Misc

Let’s take this scenario for a moment. Bob trusts Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he’ll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it’ll spread, he’ll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn’t in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob’s trust because it knows that Bob can’t totally run away from it. They’re still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it’ll spread to everyone. And it’s fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

via apophenia: Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms.

In the past I have written and spoken about what I called “Moore’s Wall,” which could be summarized as the notion that expanding computing capabilities give us higher bars to reach which then result in higher costs and development times, and not actually better products.

Well, Toshiba just announced a TV at CES that circumvents this in a clever way. The TV has a Cell chip in it, which makes it outrageously powerful for a TV. So powerful that it can in fact do silly things with the extra processing power, such as interpolate frames, or do special video effects.

Or render the image twice at full speed, so that it can turn any signal into a 3d image.

In effect, this means that the problem in Moore’s Wall is sort of circumvented to a degree; instead of upping the caliber of the content needed, it just uses the computing power to transform the content we already have.

I like this notion, in part because it has a lot in common with notions about standard formats and the like. But it also makes me propose a parlor game: what would <insert device here> be like with insane computing power but no changes to the rest of the technology? We have started to see glimmers of that with the way in which phones and iPods have been changing, of course, and the idea of networked fridges that detect spoiling food has been out there forever… but I am wondering about things like this, which seem to magically upgrade everything we already had.