In response to recent allegations that Zynga merely copies (or buys) other game ideas instead of being innovative:

“I think people in the industry are defining innovation different from the way we are,” he said. “When you define innovation, you have to define what problem are you innovating against. The problem we are innovating against is how do we get a billion people to play together. That’s what we want to solve for.”

Brilliant (and valid) way to re-frame the question of innovation is games. Game innovation has meant, for decades, creating new interfaces or new mechanics in puzzle solving, new weapons, new tools, and new premises and story lines.

Is taking an old premise and giving it new social dynamics any less innovative?

“Imagine the moment where you have an iPad streaming to your TV and it’s as powerful as a console. What’s the USP of an actual console at that point? If you think of OnLive, and they solve all of their logistical problems, why do I need a console?”

The difference between the iPad and my Xbox, of course, is that my iPad is truly a personal device. In theory, my wife and I share it, but it’s way more mine than hers.

Will iPads and onLive force people to ditch their game consoles? I don’t think that’s a near-future (next-gen console) problem. After all, onLive is available now, and the xbox is still selling 7 1/2 million consoles per year.

And so long as a console can get market share and own that distribution pipeline to a gamer’s TV, they’re not going to open up. Why should they?

(Note: for some reason the gamesindustry.biz site is horribly laggy/buggy, so be careful)

Indie dev Smudged Cat Games (comic sans!) shows off a portal-gun based 2d platformer. The more a portal gun begins to show up in other games, the more permission the dev community will have to take it and run with it.

I really identify with this style of development:

Before I start writing a single line of code, I write the README and fill it with usage examples. I pretend that the module I want to build is already written and available, and I write some code with it.

Cool posters found via Khoi Vinh

My latest project is a recreation of the original Command and Conquer entirely in HTML5 and Javascript.

This is crazy cool. I’m increasingly impressed with what seems possible with HTML5.

One aspect of HTML5 development which is annoying is how much more visual it is than “classic” web development and design. I am no artist – and a lot of what I see in HTML5 relies heavily on one’s ability to draw (or, I suppose, use and manipulate stock images).

The much-talked about app that lets you build and publish your own e-book on the iPad. I’m downloading it for a look now.

Agree.

A great post from Ben Horowitz on a new concept he calls management debt:

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Also like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More importantly, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

If you’re running a small company, this post is well worth a read.

This is probably the best tool I’ve seen for picking a new domain name.

If our brains have two systems: one (1) for “intuitive” and relatively thoughtless thinking, and another (2) for complex math problems and weird experiences, and we spend most of our time in system (1) while looking at and ignoring ads, then what happens if system (2) sees ads?

Try scanning someone’s Timeline. It’s a very unpleasant experience. When information is organized in a list, it’s trivially easy to scan it, but with Timeline your eye has to dart around and try to combine the layout into an understanding of what the person’s been up to. It induces cognitive strain and brings System 2 online.

Jeff DeChambeau theorizes that Facebook’s eye-strain layout might be done to intentionally force us to view ads while in a different “brain state” than we normally view ads in, perhaps with the hope that those ads will be more effective that way.

The USA Today has a big front page piece today on the difficulties facing the protracted effort to clean up the tanks and tanks of nuclear waste sitting in deteriorating tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington:

More than 60 of the tanks are thought to have leaked, losing a million gallons of waste into soil and groundwater. So far, the contamination remains within the boundaries of the barren, 586-square-mile site, but it poses an ongoing threat to the nearby Columbia River, a water source for communities stretching southwest to Portland, Ore.

So, no pressure to get this process going, then, right? No worries, because it’s been in process for a decade already and we know what we’re doing.

The challenge lies in the plant’s huge pre-treatment building, where the waste traverses an intricate set of pipes and vessels as its radioactive streams are separated and sent to separate facilities for conversion into glass. To keep the waste agitated, many of the pre-treatment vessels contain “pulse jet mixers” that act like giant turkey basters, sucking the waste into tubes and expelling it through jet nozzles.

“No one can stand up and say with any certainty that (the mixers) will work,” said Walter Tamosaitis, who spent seven years as a supervising engineer on the project for URS Corp. before being reassigned in 2010.

Oh, I see. And it turns out that if the system doesn’t work — the waste is so toxic that once the treatment plant is sealed off and the cleanup process started, it can never be re-opened.

This, to me, is a prime example of why nuclear power just isn’t worth it. We have options that don’t produce these kinds of problems.

Go give the article a read.

Now there’s a fascinating comment on whether or not we need “real identities” to be enforced online.

Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.

Fascinating collision of modern medical science and Yoga.

The network slowdown likely heralds the arrival of an initiative Iran has been readying—a “halal” domestic intranet that it has said will insulate its citizens from Western ideology and un-Islamic culture, and eventually replace the Internet.

As far as I understand it, this is totally possible. It’s one of those reminders that the internet is not this all-powerful thing that lives separately from oppressive regimes and the harsh rules of international relations.

Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain “a list of all running apps”. It contains “a list of recently used apps”. The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.

I guess I can see how this would be confusing. If it doesn’t matter – why bother letting users remove apps from the list?

Because sometimes code breaks, and it’s nice to have a backup option to shut things down. Under normal circumstances, though, you don’t have to manage which apps are “open” or “closed” to conserve battery on your iPhone.

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In research by Dan Ariely and others it appears that higher incentives, actually reduce performance. That’s a perverse and counter-intuitive result, but in several different kinds of experiments, groups that were promised the largest amount of money as a reward for doing a task performed that task more slowly, and completed the tasks less often.

This post actually lays out a pretty convincing argument for eliminating sales commissions.

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This is actually kind of a neat look at how the Ruby interpreter treats strings of different lengths.

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