At the intersection of design, tech, creativity and culture
Posts published on January, 2003
Back homeStatement by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter: An Alternative to War
ATLANTA, Jan. 31 (AScribe Newswire)—Despite marshalling powerful armed forces in the Persian Gulf region and a virtual declaration of war in the State of the Union message, our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike against Iraq, either at home or in Europe.
Happy Chinese new year! Here’s to the year of the ram. Note: if you heard reports that the year of the ram is bad luck on the mainstream American news, don’t believe it. It’s not true.
Ultimately, I don’t see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution. It is a misapplied tool that was never meant to be used for anything other than distributed publishing.”
“The reality is that we are trying to do too much with a language that was never meant for such heavy-duty applications. We have used incredible ingenuity to make up for the faults of HTML by putting all of the real processing effort on the server side, but the time has come to create a new system that is low bandwidth, utilizes a single code base for all platforms, and is componentized enough to make updating and customizations easy using internet-based distribution. Lastly, we need to develop these applications to run in their own space, without a web browser In the end, this may change the way we think of web browsers. It will also change the way platforms need to be developed, in order to support a wide array of thin-clients that are accessed and addressed directly from the operating system as opposed to from a browser.
A new project called etc. – bits of remembrances from trips, people, places, and other such extraneous stuff. This first set includes paper bits from a San Francisco trip from 2002.
Celebrated inventor Dean Kamen (best known recently for his creation of the Segway Human Transporter, a personal transportation gyroscopic scooter) says there’s no magic in invention, just mess: “It’s not some fundamental magic. The invention process is incredibly messy. It’s incredibly frustrating. You go around, bump into the wall, try another place, bump into another wall, do a little more, bump into the same wall again, and say, ‘Geez, I’ve been here before. What’s wrong?’ … We learn to deal with failure, and deal with frustration. I have been, for most of my life, walking around the world and kissing frogs. Most of the time, when you kiss a frog, you get a wart; every once in a while, it turns into a prince or a princess.” So you need to kiss a lot of frogs. Sounds pretty simple. Try it. (ABC News 4 Jan 2003)
Don Tapscott, business consultant and author of “Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs,” says that it’s a mistake to discount the power of the Internet based on the bursting of the tech bubble: “There is a real danger that people will decide to throw out the Internet baby with the dot-com bath water. This is a big mistake, and punishment is proving to be very swift for companies that fall into this trap. We’re not at the end of the Internet revolution; we’re at the very beginning.” Tapscott says the next phase of the Internet revolution will be driven by an explosion of “smart” devices and new users, combined with ever-expanding bandwidth, which will vastly increase businesses’ ability to foster relationships with their customers, suppliers and employees.
In fact, these tech-enabled relationships “are quickly becoming a new form of wealth, a new form of capital,” says Tapscott. “They behave like other assets in some ways—you can build them, manage them, perhaps even monetize them—but they also behave differently than other assets. For example, most assets *depreciate* the more you use them, whereas relationships seem to *appreciate* the more you use them. The more you develop relationships, the more valuable they become. So we have to think about the architecting of relationships, and the technologies that enable companies to build those relationships, as being central to competitive advantage and business strategy.”
