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Wednesday, December 24, 2003 |
Planetanalog: With the introduction of the Eye- Toy"made by NamTai"the Sony PS2 game console now has the ability to track body motions and recognize free-space gestures as part of interacting with a whole new class of entertainment software. This may be the way to turn gaming couch potatos into fit athletes. [John Robb's Weblog] 
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William Lind, a military historian, has a 4GW (4th generation warfare) viewpoint on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that is worth reading.
Understanding 4GW.
How to fight 4GW.
How to fight 4GW (part 2)
One of his major points: we lost these wars when we destroyed the Afghan and Iraqi states and turned them into a lawless mess. He maintains that it is very hard to rebuild a state once it is destroyed and we will leave well before these countries are stable states again (the implication: this would turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Lebanons). [John Robb's Weblog]
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Fast Company | If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation. Fast Company's Heath Row was kind enough to point out this article about Steve Jobs. He says:
The battle over digital music is just another verse in Apple's sad song: This astonishingly imaginative company keeps getting muscled out of markets it creates. So what does Apple have to tell us about innovation?
It's less an anti-apple piece, which is how one reader pegged it, and more an analysis of what innovation really means to an organization. Can you build a company on innovation alone? Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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How do you protect against this? In 1999, the United States was entered by 475 million people, 125 million vehicles, and 5 million maritime 40-foot containers. Meanwhile, 2.7 million undocumented immigrants are believed to enter the United States yearly. Total annual U.S. cocaine consumption can fit in 15 forty-foot containers.
What if next generation terror organizations had a decision loop that was slooooow. So sluggish (like a plant) that it was impossible to see without time lapse photography (in that slow action provides protection against detection)? Given that we are used to faaaaaaaaast action. Quick decisions. Activity, movement, and communication. Can we even imagine or respect an enemy that is much, much slower than we are? What if despite its slowness, these next generation terrorist organizations are acutely aware, globally communicative, and decisive? Good questions. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Demo of Visual Studio tools for Office.
Oh, I forgot to tell everyone. I'm back to learning how to program. I compiled my first C# app (little more than hello world) at 35,000 feet somewhere between Oakland and Seattle on Friday night. It's frustrating to learn to program. Yes, Don Box, I used Notepad. It's so exciting to compile a .NET app and get an .EXE that you can run. Now to get to something useful.
Speaking of useful, Gary Devendorf has a demo of MS Office 2003 using Visual Studio to run VB.NET code at the click of a button on an Excel spreadsheet. [The Scobleizer Weblog]
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Evangeline: "Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO". Noted without comment. The anonymity-requesting BoingBoing buddy who forwards this, then ducks and scampers away in a hurry, asks "What subculture is this? Jeez louise!" Snip:
In the following interview, notorious sim Evangeline goes back to her early days in Alphaville, and claims to have worked as a cyber-prostitute and then to have been a madam for various cyber-brothels under the guise of her sims Roxy, Tori, Fanki and then Dorian Merrill, claiming that at times she made the equivalent of $50 US per trick from her customers. She claims to still being a minor and hints that some of her customers have been Maxis employees. She discusses the conflagration with Mia Wallace, and claims to have guessed Mia's password and trashed her property and account. Finally she discusses her current policy of newbie-humiliation on her Free Money for Newbies property, currently number 1 in Alphaville's welcome category. In particular, she discusses her new game of locking newbies "in the freezer" and "caging" dark skinned avatars and calling them "monkeys" and also calling them "ugly" because one can't see their eyes. Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Pepper - Cross Platform sharing and collaboration using IM or email. (SOURCE:- Pepper Computer, Inc.)- Cool, something to try.
QUOTE
Pepper Computer announces the availability of the Pepper Keeper 1.0 for Windows and Macintosh PCs and Linux Wi-Fi Pads. The Pepper Keeper introduces a new class of software, designed specifically for consumers, for instant sharing and collaboration via IM (instant messaging) or e-mail. With the Pepper Keeper consumers can create and communicate everything digital instantly without ads or Web sites.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?. (SOURCE:Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?
A: See below (washingtonpost.com))- Yup, re-organize, deconstruct or die!
QUOTE
Back when it cost a great deal to learn and know things -- when transaction costs were very high -- big corporations had to solve the problem of coordinating information, such as what customers wanted to buy, what parts were being produced and shipped, how to make sure prices covered costs, and so on. The advent of mass production and similar "process" technologies let firms produce and sell things -- cars, steel, oil, chemicals, food -- on a much larger scale, so there was suddenly much more information to coordinate.
Companies solved this problem by creating massive bureaucratic pyramids; Alfred Sloane, chairman of General Motors, was famous for creating the multi-divisional firm. The job of these internal hierarchies is to gather, validate and store the information the company needed to coordinate all its activities. That's what "middle managers" in marketing, accounting and so on manage -- information.
Now, however, with internal communications networks and the speed of the Internet, you don't need a horde of people in a big pyramid to handle all that information. Firms have become "flatter" and "faster," and the "networked" or "virtual" company has come into being -- groups of firms that use shared networks to behave as if they were part of the same company. A generation ago, GM made all its own parts and IBM all its own chips. Not today. Now, specialized companies use networks to coordinate their activities with GM and IBM, and supply the needed components.
So the end result of the Internet revolution on companies has been exactly what Coase's theory predicted: Cheap information has allowed firms to shrink. Size is now less of an advantage in organizations, and that means more competition in the global marketplace. For companies, it's either reorganize or die. That's what Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in economics, was talking about.
Coase's ideas are no less true for political organizations, as Dean's success shows. He is the first candidate to use the Internet effectively as a political organizing device.
UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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The Lispification has begun! -Blog system and RSS Feed Portal in Lisp. (SOURCE:The Lispification has begun! via email from Simon)- Thought I blogged this, but evidently not. Someday, I'll have time to play with this!
QUOTE
Eric S. Raymon once said "LISP is worth learning for a different reason--the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.", and I have to agree with him.
My thesis "Can a 40 year old Computer Language do Web Applications ?" reflects that point of view and tries to show how Lisp can benefit Web Application Development in this day and age where technologies like Java and PHP are most often used to develop Web Applications.
During my internship I built an RSS Feed Portal and a weblog using Lisp technologies developed in-house at Beta Nine by Sven Van Caekenberghe. Check out the code at his at his homepage.
If you're interested you can download the PDF (1.8Mb) here. I'm always open to comments and suggestions, you can reach me here
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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