Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Friday, July 14, 2023

14: Media And History

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Wednesday, January 02, 2013

A Second Stimulus

I'd argue for a second stimulus. See that World War II hump when the debt exceeded 100% of the GDP? We are nowhere close to there yet.

The problem with the first stimulus was most of it was not spent on active stuff. Tax cuts don't count. Unemployment benefits don't count.

140 Billion Is Cheap

Spend money to take all Americans to the gigabit broadband era. That would be my idea of a stimulus bill.

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Sunday, October 07, 2012

Steve Jobs Revisited


Anyone trying to be or, worse, claiming to be the next Steve Jobs is not the next Steve Jobs. You have to be you. Those trying to be the next Jobs, for one, lack originality. You have to be original to be great.

Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs
one of those rarefied individuals who had not only a vision but the will and force of personality to execute it through America’s greatest cultural triumph: the public corporation....... Steve Jobs didn’t simply shake up industries; he fundamentally traumatized them ...... There’s not an important mainstream technology product or service out there right now that isn’t a result of or response to Steve Jobs. It’s not so much that we want to keep talking about him; it’s that there’s no avoiding it.
But Steve Jobs was no Thomas Edison. Let's have some perspective here. He was an amazing tech CEO, but he was no Edison.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Robotic Compatriots

Official photographic portrait of US President...
Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Next Wave of Factory Robots
Ever since General Motors first put “Unimate” on an assembly line in 1961, most manufacturing robots have worked in isolation, caged off from human workers. Now a new breed of more flexible robot is being developed to work more closely with people.
Human beings were never supposed to be alone. Robots were always supposed to work alongside them.

If robots are cheaper than the cheapest humans, and if they are to work alongside the expensive humans in America, then there is perhaps hope for manufacturing in America. Or so my man Obama thinks.


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Saturday, March 24, 2012

Steve Jobs


I ordered the book. That was months ago. If you know what I mean. And waited, and waited, and waited. Finally I went online to Amazon.com and filed a complaint. I never received the book, I said. I was immediately refunded. I used that money to immediately reorder. This time I was closely tracking the delivery. One notice said, delivery attempted. Two days later the notice said, delivered. Delivered? I never received the book. I went to the post office. They gave me a print out. See? Delivered. They said. I talked to pretty much everyone in the building, including the landlord. No book, nowhere to be found. I figured either the post office lied to me, not very likely, or there is a Steve Jobs fan in the building. Or the delivery man himself is a Steve Jobs fan. I went online to Amazon. This time there was no refund. The book was delivered, they said. I did not get the book, I said.

Oh well, I thought.

Today I bought the book from this sidewalk bookseller. The cover price said 35 dollars. I haggled. I looked interested, then I walked away. The guy came after me. He said 30. I said 25. He said okay. I don't have the cash, I said. I need to get money from the bank. How long, he asked. Five minutes, I said. Then I reached into my pocket. I had 21 dollars. This is all I have, I said. You can have this right away and I will take the book. He thought for a split second. He looked at me. He took the money, and gave me the book. I could not believe it. I had just brought the price down by 14 dollars. When will you be back, he asked. When will you be back with the four dollars? Five minutes, I said. And I walked over to the ATM at the bank on the same block. On my way back I bought a mango lassi for two dollars. So I had a 10 dollar bill, a five dollar bill and three one dollar bills. 20 minus two is 18. I gave him three dollars. I was trying to get one dollar ahead. He took it. Then he grabbed my mango lassi. Can I have it, he asked. Sure, I said. He made it look like he gave me the book for 24 dollars when we had already brought the price down to 25 from 35. Mango lassi does not count for payment, it counts as hospitality.

I don't know if he got one dollar ahead, or I did. But I finally have the book now. This sidewalk bookseller just beat Amazon in delivery - instant - price - really low - and there is no way Amazon can match the experience.

Tip: try haggling.

"Where you from?" I asked as I walked away.

"Bangladesh!"





Steve Jobs And NeXT
Steve Jobs — 1955-2011
Steve Jobs Stayed A Pirate
My Disagreements With Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs: 1997
Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs' Departure
An Ode To Steve jobs
Steve Jobs: iPad 2 Announcement
Steve Jobs At A City Council Meeting
How Steve Jobs Gets Things Done
Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired
Steve Jobs: Android Rant
Sculley: Scum
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Location: New York, NY, USA

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Steve Jobs — 1955-2011

LONDON - JUNE 15: (FILE PHOTO) Steve Jobs, Ch...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI just got back from an event near Times Square. I had some roadside momo - dumplings - with a ton of hot sauce. Usually I burn the midnight oil - it is a body clock thing. But today I was hoping to go to bed early and to wake up earlier than usual to work out some - I do freehand.

I guess I decided to log into my computer just as I gulped the last dumpling, and there was a Google Talk message from a friend out in the MidWest, someone I have yet to meet, a doctor from my hometown in Nepal. A few weeks back he mailed me a book he has written - Enduring Everest - about enduring ethnic prejudice as a Madhesi in Nepal.

"Steve Jobs died," the message said. It was not a new message. His status said he was idle.

My first reaction was disbelief. I expected the guy to retire, not to die. I felt sad. No, I did not see this coming. I was expecting him to stick around for years. This guy truly, truly stands out among the tech titans of my lifetime. It is going to take me days to digest the news.

Walt Mosberg: The Steve Jobs I Knew
Larry Page
Mark Zuckerberg
Bill Gates
The White House: President Obama on the Passing of Steve Jobs: "He changed the way each of us sees the world."
Dick Costolo
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Location: New York, NY, USA

Friday, November 19, 2010

Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web


Scientific American: Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web: The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. ..... We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity. ..... Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. ....... Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource ...... The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. ...... Yet people seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature ..... The Web should be usable by people with disabilities ...... from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. .... A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets
Tim Berners-LeeImage via Wikipedia so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation. ..... many companies spend money to develop extraordinary applications precisely because they are confident the applications will work for anyone, regardless of the computer hardware, operating system or Internet service provider (ISP) they are using—all made possible by the Web’s open standards. ....... The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped .... For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up. .... It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time. ..... as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. ...... The Web is an application that runs on the Internet, which is an electronic network that transmits packets of information among millions of computers according to a few open protocols. ....... the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network ..... In 1990 the Web rolled out over the Internet without any changes to the Internet itself, as have all improvements since. And in that time, Internet connections have sped up from 300 bits per second to 300 million bits per second (Mbps) without the Web having to be redesigned to take advantage of the upgrades. ..... A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. .... Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved. ..... snooping. In 2008 one company, Phorm, devised a way for an ISP to peek inside the packets of information it was sending. The ISP could determine every URI that any customer was browsing. The ISP could then create a profile of the sites the user went to in order to produce targeted advertising. ...... In France a law created in 2009, named Hadopi, allowed a new agency by the same name to disconnect a household from the Internet for a year if someone in the household was alleged by a media company to have ripped off music or video. ..... In the U.K., the Digital Economy Act, hastily passed in April, allows the government to order an ISP to terminate the Internet connection of anyone who appears on a list of individuals suspected of copyright infringement. In September the U.S. Senate introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would allow the government to create a blacklist of Web sites—hosted on or off U.S. soil—that are accused of infringement and to pressure or require all ISPs to block access to those sites. ..... In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.” ...... Finland made broadband access, at 1 Mbps, a legal right for all its citizens. ..... the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. The proliferation of smartphones will make the Web even more central to our lives. Wireless access will be a particular boon to developing countries ...... devising pages that work well on all screens, from huge 3-D displays that cover a wall to wristwatch-size windows. ..... linked data. Today’s Web is quite effective at helping people publish and discover documents, but our computer programs cannot read or manipulate the actual data within those documents. As this problem is solved, the Web will become much more useful, because data about nearly every aspect of our lives are being created at an astonishing rate. Locked within all these data is knowledge about how to cure diseases, foster business value and govern our world more effectively. ...... The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents. ...... They posted
Tim Berners-Lee at a Podcast InterviewImage via Wikipedia a massive amount of patient information and brain scans as linked data, which they have dipped into many times to advance their research. In a demonstration I witnessed, a scientist asked the question, “What proteins are involved in signal transduction and are related to pyramidal neurons?” When put into Google, the question got 233,000 hits—and not one single answer. Put into the linked databases world, however, it returned a small number of specific proteins that have those properties. ........ The investment and finance sectors can benefit from linked data, too. Profit is generated, in large part, from finding patterns in an increasingly diverse set of information sources. ..... We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

I am not worried. I never thought the web was about to die. Apple does not scare me. The iPhone app warlordism does not scare me. The web is part of an ecosystem. It is the biggest fish, but it does not have to be the only fish.
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