Friday, March 12, 2004

Beyond Knowledge?

I've spent all afternoon trying to put into words my analysis of the American Outsourcing crisis. I started the afternoon with a really simple little nugget that I felt was at the core of the outsourcing crisis. I took that nugget and tried to beat it out into an impressive sheet of gold but the sheet kept tearing. After a lot of garbled scribbles I decided to take a break. I found this on my News page. It led me on to a Wired article that made me realise, there's no point in my trying to write anything when other people are doing a proper job of it. The Wired article left one question unanswered. Here's an excerpt of the conversation between journalist Daniel Pink and Senator Shirley Turner: I toss a slur across her desk. I call her a protectionist. "Oh, and I'm proud of it," she responds. "I wear that badge with honor. I am a protectionist. I want to protect America. I want to protect jobs for Americans." "But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next." She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge." Pink seems to be lost for words. Shirley Turner wants to know what lies beyond knowledge economy. I think the real treasure has never been ownership of the farming, factory or knowledge per se; it is the ownership and exploitation of the innovation. Jobs have moved from farming to factories and from factories to knowledge industries because of innovation. Money flows towards a new center of innovation because demand for the new always exceeds supply; the shortage of supply sends the price up; suppliers cash in; knowledge diffuses away from the center of innovation reaching new suppliers; at some point, the supply starts to exceed the demand; the price starts to come down. This is a really, really simple cycle that's affects everything from individual products entire industries. From the 70's yo-yo craze of my childhood, to the global automobile industry, the innovator makes the real bucks before the competition moves in. Everything changes when the supply finally exceeds the demand. Suppliers need to adopt a whole new psychology The smart ones will have been practising continual self-improvement, always looking for early mastery of the next innovation. Those ones that switch off when they leave the office, looking forward to sitting comfortably in front of their TVs for the evening, are going to suffer. The whole point of the game is, not to own the farms, the factories or the knowledge, but to own the innovation. If you are an innovator, you have the initiative. If you have the initiative, everyone else is playing catchup. 5:58:23 PM

Where do you blog?

I came across this blog space meme a few days ago an it's inspired me to put up a picture of my blogging ghetto. I say ghetto because everyone else's picture looks like it was stolen out of an Ikea catalogue. Key points to note, clockwise from lamp, are: children's art work, a never ending stream decent speakers; H/K's are good but I think my brother's JBL Creatures are slightly better halo - best game ever the CD tray is a display box for sma Gold cartons (baby milk) the standup CD rack is useless; impossible to get the damn things out of their cases the Toshiba that never gets used; its reserving that space for the G5 that's going to sit there some day the G-clamp that holds the desk together; that's right, it's two saw horses and a sheet of 1-inch MDF and the saw horses are home made; it doesn't get much cheaper than that coffee a few mousing alternatives dragged out of the cupboard yesterday Stokke writing slope raises the PowerBook screen just enough to avoid headaches from looking down PowerBook, just a few MHz underpowered for Halo, fine most of the time but jerky in big fire fights On-the-Go books HTML: the definitive guide, 2nd edition; The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton; A Devil's Chaplain, Richard Dawkins; Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Davidson&Apple; Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Hillegass; Mac OS X for Java Geeks, Iverson; The E-Myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber; Adaptive Software Development: A collaborative approach to managing complex systems, Highsmith; Contributing to Eclipse, Gamma & Beck; Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss 11:44:28 AM

Power Chords

Now this is an interesting take on the one button mouse issue. i like the one button mouse. robert emslie said it best above. the "violinist's hand" analogy. the thing about the single buttoned mouse is that it is amazingly easy to get to grips with but it is as deep as you want it to be as well. a perfect balance between useability and accessibility. with a two wheel mouse + scroll wheel, i feel that people are more locked into the mindset of only using the mouse... so in that case, it can actually limit a beginner's control over an OS. a one-button mouse promotes exploration of the OS. Stephen Chan I didn't see through Robert's point about the Chords to the underlying effect on the way the user might be led to explore what the system can do. Playing around in this editor shows that ctrl-click is the only chord available to me at the moment, and this is probably the case with 90% of the applications I use on the Mac. And if it wasn't the case, how would I know it? The normal way to evolve from newbie to power user, in my experience, is to gradually incorporate keyboard short cuts into your repertoire, which you pick up from the menus. The application itself gives you a way to discover the short cuts. This isn't the case with mouse chords, is it? In fact, I can do more than ctrl-click in this editor if I have some text selected. I can use the mouse to drag the selected text from one place to another; I can use alt-drag to copy it from one place to another. There is no indication from the user interface that these two operations are available to me until after I have started them. You have to know about them before you can use them. How does a novice learn these tricks? Let's look at a similar problem on Windows. I became known around my last client's site as the guy with the Mac; the only Mac amongst the 800 developers on the site. The standard reaction was 'Looks pretty,' implying that it was the dumb blonde of the computing world, and that the same was probably true of me. This became apparent to me one day when a PC using colleague was having a bit of trouble with his windows. I said, "Look, press Windows-D." Shazam, there was his desktop and all the pesky windows were minimised. "You can press Windows-E to get a fresh Explorer window." Then the insolent young pup said to me, "Wow, you know more about Windows than I do!" He was genuinely shocked; I was genuinely shocked that he was genuinely shocked. How could something as trivial as a keyboard shortcut change his perception so radically? He'd been using Windows for years and never come across any of the Window-key shortcuts, and that, in turn, is because they don't appear on any application menus. I learned about them when I caught a colleague using one. "Hey, what was that you pressed..." and so I found out about them. I reckon that these non-menu shortcuts spread mostly by word of mouth. Like the Window key shortcuts, mouse chords are really useful. Their only problem is that you may never realise that they are there unless someone else points them out to you. 9:58:14 AM