The original Cluetrain Manifesto, put many ideas into words and moved a generation 16 years ago. The new one, written by the same authors, aims to do the same. But is this for the new generation, or the old?
Agree with it or not, it is important, and not a long read. So go read it.
This week saw multiple stories published in various outlets about issues surrounding out perception and management of work and leisure time in the modern world.
This Wired story presents that case that allowing employees more flexibility with managing their time has sound benefits for the business.
Cory Doctorow linked to a “The Economist” story detailing various research results that deal with the modern perception of time, its value and its scarcity.
And lastly this TechCrunch post discusses the issue from the point of view of a startup founder.
The good: Nice UI, good integration with other Google services, for example I can see how many messages I got directly for the Google Reader page, no need to open a separate tab like I need with Facebook.
The Bad: The mostly empty gray area at the top of the screen takes up too much space, it ruins the experience on small-screen Netbooks where you find yourself scrolling too much. Even though they had Buzz already, they created yet-another micro-blogging service within the Google+ posts, how many of those will we need to keep manually synchronizing?
This seems to be one little but important detail that escaped notice by the press so far:
“Because Tsubame uses a KVM hypervisor and various cloud-like provisioning tools, it can run both Windows and Linux at the same time on different nodes, and offer users various types of processing configurations”
KVM Stands for “Kernel Virtual Machine” it is the virtualization platform embedded in the Linux Kernel, what this means is that when Tsubame was running either Windows or Linux, it was actually running them as Virtual Machines on top of Linux Physical Hosts, if I understand correctly this means that essentially, the so called Windows benchmark was actually a Linux benchmark…
Tab Candy – New Firefox 4.0 Innovation
This has a nice look to it, but I can’t help but be reminded of Activities feature of the Gnome 3.0 shell.
It seems to me more and more of the things that naturally should be done by the OS are moved into the browser, with window management being the particular example here.
I really think that browser tabs, while being a good feature and workaround for the OS problems we had back when they were invented, should have been surpassed long ago by general OS-level window tabs (And the recent trend to move them to the top f the window proves it, I think).
I enjoy following the unfolding debate between Adobe and Apple, I find it to be especially amusing considering the point that Adobe and Apple practically made each other, for there would be no Photoshop without a Mac, and the Mac`s success is largely due to Photoshop’s emergence on that platform.
That being said, I think Wired completely missed the point in their article covering the latest round in the debate.
Diaspora had been getting a lot of press lately, and while I do think that utilizing peer-too-peer and distributed computing technologies to give users back the control over their social and personal information us a good idea, I`m not sure that server-style software is the right way to achieve this.
If breakup of the dominance of big, centralized, services in the social computing sphere is to be achieved, it should be done in the same manner that central FTP archives were made obsolete by P2P software and IM networks by multi-protocol clients – By writing convenient desktop software that will merge in the services of multiple providers to eliminate differentiation and facilitate competition.
I realized today that blind dates are such called not because you didn ‘t see the other person beforehand, but becasue you wish you were blind during the date…
Dongles!
While I wasn’t looking these things multiplied and took my place over…
This week’s Starship Sofa story Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons by Gord Sellar is absolutely mind-blowing, it has everything, spaceships, aliens, music and thick deep African-American accented voice. I wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone even if you’re not into Jazz music (Which I am certainly not) or Science-Fiction stories.
About the only point of criticism I have about the show, is that it seems to me that some kind of a jazz music track should have been played after the story concluded rather then Gord Sellar`s outro, then again the Starship Sofa never played music before and there are copyright issues, so its probably too much to ask.
Starship sofa had been going from strength to strength recently, with the serialization of Kim Newman`s “The Serial Murders“, an amazingly entertaining story including a myriad of charmingly British characters played with extremely talented voice acting by Gareth Stack, concluded last week, and a new web site that provides much needed technical improvements over the old site such as the ability to link to an individual show.
Also worth mentioning is Tony C. Smith`s, Starship Sofa’s esteemed host, guest appearance on another favorite podcast of mine, Escape Pod. A few things can put a big smile on my face like this humorous cross-over. Now, if only Escape Pod’s Steve Eley would do a guest appearance of his own on the Starship…
Ifblog (ponderings 2.0) 