It’s a good thing we didn’t rename the Tacoma Dome the Comcast Dome … Xfinity Dome? Lame.
Chief Executive Brian Roberts said Wednesday the company will rebrand its cable products under the banner “Xfinity” in an effort to reinvent its relationship with customers as the company’s cable systems shift to new technology platforms. via online.wsj.com Also, note to troubled companies with bad reputations. Changing your name to start with an X doesn’t mean we’ll start liking you. I’m looking at you Xe.
U.S. To Be Hit By Massive Cyber Attack On Feb. 16. (But it’s all pretend.)
At least three times this year, the US government has held private versions of cyber wargames. This will be open to the press. CNN has agreed to record the event for broadcast later in the week. via politics.theatlantic.com That broadcast sounds better than a movie about the same topic. I’m there. Let’s just hope the producers can find a way for a computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe with itself as a climactic finish.
Giving Buzz a whirl …
via gmailblog.blogspot.com I hope it’s better than Wave turned out to be.
How to Blog a Book
“It’s a five-year process from writing to publishing,” said Llewellyn, of traditional books. “It’s incredibly frustrating. And it’s like the lottery, such a risk every step of the way. “The Tilting House” was the fourth manuscript I tried to have published – no one ever read the others. So the idea of having an immediate audience was attractive.” The result is “Letter Off Dead,” a book in blog form (letteroffdead.com) which Llewellyn’s been writing since last April. The book follows the middle-school adventures and mishaps of Trevor, who begins writing to his dead father in a desperate measure to cope Read more…
Kasparov on computers
The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the Read more…
the iPad
So, it’s a “pad,” but I still think of it as a tablet. Everyone had been hoping for a giant leap forward, but it’s not. It’s just a well-designed tablet computer, and tablet computers aren’t new (they’ve been Windows so far). So a good tablet is a good thing, but it’s not as big of a deal as the iPhone was. That said, watching the promotional video (link below) should make it clear that this really is where things are going. In a few years my current laptop will go kaput, and the iPad may be a viable option by Read more…
The Tablet
Lest there be any doubt I’m a bit of a nerd, Apple’s new tablet sounds a lot like this gadget they use on Star Trek. Characters read books on it, they do their work on it, and it looks pretty much the same. So does that mean Apple was ahead of its time, or that Star Trek was?
Tacoma Startup Weekend This Weekend!
If you're an interested entrepreneur or techie, we've got a big weekend ahead of us! Start-Up Weekend is like the 72-Hour Film Competition, except instead of making a movie in 3 days, you create a company, a product, and a business plan. Bringing together people with a variety of different talents, people team up, get to work, and then at the end of the weekend, they've got a company. From there, it's up to them to decide whether to keep it going or not. We'll be at Suite133. Andrew Fry's blog has a good run-down of what the weekend would Read more…
NASA Astronauts Twittering from Space
Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! via twitter.com Maybe the New York Times should do a series of articles on the dangers of twittering while driving the space station.
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