I reviewed this guy and his lifestream idea back in 2004 (http://www.natesimpson.com/blog/archives/2004/08/10/scopeware/) and ultimately found myself pretty unimpressed. I mean, the core ideas are interesting but so patent-encumbered that it will be a decade before they are touchable, and the man himself holds some pretty irritating/intolerant views (cited a few in that post) that left a bad impression on the whole. Sad then, sad now.

I was presuming that it would be untouched simply because that's why people value typewriters from authors. Take one of those typewriters the submitter mentions, sand off all the keys so that they're evenly worn, take it back to factory state, and I doubt anyone would care about it. Same for a stripped laptop. Could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

I suppose you could do this if you never bothered to do any research. Personally, I find having the internet accessible while I am writing means I can easily look up technical details about something that I didn't anticipate needing to look up, and my writing is ultimately better for it. I suppose it depends on your personality and ability to concentrate, but I've never found it to be an issue.

Sorry, I missed this last night.:)

Typically I write in OpenOffice.org and save to .odt and .rtf as well as doing a .pdf export at the end. I also tend to back everything up locally and on Gmail, which means I have easy access to an HTML conversion as well.

I was using Gmail drafts to keep ideas (so that I could access them from anywhere) backed up as well, but lately I've switched to Wave, which is incredibly useful for me since I can easily tweak them and move them into a proper writing program after they are somewhat more fleshed out.

I am a writer (or at least, I've written a couple of novels and a few hundred thousand spare words that are lying around waiting to be turned into novels, plus assorted other writing), and I have always written exclusively on a computer.

I should be clear that I'm not trying to compare myself with Stephenson or McCarthy; I'm fully in the amateur rank, but I would say that this is mostly a personal aesthetic thing. It's sort of related to the reverence people who hate "digital books" hold for paper copies; they'll give you loads of ultimately irrational excuses down to the smell of the paper as to why they prefer to read a "real book." I've been reading novels on a screen for years, and I've discovered that I quite like the ability to zoom in on small-font text or to hold thousands of books in the footprint of one on my desk (it's really a coffee table but shhh!).

Anyway, as for writing, it's like anything else on a computer. I don't think of it as "using a computer" - it's just a tool that lets me do what I want. Personally, I'd think that the ability to get a peek into how these guys organized their lives would be quite interesting (stumbling over their porn stashes, probably not so much, but undoubtedly revealing (hah!)). Think about all of the incidental stuff you could learn; art preferences (screensavers and so on), unfinished and aborted works, etc... I'd buy one from an author I liked, if I wasn't guaranteed to die poor by virtue of trying to be an artist myself. ;)

...it seems to me that anyone intelligent enough to be particularly interested in chess wouldn't be overly enthusiastic about the possibility of brain damage over time from being struck in the head repeatedly. Concussions aren't funny. I mean, I'd hate to lose a game of chess to some 400-lb gorilla who got in a few lucky shots, and if you did this with any serious enthusiasm, your game of chess would almost certainly degrade over time.;)

I train in martial arts, but I avoid schools where being struck in the head is seen as a core part of training (I think MMA is fairly idiotic for this reason), and I think go is a much more interesting game overall. Combine go with something like a triathlon and I might find the idea more appealing as a mind-and-matter competition.

This article seems to imply that he "got rich" by investing, which is true but misleading. As far as I can tell, he made about a quarter of a million dollars in two months, and it was this capital that enabled him to play the stock game in the first place, since that ~six-fold increase means he invested at least $125,000 or so in order to get to a million (I'm not really sure what he has now, didn't bother watching the video and won't, but I'm guessing he has at least a million now or they wouldn't be calling it "riches"). He could have just as easily lost the money, in my opinion, this way.

Point is, if you don't have $100,000 to throw at the market (and possibly lose it all), it seems fairly intelligent to spend your free time making something you can sell to people, which the summary seems to be discouraging.

One of the most useful pixel art tools I've found so far is mtPaint - I did a lot of little isometric drawings for a game project I'm working on (e.g. this one of a park) entirely in this program. Far easier than using paint or a full-fledged image tool (although I did use GIMP for compositing layered tiles into final images at times).

Not everyone who is "college level" at that age is autistic. I passed the ACT exams at significantly higher-than-highschool-grad levels when I was 12, and my parents only held me out of university because they were afraid that I was too young to deal with the social aspects of it (code, more or less, for worrying that I'd have my pentecostal values corrupted by the evil liberal crowd that tends to frequent such places). They had no problems, though, letting me work "part-time" in their computer store, though, of course, starting about a year later when my dad opened one.:P

In any case, considering that one of his interests is martial arts, I think presuming that he has motor coordination issues is premature. I do agree, however, with a number of commenters who suggest that his "dislike" of video games is probably coming from adults around him who are pressuring him with notions that he shouldn't "waste" his time on such things.

Speaking from experience, I'm a bit torn on whether or not to be happy for him that his parents haven't held him back, or concerned for him that all of the exposure will cause him to have some sort of meltdown when he is a bit older (a scenario I consider pretty likely). It's pretty hard to go from being "kid genius" to "regular guy," which is pretty much the case as soon as you exit the academic world no matter how intelligent you are, since you are accustomed to people actually paying attention to what you say based on the merits of what you are saying and the novelty factor of hearing someone so young say "intelligent things," not how much money you have or how good you look. Like age differences, intelligence differences seem to look a bit less extreme when you get older, realistically, in pretty much all shallow social encounters, and only longer-term interactions with people tend to pull out the differences unless you are dealing with someone who really is suffering from some sort of ASD.

I don't entirely disagree with you. I take no offense at the implication that I lack masterful proficiency at creating art - although this is a separate conversation full of discussion about how much of the work of "polishing" content to make it appear "masterful" - from music to movies - is now done by individuals other than the actual content creators or originators of the ideas. This is another can of worms entirely, albeit a relevant one since it's unclear whether any one person can really be an "expert" anymore in the sense you seem to be implying.

I do think it's important to be careful not to overrate the importance of experts, though, because barring outright unbearably bad content, a lot of this becomes a matter of taste, as I implied in my original post. Much of today's most popular content both online and in traditional media has been created by people who were just messing around in their free time and who certainly haven't put 10,000 hours (a figure which, while it amuses me, is certainly not scientific) into content creation - in many cases, the creators are simply too young to have had that much free time, for one thing (university, full-time jobs, etc.)

Essentially the "old" system was a "chance" lottery, where publishers and producers took a chance on new artists fully expecting to take an actual financial loss on most of them while they hoped for a few superstars, and I don't really see that it was fundamentally superior or produced more "experts" than the internet has done so far. I think even if you look at successful artists in whatever medium as defined by the old system, you can see clear progression in skill in earlier works versus later ones, and I see no reason why you should expect anything else in the emerging new system.

Just my two cents, anyway.:)

I like this line, because it sort of encapsulates the paradox of trying to force your audience to pay for content when they are pretty clearly demonstrating a willingness to either "steal" it or jump to other content that is provided for free if you make it at all expensive or inconvenient for them. Your content has no value without them, but you want to be able to screw them over at the same time, essentially. Seems like a pretty clear case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.

Now, granted, I'm only an amateur artist/writer/composer, but I am pretty content just to have the audience. As a thousand other small content creators have said on Slashdot in a thousand similar comments before, this notion that people are going to stop creating stuff just because they aren't getting paid for it is demonstrably false. A lot of us do it because it's fun, like fixing motorcycles or watching television is to other people. You can make some sort of argument that the existing system provides "valuable" gatekeeping and quality control if you want, but then you are getting into the murky waters of subjective tastes and preferences, not to mention the vested interest in not having to compete that the "established" artists and composers who are the membership of these societies possess.

The short of it is that the old business models just won't work anymore and these guys are kicking and screaming on the "artists'" side in the same way that the various publishing/distribution associations are. This guy points out himself that concerts and live broadcasts are still doing pretty well. These are clues about the sort of thing that have actual monetary value now; it will take more experimenting and time before new models are worked out and clear paths are found to monetizing content that does not require some sort of physical presence to experience.

I don't think anyone actually has all the answers yet. I have some friends who are semi-professional content creators (musicians, mostly) who are grappling with this more directly, and even they don't have all the answers, but they seem to be doing okay performing locally and giving away their recordings essentially as advertising to fill seats at gigs. For my part, I'll just keep making stuff and throwing it online. I figure if the audience gets big enough, I might be able to eventually do it full time, which is enough of a dream for me.