Q&A: John Carmack's New Cell Game

May 16, 2006 | Comments

Q&A: John Carmack's New Cell Game: "It's the same engineering puzzle-solving I look at for almost everything I do, whether it's making PC games or building rockets or whatever: given a set of constraints, what's the right thing to do? "

Poetry

May 16, 2006 | Comments


So I finally gone dun it. I went to a fucking poetry evening.

Oh alright... I went along to SWIM at the Sanctuary Cafe. It was an open mic thing, and I was only really there to see James spit out one of his filthy word bursts - The Terrible Secret of the Librarians, which he delivered well. The thought of librarians locking themselves into underground cells and perforating their own eardrums tickled me. Particularly when combined with mental images of librarians I have known and loved.

But I was pleasantly shocked to find myself enjoying quite a lot of the other stuff I heard too: whether it be a man who seems to have spent 30 years narrating Lord of the Rings to himself in a darkened room, the guy who brought up "the conflated ugliness of John Major and Chris Evans - with John Major on top", or the bloke who referred to Christ as a failure who "couldn't even die properly", I heard a lot of things which supplemented my Inner Grin. So I suspect I'll be going back at some point, if only to hear a proper clown story.

Ah well. Next stop pilates classes and a child called Tarquin...

Non photography day

May 16, 2006 | Comments

Non photography day: "...an effort on my part to revive the moment by putting down the camera. It is a day to think about how life exists, in essence and not appearance and to understand the inadequacy of the photograph in describing this essence, to bring awareness of the perils of living through the view finder or the display screen…"

Guilty as charged.

No critical cocktail will force operators over to IP

May 16, 2006 | Comments

No critical cocktail will force operators over to IP: ""There's no 'critical cocktail' of applications," he claimed. No one specific application like IM (Instant Messaging) or location based service was going to swing the balance. However, operators will eventually work out that if they want to launch loads of new services, they'll have to move to IMS."

Reminds me of a lot of the talk we were hearing a few years back about mobile in general: how there wasn't one single universal "killer app", but consumers would pick and choose the ones they wanted.

Mobile Web: the dark horse of mobile data services?

May 16, 2006 | Comments

Mobile Web: the dark horse of mobile data services?: "At events like 3GSM and CTIA, the mobile community talks a lot about "mobile content" these days. But Web access is almost completely absent in these discussions. Mobile content means music downloads, multimedia messaging and, of course, mobile TV - not Web access. But the market seems to tell a different story - over the last six months, good news on mobile Web use has been pouring in"

Completely agree. All that stuff you read about WAP being an initial failure, and then coming back into fashion recently? It's rubbish. WAP traffic has built steadily from day 1, since it was launched into the UK (look at this graph from the Mobile Data Association). There's been no bust/boom cycle at all.