A New Way to Fly

March 9th, 2010 § 0

Designer Damien Grossemy has a wonderful vision for how flying might look like in the future.

To Believe or Not to Believe

March 5th, 2010 § 0

Penn Jillette is not only one of the funniest guys in America, he is also a very well verse, none-bullshit guy.  He comedic routines alone with his Showtime Show Bullshit, are a refreshing does of sanity and common sense.

Back in November of 2005, Penn was asked to contribute to National Public Radio’s series, This I Believe.  Below is his piece on God and life.  Five years later I still find this inspiring and truthful to the spirit of what it means to be a human.

When the Republic Died

March 5th, 2010 § 0

I have often wondered where the Presidents got the notion that they could ignore the Constitution’s directive of War Powers, specifically that only Congress could declare war. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 is the source. So read on and see when our republic died.

I came across this bit of information via the video below. It is a conversation with Garry Wills on his new book, Bomb Power.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Google Buzz

February 12th, 2010 § 0

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Venture Beat discusses how Google scrambles to fix some of the privacy concernes raised by gmailers regarding the deployment of Buzz.

To be honest, Facebook’s approach has been one of get the product out there and then tweak it.  And while traditionally this has been frowned upon, for them it works.

This might actually be a shift in how we practice business and develop and deploy products.  You can actually learn more, faster by having folks work with it and tear it apart than by having your internal brain trust figure everything out before the release and then having a flopped product cause the brain trust got things wrong.

One point of caution might be that this approach might only work with behemoth brands like Facebook or Google, though. Regardless, the approach is agressive and clever in my opinion.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Snowcopolis 2010

February 8th, 2010 § 0


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Hitler’s Ipad Rant

January 30th, 2010 § 0

The use of clips from the movie Downfall (which is an excellent film about Hitlers last days in the bunker) never gets old. But this one probably takes the proverbial cake. I have had one of the best laughs in a while with this.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Fourth Amendment in the Cloud

January 21st, 2010 § 0

Amendment 4
Image by Subliminati via Flickr

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Do the above words apply to your content on the cloud?  That is the question posed by cnet’s James Urquhart in his blog The Wisdom of the Clouds.

Urquhart points to a note he has read by Minnesota Law School student David A. Couillard, titled Defogging the Cloud: Applying the Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing.  I have not read the document (though I intend to do so in the coming days) but found Urquhart’s summary helpful and found myself in agreement with the overall thesis: that digital assets be treated stored in a third-party site be treated as physical property and not as a transaction.

However, with digital property stored with host like Salesforce there is little by way of encryption which the owner of the content can deploy.  So if someone at the hosting facility stores illegal material within the content or the organization gets compromised and the perpetrators insert or hind their contraband within customers data; is the Fourth Amendment still valid?

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Cloud Computing’s Back End

January 21st, 2010 § 0

Outline of a cloud containing text 'The Cloud'
Image via Wikipedia

Revuen Cohen from ElasticVapor has a great post “Oversubscribing the Cloud” the allegations that Amazon is over subscribing its EC2 product.  The implications of such a practice, should it be true, can impact smaller organizations decisions on weather to use products like EC2.

I am a proponent of cloud based computing, especially when it comes to the advantages to small or medium size organizations.  But there are still issues to be resolved.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Programming Via Screen Shots

January 21st, 2010 § 0

The folks at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a programmed call Sikuli that allows users to program with no need to know a programming language.

The program uses screen shots to execute commands.  This kind of advancement will continue to drive the democratization of technology.  It reminds me of how in Star Trek: the Next Generation people would speak into the computer what they wanted it to do and the computer would figure out the program.

For more information visit Project Sikuli.org
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

On China’s Terms

January 20th, 2010 § 0

northeast tower of Forbidden City in night light

Image via Wikipedia

Are we ready for a future where the global agenda is set by the Chinese government? If we do not raise our standards for education and health care we might just have to do so.

China Rising - The Long Now Blog

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

« Older Entries