So long and thanks for all the Flash
Back in ye olde ancient days of the computer, there was Mac and Windows and all that server room stuff. If you wanted to create video or most anything else that you shared (that wasn’t on paper) that looked like hiring programmers, testers and so on for Windows and Mac and having a multi-year development plan. Then we got email and the web. And they were kind of cool. All of a sudden you could share words and simple images. You didn’t need a paper phonebook anymore! But, HTML couldn’t do anything complicated and it couldn’t do video or sound. Then Adobe invented this thing called Flash. YouTube was build on top of that. Almost all of the silly games on the web were built on top of it. And people built entire applications in it. And people built websites on top of it. Except, Flash is proprietary. Those flash files are little sealed boxes and the almighty google can’t see in side those boxes. We spend a lot of time explaining to people that they’re Flash website is very pretty and all… and no one can find it on Google. Ain’t gonna happen. That’s the nature of Flash. Since then, html (especially the latest rev html5) has steadily taken on the things Flash used to do. I can’t remember the last time I created something in Flash. And, it’s always been demanding and buggy with a never-ending history of security problems. Over the last ten days, Adobe had what … Continue reading So long and thanks for all the Flash
Kafka and Imperial Presidencies
Obama seems to be happy to follow in the footsteps of almost every President since Johnson (and probably a few before) in strengthening the powers of the Presidency at the expense of the other two branches, especially the legislative. Under Bush II and Obama, that seems to have taken a very weird Kafkaesque turn with legal justification for presidential actions being classified. What strikes me as an apropos example is covered in the Atlantic’s The Secret Memo That Explains Why Obama Can Kill Americans. The core of the article reads: “The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi… The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said.” …the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike? It’s secret. Classified. Information that the public isn’t permitted to read, mull over, or challenge. What is truly puzzling is that the US legal basis for this seems fairly explicit in the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the … Continue reading Kafka and Imperial Presidencies
Headlines of the Day
Best Buy CEO Claims iPad Cannibalizing Notebook Sales By ‘As Much As 50%’ Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn is quoted as saying that … internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%. One of the phrases we have for this is Any device… Any where… Any time. The Senate on Thursday approved a multi-billion dollar package of tax breaks and government-backed loans for small businesses, as Democrats surmounted months of opposition by Republican leaders. Backers say the bill could spur business growth and new hiring. “It’s a very different environment now,” said Stephen Baker, the chief electronics analyst for market researcher NPD Group Inc. “The real cool stuff now will be the tablets, e-readers and probably the higher-end digital cameras.” http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/16/best-buy-ceo-claims-ipad-cannibalizing-notebook-sales-by-as-much-as-50/ Senate Passes Bill to Aid Small Businesses http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17cong.html?partner=rss&emc=rss Adobe Releases Beta of 64-Bit Flash Player Adobe yesterday announced the release of a beta preview version of Flash Player for Mac, Windows, and Linux offering 64-bit support. The new release, codenamed “Square”, has been found to be fully functional as far as content compatibility and stable enough for broad testing so far, but Adobe of course encourages feedback on performance. http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/16/adobe-releases-beta-of-64-bit-flash-player-for-mac-os-x/ Inside Internet Explorer 9: Redmond gets back in the game Microsoft today released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9. Coming after four developer-oriented preview releases, the new browser brings a streamlined user interface and a core that is more standards-compliant—and orders of magnitude faster—than any previous version of Internet … Continue reading Headlines of the Day
Improvisation, Part II
Last night, Andrea, Ingrid and I were talking about changing focus from the fact that the glass is half empty to the fact that the glass is half full. When one is true the other is true. They are facts. When the situation changes, the facts change, too. If the glass is sitting outside and it begins to rain, the glass will fill up. In life, just as in physics, there really is no such thing as an uninvolved observer: when someone chooses to observe something, they change what they’re observing. If I focus on finding more work, I will tend to find more work. What you focus on expands. One traditional technique used to teach art is still life. In the middle of the room, there is a table with some objects; perhaps a red apple and a blue bowl of water. Each student is given a piece of what looks like charcoal-colored chalk and a sheet of paper. Each student immediately faces a choice: focus on the factual limits they’ve been handed or focus on the factual capabilities they’ve been handed. Like improvisation, this is also a kind of game. With any game, we agree to the rules including the rule (spoken or not) of agreement. Cheating is bad form primarily because you’re not following the agreement rule. A student who dwells on the limits they’re stuck with has lots to think about: they don’t have red, they don’t have any way to make the apple shiny, they … Continue reading Improvisation, Part II
Weather is not Climate
forecasting the weather is an attempt to get fairly precise information on the state of the atmosphere in the near future. Forecasting (climate) … involves an attempt to identify the atmosphere’s most probable states on far longer time scales. — Why weather != climate: the engine behind climate models That quote is from an article on Ars Technica, a site that has a great track record covering technical topics such as computers and science in depth. In some cases (like this one), the article probably won’t make anything clearer than mud unless you’ve got the right background. The article is based upon some of the core ideas in Chaos Theory. Most books on Chaos Theory talk about the Butterfly Effect. In 1961, Edward Lorenz was using a computer to simulate the weather. He decided to re-start a simulation in the middle. In the original simulation, the value at that point was 0.506127. When he re-started the simulation, he just entered 0.506. The new result was completely different than the first. This has been summarized in many ways (see Butterfly Effects – Variations on a Meme) including “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Africa cause a hurricane in the Atlantic?” The butterfly effect (and Chaos Theory in general) focuses on dynamic (don’t stay the same) systems that are very sensitive to how things start. If you put a ball on the peak of the St. Louis Arch, you really have no way of knowing exactly when it will roll … Continue reading Weather is not Climate
Improvisation, Part I
When my daughter was maybe four, I taught her an improvisation exercise: Gift. Gift always starts the same way: the two people playing agree who is going to give the gift. If I was giving the gift, I might start by picking up an (imaginary) box; maybe a large box. Then I would hand it to her. For the game to continue, she would have to take the box she couldn’t see. It couldn’t be just any box but the box I had handed to her. She would have to agree with what had already happened. At our last retreat, Andrea read a passage about improvisation from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to us. I offered a Gift to Ingrid. She very carefully removed many ribbons, opened the flaps, reached into the box and lifted out something; clearly something that filled the box, perhaps rounded, and said “thank you.” I said “its shiny” and then she said “pretty” to which I replied “But what does it do?” “I don’t know but it’s shiny.” “I’ve been wondering what it does since I bought it.” Then she said “It’s pretty. That’s what it does.” Improvisation never has a script but, even if you can’t see it from the outside, there are always rules. One rule (spoken or not) that is critical to improvisation is that there has to be agreement. Improvisation usually has no props, no set, no backdrop: just people. With only their words and action they have to create a world, a … Continue reading Improvisation, Part I
Improvisation, Part I
I’ve been busy since early in the year working with several people to start a new company. while, it’s left little time to blog, we’ve had many great conversations about what we want to build and how we want to build it. Although our website isn’t finished, we recently started a blog and I’ll be writing pieces occasionally. My first piece went up today: Improvisation, Part I When my daughter was maybe four, I taught her an improvisation exercise: Gift. Gift always starts the same way: the two people playing agree who is going to give the gift. If I was giving the gift, I might start by picking up an (imaginary) box; maybe a large box. Then I would hand it to her. For the game to continue, she would have to take the box she couldn’t see. It couldn’t be just any box but the box I had handed to her. She would have to agree with what had already happened. At our last retreat, Andrea read a passage about improvisation from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to us… Read the rest Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
Christmas Eve
Tonight, I was with family. Before gifts were opened, my daughter was playing. And I had this interesting exchange with my mother and my brother’s wife. They were talking about how the normal heating system in a house can leave one part of the house hot and another cold. My mother mentioned that, if they build a house, they want to convection-heat the floors. My sister-in-law pointed out how her parents were cooling their home with a geothermal system: the house was kept cool by the constant temperature of the earth. It costs them very little to cool their house. We went on to jump from that to the lack of consistent tax policy (to encourage innovation and customer demand); how Holland, and now China, had big companies to supply that demand (because of policy); how in Europe, a lot of people had installed solar panels (because of their tax policy and the fact that they could sell the electricity back to the Utility company). Strangely enough, this was a discussion about Energy Policy that bridged the traditional split between left and right. One of the three people in the discussion is a traditional Republican who is at best “not convinced” about climate change. She does realize that clean energy is doable. And she also put together that innovation is the key: with the right policies (for investors to place long-term bets), people will start coming up with solutions to the technical problems. That changes the dynamic for clean energy … Continue reading Christmas Eve
More on Health Care
The debate on Health Care has clearly been hated. My previous post on the topic develops an idea I had discussed with my Dad. Generally his views are on the Conservative end of the spectrum and (suprisingly to me), he thought it was a great idea at the time. Even more interestingly is that (at least as I read the tea leaves of Obama’s recent speech before Congress and the discussions afterwards), it looks like a variant of my idea will be part of the final bill. Tis interesting… Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
Yet Another Tax Hike
A hypothetical campaign exchange: “There goes my liberal opponent again—demanding yet another tax. He’s never seen a tax he didn’t like. Now he wants to raise your gasoline taxes… The American people have been taxed quite enough, thank you!” “The American people certainly have been taxed quite enough. I totally agree. Right now they are being taxed by Saudi Arabia, taxed by Venezuela, taxed by Russia, taxed by Iran, and, if we stay on this track, they’ll soon be taxed by Mother Nature… So let’s get one thing straight: My opponent and I are both for a tax. I just have this quaint, old-fashioned view that my taxes should go to the U.S. Treasury, not the Saudi Treasury, not the Iranian Treasury and not the Russian Treasury. It’s just a little tic I have. I like my tax dollars to go to build my own country.” That hypothetical campaign exchange comes (via some modifications of my own) from Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. It’s an exchange that does a nice job of summarizing some basics. There are a laundry list of examples that demonstrate that climate change is very real. The opening of the Northwest passage for the first time in recorded history is one such indicator. The extraordinary efforts the Chinese went through to have clear (if not clean) air for the Beijing Olypics is another indicator. Al Gore’s movie and (until the economic meltdown) the nightly news were filled with more. As California Governor Schwarzenegger (you have … Continue reading Yet Another Tax Hike