Jim Coyer’s Weblog

Enticing review of Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming Quicksilver novel.

It’s easy to riducule the idea of “encoding” the creative acts into mere number crunching as a hacker hope to make things computable, as this reviewer seems to do. Somewhere, though, there is a link between the seemingly simplistic acts a computer performs, and the equally simplistic propagation of electrical impulses that course through our brains.

Where in all of this does the mind emerge?

It will be interesting to see if Stephenson takes on any of this in Quicksilver.

A great new idea from MIT: OpenCourseWare. Open “source” education?

I watched Soderbergh’s Solaris tonight, and find myself replaying again all of the film’s evocative images. Haunting images. Not haunting in the sense of horror, but lingering.

This is a film that reveals itself to you not as you watch it, but as you see it again and again in your minds eye later.

Which is, I just realized, deeply ironic.

Economist article retracing the history of Ethernet.

Take-aways?

- inspiration comes in odd, random moments
- good ideas are simple
- evolution, not revolution
- Innovator’s Dilemma at Xerox
- fast adoption versus high proft margins and how to work in standards bodies

Masayoshi Son’s Yahoo BB! in Japan is supposedly able to keep its DSL fees low in part due to his gigabit ethernet backbone - an interesting validator to the idea of ethernet underlying all data traffic.

His name is ‘Linux.’

Asian trio in deal to replace Windows | CNET News.com

Are governments and companies jumping on the open-source bandwagon just out of cost concerns? In China, I could see why pricing would matter (as it does in Thailand), but I think there is more to this than pricing for Japan and Korea. Perhaps those governments see this as an opportunity to bootstrap their as-yet laggard software industries?

An article in Wireless Week on Intel’s moves to get into mobile handsets.