Marc Benioff posted something on Twitter that's worth quoting.
"No one I know predicted the @Pokemon/AR phenomena. That's what I love about our industry: You never know what's next."
That's right!
That's like something I used to say as the web was first taking root in 1996. None of the titans of the software industry saw it coming. They're never as smart as they imagine they are.
.. wird immer besser, ich kann Season 5 kaum erwarten.
"Nearly every moment of the fourth season of “Orange Is the New Black” feels refracted in a small sequence in the finale, a bubble of joy floating up through tragedy. In a flashback, Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) is visiting friends in New York, and ends up taking an F train to Dumbo, blissful and exhausted. Sitting next to her, a white guy with dreads plays a steel drum. An Asian mother falls asleep; when her little boy opens her wallet to take some cash, Poussey catches the eye of a middle-aged man in a turban. They smile, sharing the secret. Poussey watches Wall Street suits offering a flask to two girls, then gazes at an older black woman reading Michael Chabon, an interracial couple kissing, a pregnant woman, some jocks.
For anyone who lives in New York City, this is a familiar vision of cosmopolitan heaven—a weave of strangers, open and curious. The city that Poussey gets lost in isn’t perfect. She’s a young black woman, and when her phone is stolen, and she asks for help, white men brush her off. But, for a few hours, her life is full of jittery serendipity: she meets a drag queen named Miss Crimson Tide; she sees a dopey Roots cover band; she goes to a club where participants follow instructions that flash on the wall (Kiss, Dance, Share); she ends up hitching a bike ride from a fake monk who’s a member of Improv Everywhere. It’s hell to watch, though. The subway car is the inverse of the justice system that will swallow Poussey up and, years later, kill her."
And the season manages to end with the individual. In the finale’s last shot, set on the Brooklyn pier where Poussey will soon be arrested, she smiles at the camera, breaking the fourth wall. It’s as if she were taking her place in the show’s opening credits, a montage of the faces of real-life ex-prisoners, staring at us.
-by EMILY NUSSBAUM, New Yorker.
...is that the system can't hear you. Only people can.
And the problem is that people in the system are too often swayed to believe that they have no power over the system, that they are merely victims of it, pawns, cogs in a machine bigger than themselves.
So, when the system can't hear you, and those who can believe they have no power, nothing improves.
Systems don't mistreat us, misrepresent us, waste our resources, manage poorly, support an unfair status quo and generally screw things up -people do.
If we care enough, we can make it change.
Everyone says we should teach kids to code, what if instead we made it so that the machines they're using didn't need so much coding? Amazon really has something good with AWS, the way we should all be doing computing in the future, but now it requires people to know too much to get the simple result most people will want.
I'm a longtime user/customer of Amazon Web Services, going all the way back to the 2006 when they rolled out S3, their basic storage system.
My websites are S3 buckets. I have an 3 EC2 instances that run my apps and Insight. I use Route 53 to manage domains.
I probably would use more of their services, but they're so damned hard to get started with. Which is a shame because once you've climbed the hill, they're not that hard to use.
Typically I have to approach a product several times, often over a period of months, before the clutter gets out of the way, and the steps-to-start reveal themselves. When I look at the docs, I can tell right off that I now have to learn a lot of extra concepts before I get to Hello World. Usually it takes a few approaches over months before I break through and discover how to use one of these toolkits. There are so many concepts they use that I don't understand, that's why I have to approach and re-approach. Most of their competitors are no better, by thhe way.
They really ought to fix this.
Quote of the Day:
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
-Georg C. Lichtenberg.
And
Everyone’s life is similar, an accumulation of chances and random occurrences producing outcomes no-one expected. Which explanation of events is true?
Tom Stoppard’s,
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.
or Shakespeare’s?
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
Faith suggests Shakespeare has got it right; free will means Stoppard has to be true.
I had planned on keeping my iPhone 4 as long as I could.
I was an original Siemens Mannesmann D2 and then Vodafon user. Once I got my iPhone however I never used my Siemens "Knochen" again. Literally. Never used it again.
Until last week I still used the iPhone 4 but it has become very slow and quite unreliable. And I must use iTunes to get new stuff onto the phone, and that's even worse.
So for some time I have believed that Apple could be replaced, for me, by a phone that was somewhat elegant, hardware-wise, and had software that was as easy and reliable as it should be, 8 years after the iPhone was first introduced. You expect a certain amount of bugginess at the outset, but over time the glitches should be out and the product should become part of the background, the focus being on what you use the product for. The iPhone resists that. Every time they come out with a new version of iTunes or iOS it works differently and I have to find a new set of workarounds.
Please just give me a device that's reasonably nice and Just Works. And for father's day, Stephen did. As a long time AWS user, it just had to come from Amazon:
