackery to explain how Bono seized control in the first place. All in good fun. Nice Thanksgiving prank.
Via iPhone SaviorÂÂÂ
Written by Petemortensen on November 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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Is there anything more re-assuring in life than knowing that Fake Steve keeps being funny even after the disclosure of his true identity? He’s now featuring simply hysterical Zune 2 parodies with custom backs poking fun at Microsoft and a certain dancing CEO…
Written by Petemortensen on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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