Info is starting to emerge about the new client-side app platform from Adobe - Apollo.
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
It looks like it could be a XAML/WPF competitor worth watching…
Science/Culture writer Steven Johnson has written a fascinating article about the game Spore and the idea of the ‘Long Zoom’. Johnson uses Spore as an example of “way of seeing of our time”:
Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom…
Will Wright on his new game:
“I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”
Listening to: Public Service Announcement (Interlude) - Jay-Z
The BBC World story on the Stern Report… fix it now and fix it for a bargain price:
Climate change could cut global growth by a fifth, costing up to £3.68 trillion in total, unless drastic action is taken, a review is to warn.
But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, economist Sir Nicholas Stern says.
…
However the review says failure to act early could end up costing between 5% and 20% of global GDP and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable with poor nations hit first and hardest.
Britons face the prospect of a welter of new green taxes to tackle climate change, as the most authoritative report on global warming warns it will cost the world up to £3.68 trillion unless it is tackled within a decade.
The review by Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and published tomorrow, marks a crucial point in the debate by underlining how failure to act would trigger a catastrophic global recession. Unchecked climate change would turn 200 million people into refugees, the largest migration in modern history, as their homes succumbed to drought or flood.
Listening to: You Say - Phully Seagull Remix - Del Rey System
Salon is currently running an article on the dissatisfaction in military over how the war in Iraq is being run. The most important point is:
It’s not that the current and former military leaders are suddenly eager to see liberal House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi take more power in Congress if the Democrats win control. Instead, the embrace of the Democrats, they say, is purely pragmatic. They hope the Democrats will succeed where Republicans failed and conduct critical oversight to help the Bush administration fix its stalled and failing strategy for Iraq. “Over five years our Congress has abrogated [its] oversight responsibilities,” Batiste said. “They have not held serious hearings about this war.”
