Month: November 2007

Don’t complain about the game. Change the game you’re playing.

Don’t complain about the game. Change the game you’re playing.: The people who insist on telling you that you can’t are often actually saying I can’t. For whatever reason: fear, self-doubt, teachers, managers or parents who quash them (whom they let squash them), a complete lack of belief in their own power, a kind of sublimated jealousy and rage because you succeed where, of course, they “can’t.”

It’s true that this stuff sometimes comes straight from the mouths of people who care (or purport to care) about you, your business, your product, your career, whatever. They may think they’re trying to do right by you, but I’ve found that the people who say such things are afraid of life… not just for themselves, but for you, too. They’re afraid you might fail because they’re so horribly afraid of failing. They’re afraid that you might succeed, too, because what kind of light would that cast on their failure to do exactly what you’re doing right?[Great piece on success, failure, and making stuff happen.]
Source: (24)Slash7

Creating People-Friendly Streets

Creating People-Friendly Streets (Gotham Gazette, November 2007): Against this backdrop, many West Side residents and elected officials believe the time has come to reclaim the streets as public space. In November, several hundred people filled the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan to hear Jan Gehl, the Danish urban planner renowned for humanizing the streets of Copenhagen, London and dozens of other cities. Gehl’s talk launched the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance, a campaign to radically reconfigure the streets led by Transportation Alternatives, the Project for Public Spaces and the Open Planning Project.

Gehl is working as a consultant for the transportation department. With a team of volunteers, he conducted studies of how the streets are used in various parts of the city and made recommendations for supporting “walkability” in public life. [Go, Go!, GO! (Am I enthusiastically for all this? Mmmm, yes!)]

NYC’s “Flawed” Traffic Plan Brought to You by… Toyota

CBS 2’s award-winning political reporter tells us that "Londoners are now cloning license plates to avoid congestion fees" (note they’re not copying license plates — they’re cloning them. Terrifying). She doesn’t tell us how widespread the practice is, how many people might be doing it or how it may be impacting a system that has reduced traffic congestion by 70,000 vehicles per day and is raising $250 million a year for mass transit (You’d think it would be easy for an award-winning investigative reporter to find this sort of information). Rather, Kramer gives some airtime to Westchester obstructionist Assembly member Richard Brodsky, incorrectly referring to him as "head of the Congestion Mitigation Commission."[Oy.]
Source: StreetsBlog

Russianoff and Schneiderman Map the MTA’s Road to ‘Ruin’

Russianoff and Schneiderman Map the MTA’s Road to ‘Ruin’: Spitzer has a lot on his plate, but ending Albany’s systemic abuse of our 7.5 million straphangers should be at or near the top of the pile. He must work with the Legislature and the MTA board, both to avoid a fare hike in 2008 and to set a new agenda for our state’s mass transit program – an agenda that breaks with the unsustainable and inexcusable policies of the last 12 years. [What a mess…]
Source: StreetsBlog

Apple, where are the rentals?

Apple, where are the rentals?:

Over the past few weeks, the studio bosses have been reversing course and praising apple again.  Warner Chief, Edgar Bronfman recently got caught praising Apple’s iPhone and iPod lines.  Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball reports on  Doug Morris‘ admission that the Entertainment industry had/has no idea what they are doing technology-wise.  In fact they were so stupid that they couldn’t even know who was smart enough to hire to figure it out.  That is Calculus Integral stupid – and it seems about right. Quote:

"There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist," Morris explains. "That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. "We didn’t know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."

[It’s amazing that these folks can’t even get to let’s try a whole bunch of things and see what works and what doesn’t — including Apple’s solutions. Shameful…]
Source: 9 to 5 Mac – Apple Intelligence

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy: The company itself is also trying hard to reduce its drain on the environment. Google is working to reduce the energy expenditure of its data centers across the world, all of which need power and cooling for the servers, and plans to be carbon neutral by the end of the current year. It has also been developing an array of solar cells to power its California headquarters, the Googleplex, and is involved in an initiative to arrive at more energy-efficient computers.

Presumably, the idea behind this move is as follows: if you can’t persuade people that burning coal is a bad idea ecologically, providing them with a cheaper, cleaner alternative makes it more expensive to pollute than not, and even if shareholders don’t care about the trees, they’ll care about the bottom line. At a time when report after report highlights the growing damage done to the planet through the use of fossil fuels, this move by Google to spur renewable energy uptake ought to be applauded.

[Excellent. Git’er done! The flip side of evil.]

GDrive: Three Ways it Could be a Game Changer

GDrive: Three Ways it Could be a Game Changer: The difference between local and online storage in this case will not just be the absence of space limitations, the data will also be accessible to the nearly infinite computing power of Google. Though it’s a nontraditional use of the world, I think Henry Blodget is on to something important when he writes this morning about GDrive that “‘cloud computing’ represents a paradigm shift similar in magnitude to the one that ushered in the PC age.” Both for individual users and in anonymous aggregate, there’s magic that’s possible when our data is so accessible to unlimited processing power.[Everyone ready to Google with all of this? That’s what I thought…]
Source: Read/WriteWeb