Extra Future

Month: May 2010

  • Mark Twain’s Autobiography To Be Released 100 Years After His Death

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Following Twain’s wishes][link]. It’s chilling in a vault at UC Berkeley. I’d love to see a rundown of where the manuscript had been all these years. [link]: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html “After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all – News, Books – The Independent”

  • Irrational Games’ Original BioShock Pitch Document

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Released by the company today][link], and a wonderful recent-culture artifact. [link]: http://irrationalgames.com/insider/from-the-vault-may/ “From the Vault – The BioShock Pitch | Irrational Games”

  • “Metafilter is like Fark, except instead of self-loathing social misfits, it has narcissistic problem-solving social misfits.”

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [MetaFilter users help stop two newly-arrived Russian][ask] [immigrants from becoming victims of human trafficking][meta]. [meta]: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/19304/The-kindness-of-strangers “Thread on Metatalk” [ask]: http://ask.metafilter.com/154334/Help-me-help-my-friend-in-DC “Ask Metafilter”

  • “Step into the sensory box”

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [The worst or best possible place to take drugs in the world, depending on the drug.][link] Looks like something out of Carl Sagan’s dreams. [link]: http://vimeo.com/10692284 “ENVISION : Step into the sensory box on Vimeo”

  • For The Uninitiated: Web Video Fracas 2010

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    Adobe wants people to use Flash to play videos, primarily because they own the technology behind it (which makes them lots of money), and have enjoyed the majority of video on the web being played via Flash for quite some time. Adobe, by virtue of owning Flash, is the only real player in the Flash…

  • Google Unveils BigQuery and Prediction APIs

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [This is some news that will kill a few startups][link], but I can’t wait to get my hands on Prediction. [link]: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/bigquery-and-prediction-api-get-more.html “Google Code Blog: BigQuery and Prediction API: Get more from your data with Google”

  • Google Font API

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Google’s hosted, embeddable, fonts for use with @font-face.][link] They’re apparently [collaborating with TypeKit][type]. via [Zeldman][zeld] [link]: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/ “Google Font API – Google Code” [zeld]: http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/14310112928 “Original Tweet” [type]: http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/ “TypeKit and Google”

  • An In-Depth Technical Analysis of VP8 from An x264 Developer

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Jason Garrett-Glaser got access to the VP8 spec, software][link], and source a few days before the big announcement. This is a serious analysis from someone who knows a thing or two about video encoding. [link]: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377 “Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8”

  • The Windows Blog

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [Great news from Microsoft][link]: >In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows. In the post the Author, Dean Hachamovitch, reiterates the company line regarding HTML5: “we’re all in,” but this is not a surprising development at all.…

  • WebM

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [As some anticipated, Google has open-sourced the VP8 codec they acquired in their purchase of On2 Technologies on 17 February this year][link]. They’ve taken the VP8 video codec and combined it with Ogg audio, and a new container format to create the WebM project: “a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for…

  • “Steam Is a Port”

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [John Bell on Steam’s Mac version][link], and cross-platform UIs in general. As I did [in my post on Steam][me], he sees it as an example in favor of Apple’s stance on third-party SDKs in the App Store: >Apple has their head on straight with regards to ports. They want apps to be designed with iPads…

  • “Retro-futurist techno hyperstasis”

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    by

    Phil Nelson
    in

    [This is a fairly assessable post by Bruce Sterling on (a)temporality, genres, and kaleidoscope novelty][link], which culminates in this incredible little salvo: > It’s an ideological and philosophical problem. When do we fully realize that that our “progressives” are conservatives, and that our “conservatives” are panicked radicals? When do we get it that networking is…