Inside the Mind of a Nerd: Interviews on Innovation

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Interviews on Innovation

There were a couple of interviews I wanted to talk about. The first one is with Steve Ballmer about what bloggers are saying about Microsoft, and the big thing seems to be that they're not innovating. Ballmer argues against that, but I don't think he does a good enough job. He keeps mentioning things without substantiating those claims. So you're putting Longhorn into beta now, what's so great about that? If MSN Messenger is so great why does everyone still use AIM (I use Gaim for the record)? What is Systems Center or DSI and why haven't I heard of them? They really need to fix their image. While we're talking about innovation though I wanted to bring up open source, which one veteran seems to think has a myth regarding people working for free. I totally agree with him. Programmers may like to do some stuff for the good of humanity from time to time, but they're driven by money just like everyone else. Just something that I thought was important to bring up with IBM and some other key players getting all pumped up about it.

There's some better techie news than that though. It turns out that the London subways are going to start using the body scan machines I talked about earlier that can actually see through clothing, and it will be quite an expensive upgrade. People seem to always try to prevent things from happening after the fact. Like data theft, which is now becoming a huge concern since California started requiring people to be told when their data has been compromised. The Japan Times is running a pretty good article on fuel-cell vehicles (energy comes from a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen) and the hurdles it has to leap (particularly with pricing). Still, I have high hopes for it and could be the ultimate clean car. Keep the company Iridian in the back of your head because they could be big someday for their development of iris scan technology since no two irises are alike. As you can no doubt tell, futuristic stuff always gets me giddy. Lastly, coffee drinkers may want to look into the self-heating cup.

I have some big movie news today. Well I'm not sure how true it is, but JoBlo claims that the box office slump is over! Fantastic Four made an impressive $56 million (almost double the estimates), with War of the Worlds in second at $31.3 million and Batman Begins clutching 3rd with a surprising $10.2 million. I'm sure that we can see sustained momentum next weekend with the release of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. IGN has a video interview with Tim Roth, which is only important because he mentions his enthusiasm to work with Quentin Tarantino again. He's not yet on board for Inglorious Bastards, but it seems that all Tarantino has to do is say the word for him to be a part of it. If you're looking for an independent movie to see AICN recommends that you check out Murderball, which is a documentary on a team of quad rugby players. Another interesting indie movie is Grizzly Man, which has a trailer up at Yahoo! Movies and did pretty well at Sundance. It's about a man who lived in nature and died trying to protect the animals he grew to love, so it's something to keep in mind when you see commercials for it later on. Lastly, AICN got a look at some footage from A Scanner Darkly that will be shown at Comicon and it sounds really awesome. I hope it gets leaked online during Comicon.

Just a couple of things before I conclude. Good news from our economy: the unemployment rate has dipped to its lowest in four years! Some speculate the Fed won't raise the federal funds rate due to this development, but I think that they need to get back to a neutral rate. If you want to see the growth of tech jobs, you should check this out. I decided to go back to PostSecret after a long time and I found one I wanted to post that said something like "I'm 25 and I still haven't had my first kiss, not because I don't want to but because no one else wants to." Unfortunately, the power went off and I lost it so instead you get this funny one: