Recently in Quality and Risk Category
When a company's reason for being is in agony, the first order of business is to modify the brand. The logo seems malleable, the business plan requires integrity and perseverance.
Dave Winer:
... the only way to shut [WikiLeaks] down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
Paul Graham:
The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are so great that everything that can get turned into software will. So for the next couple years, a good recipe for startups will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.
In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is ... they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.
Necropsy: pathological dissection of a corpse, belonging to any life form; particularly to determine cause of death. A dissection is a minute and detailed examination.
Autopsy, from Ancient Greek αὐτοψία ("the quality of being seen for oneself"): dissection performed on a cadaver to find possible cause(s) of death. A cadaver is a dead body, a human corpse. By extension to human artefacts and activities: an after-the-fact examination, especially of the causes of a failure (more common term in this context: post-mortem).
This applies to much more than restaurants and web sites. Dave Winer:
When I go to a great restaurant I don't want the waiter to interfere with the experience. I came there to eat and be with my friends. Same thing with software and with websites. I came there to read and to learn and to be inspired. The website can help, but it isn't the show.
Do we value the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, and innovation into the mass-information age? do we want our children to grasp and manipulate the world first-hand? are man-made objects as equally accessible as natural entities?
Coy Doctorow is angry with Apple's path: The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."
He is on to something significant.
ben fry:
There's simply no reason to prevent people from installing anything they want on the iPad. The same goes for the iPhone. When the iPhone appeared, Steve Jobs made a ridiculous claim that a rogue application could "take down the network." That's an insult to common sense ... The $499 iPad that has no data network hardware is not in danger of "taking down" anyone's cell network, but applications will still be required to go through the app store and therefore, its approval process.
Computing platforms need to remain open. Tinkerers explore and innovate. Apple will lose this battle.
Most Maglites come with a spare light bulb in the butt. Unscrew the cap on the bottom of the Maglite, pull the spring off, and out slides a plastic capsule with replacement bulb. Later, remember to refill the reserve.
The state's jobless rate of 12.5% in January was its worst since records have been kept (starting in 1976) and fifth-highest in the nation. It's not over yet, there is no actual economic recovery, just government propaganda. I'm glad we left.
Just give us a device that can and will maintain always-on connection via 4G, 3G, Edge, and Ethernet (throw in bluetooth and USB for desperate cases), and all that device needs to do is provide tethering to that connection in the form of a secure, local WiFi hotspot. No screen, no button, no nothing else -- just a battery, power plug, and red/green led. Then I can tether my laptop, tablet, "smartphone", anytime and anywhere. Charge $100 to sell the device, then $10-20 / month for an unlimited data plan.
Continue reading Actual Function for Mobile Connectivity.
