DrawMatic

Human Spam

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:11:00 GMT

Recently, Jill and I were at what back in the Bubble might have been called a “networking event.”

Some very decent, successful old friends were in attendance, as were a strange mix of folks whom Jill christened “shucksters” as in an unholy mix of shyster and huckster. Or something to do with oysters. Anyway…

There was the successful purveyor of a well-known diet product, and several folks promoting email marketing, ad networks, and systems for bringing your notional Hollywood Blockbuster to Steven Spielberg’s attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot since then about human nature and the role of society. The idea that keeps bobbing up in the magic eight ball of my mind is “We’re all shucksters.”

We’re all shucksters. We would all send spam, and hawk pr0n, and phish the clueless, and Anderson our accounts, and misuse the powers of whatever office we could bribe our way into, if there weren’t any consequences.

If there weren’t any consequences.

But we’ve spend the last few millienia working out what the consequences should be, so the greatest number of us could live as well as possible with the minimum concern that we would be murdered in our sleep for our iPods.

To any reader of history, civilization is not a linear path. There are retrograde motions that make pre-Gallilean cosmology look positively mathematical. Even a vaguely open-minded search will detail our failings past and present.

Civilization is an artifact of designs that succeeded where others failed, in that fundamental objective, of providing the greatest good to the greatest number of individuals for the longest time.

You can be a major shuckster and edge out ahead of civilization for a time, exploiting fellow humans who haven’t clued into the dangers of running that free screen saver.

You can be a minor shuckster and gleefully pirate the works of living artists. You won’t get caught, probably. The artists won’t go broke because if it. Probably. But further along the path, the people who create things need to eat, and it’s a rare breed who wants three meals of fame alone each day.

Or you can realize that the moment ahead of the curve is not the little notch where a dictator builds his palace for a few decades before he’s garroted by his own starving people.

The moment ahead of the curve is in helping more people live better than they do now. It’s in joining a community that protects people rather than exploiting them.

It’s not in your nature as a solo human animal. It’s in your nature as a civilized human being.

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Yes And

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:38:00 GMT

This morning on NPR I heard a piece about Chicago’s famed Second City improv comedy group teaching their techniques to Fortune 500 groups.

They mentioned the principle of “Yes, and” as opposed to “No, but.”

Macolm Gladwell talks about this in Blink. When improvising, if another player offers you a situation (“It seems as if your head is on fire.”) you must accept the situation and build on it (“Yes, can you put another log on it?” rather than “My head isn’t on fire, it’s your eyes that are burning.”)

I think the current entrepreneurial boom is a movement of “Yes, and” rather than, “No, but.”

Yes, we can make that happen. AND we can do it quickly and cheaply. AND we can build upon software that is freely available.

Funny how things can work out.

Posted in Creativity, Web 2.0 | 2 comments | no trackbacks

Better AJAX Chat

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:39:00 GMT

So the demos I've been doing at Web 2.0 of xdraw, my shared vector-drawing application, have been using the fairly brain-dead "web page polls the server continuously for changes" approach to AJAX chat. Naturally, this is pretty bad for the health of my server (50% CPU consumption anyone?). The better approach is to have the server hold open the connection and jam data down the pipe whenever something changes. This is the system used by jotspot and the HTTP.push library. Stay tuned as I turn it on.

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The Network Is The Client

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:15:00 GMT

Just watched a demo from Mental Images, where a 3D visualization was rendered in real time on a server, and the resulting images streamed back to the web browser.

The images themselves were transmitted with lowres/hires pairs, so that when you stopped moving the mouse, you’d see a more bandwidth-intensive and pretty picture.

Now, this frees up the content owner to render from a scene that could possibly have gigabytes of data, while only sending small image files to the client.

But, really folks, it’s a nasty hack to make up for lack of client side 3D apis.

That got me to thinking, why don’t we have this? Ten years ago this summer, I remember sitting with the VRML dudes planning our new 3D future.

Didn’t happen. Here’s my theory:

At the time, the client was considered the “property” of client-side software companies. Thus, despite efforts at building consortia, the 3D plugins were developed and delivered as proprietary software which (partially) implemented a standard specification. Each software vendor wanted a proprietary advantage, and nobody opened their source. The business was never conceived of as something built atop an open, interoperable framework. It was culturally unsellable in a shrinkwrap software world.

It wasn’t just the wacky 3D browser world, it was more serious and potentially more useful technologies such as the now lowly Java applet.

Here’s what I think is coming. The business has moved from the browser to the server over the last decade, and all that money wants customers to have a great end-user experience. More importantly, a consistent end-user experience no matter what OS choice the user makes. So, we’ll fund Firefox and KHTML, sometimes with cash but more often with intellectual effort, to give us a better outlet for our businesses.

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