The Importance of Linux
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"The Importance of RSS"
"The Importance of RSS"
06/22/2005 02:21 AMTPM on the importance of words
TPM on the importance of words
04/15/2004 10:30 AM
This is precisely the sort of inane mumbojumbo that will --
perhaps literally -- get us all killed. ...The importance of words
is a conceit of wordsmiths, certainly. But they are important --
especially when they bleed through into thought and action, which
happens more often than you'd think.,
TPM is becoming almost
too widely-read to be postworthy, but Josh really puts things into
perspective with this post.
For an example of what all this jingoistic gibberish can result in,
see the
post below it.
Importance of Brand
Importance of Brand
02/10/2004 02:45 AM As has been reported everywhere this morning, Mozilla has renamed
Firebird. The new Firefox trademark is the result of a naming conflict
with another open source project, and the process has been written up
by those involved: Ben Goodger,...
The importance of being stateful
The importance of being stateful
04/22/2004 11:52 AMThe importance of the veep, then and now
The importance of the veep, then and now
07/06/2004 04:48 PMThe Importance of Place
The Importance of Place
06/17/2005 03:28 PM
Place, the place we call home, the place
we belong to, defines us. When we have lost our sense of place, we
have lost our soul.
Last Christmas I wrote a piece about
homelessness, and suggested that the homeless and the addicted are
a perfect metaphor for all of us living in modern civilization. I
wrote:
Civilization is our Pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on
consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and
gives
us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive
product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that
life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The
monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander
the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really
home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is
our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting
fires
on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can
get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already
drug-addicted at birth.
So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be
frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the
mirror. It is we who are
homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit,
walk away from The Man, and find our way home?
On another
occasion I wrote:
Know your place. We are all part
of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, but ultimately we have our own
place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and
every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place.
If
you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. A house is
not
a place, though if it's open it can be part of one. A mind is not a
place.
The wonderful books of biologist Bernd Heinrich are about birds and
animals, but most of all they are about the places that the creatures
he studies call home, and about the importance of those places. In his
latest book The Geese
of Beaver Bog
he talks about another biologist, David Ehrenfeld, who writes about
animals and the importance of place to them. I've ordered Ehrenfeld's
1994 book Beginning Again,
but I've already read the amazing first chapter
from Amazon's 'search inside' page for the book. The chapter is called
'Places' and here is an extract that shook me to the core of my
being:
Because the turtles [I was
studying in Costa Rica] come out to nest after dark, much of my work
was done at night. There was a great deal of waiting between turtles,
plenty of time to sit on a driftwood log and think. In the first years
of my research I was often the only one on the beach for miles. After
ten or twenty minutes of sitting without using my flashlight, my eyes
adapted to the dark and I could make out forms against the brown-black
sand: the beach plum and coconut palm silhouettes in back, the flicker
of the surf in front, sometimes even the shadowy outline of a trailing
railroad vine or the scurry of a ghost crab at my feet. The air was
heavy and damp with a distinctive primal smell that I can remember but
not describe. The rhythmic roar of the surf a few feet away never
ceased -- my favourite sound. I hear it as I write in my landlocked
office in New Jersey. And then, with ponderous, dramatic slowness, a
giant turtle would emerge from the sea.
Usually I would see the track first, a vivid black line standing out
against the lesser blackness, like the swath of a bulldozer. If I was
closer, I could hear the animal's deep hiss of breath and the sounds
of
her undershell scraping over logs. If there was a moon, I might see
the
light glistening off the parabolic curve of the still wet shell. Size
at night is hard to determine: even the sprightly 180-pounders,
probably nesting for the first time, looked big when nearby, but the
400-pound ancients, with shells nearly four feet long, were colossal
in
the darkness. Then when the excavations of the body pit and egg cavity
were done, if I slowly parted the hind flippers of the now-oblivious
turtle, I could watch the perfect white spheres falling and falling
into the flask-shaped pit scooped into the soft sand.
Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same
slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same
massive bulk with the beaked head and the same large, myopic eyes
rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours,
days
and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene
beach, a Cretaceous beach -- the scene is the same. It is night. The
turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breath and
catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the
oceans form and grow. The turtles were coming here before here was
here. At Tortuguero I learned the meaning of place, and began to
understand how it is bound up with time.
Ehrenfeld goes on to describe the cruel and careless treatment of the
turtles by local fishermen, and how the witnessing of such atrocities
by the President of Costa Rica so enraged him that he took steps to
protect the green turtle's Tortuguero breeding ground in
perpetuity.
Often, at night, I sit out on the back hill behind our house,
overlooking the 1100-acre Albion Hills Conservation Area, with Chelsea
the dog, just paying attention to the sounds and the smells and the
shadowy sights in the moonlight. I soon forget there is a house behind
me, and behind it a community of 34 houses interspersed with
wilderness
wetlands, and beyond it a city of 6 million that is forecast to grow
to
as many as 40 million by the end of this century. To us for a few
moments there is only the wilderness, the sounds of owls and wood
frogs
and wind through the trees that have been here for a hundred thousand
millennia -- the dogwood and the balsam poplar and the maple and the
trembling aspen and the white birch and white cedar and bur oak and
ironwood and pussywillow, and the smells of rain and muskrat and
decaying leaves. And I long to see and feel how this, my adopted home,
this place that has welcomed me and allowed me to be a part of it and
to share in its wonders, looked before man arrived to change it
quickly
and utterly. For even here, where nature is respected and where the
actions of conservation authorities and lack (for now) of development
stress has allowed some of this land to remain unaltered, and some
more
to start the slow path back to something like what it was like before
we arrived, it still bears little resemblance, to the trained eye, to
what it must have been, in the eons of silence and darkness before man
arrived with his noise and artificial light and carelessness and
altered it beyond recognition.
If I am to believe the biologists, the area I call home once probably
looked like these photos:
I can imagine living in a place like this, but only because I do live in a place vaguely
like this. If I were to have spent my whole life living in a city, or
even on a farm, I don't think I could imagine it. And even if I could,
I don't think I could conceive of it as my place, the place to which I
belonged. While this is my adopted home, it is only, naturally, the
place of a rare and scattered minority of humans, the First Nations,
who learned, in ways that we never have and which I cannot hope to
comprehend, to live with the bears and wildcats and mosquitos and
black
flies and bitterly cold winters and lack of year-round food supplies.
Without my protection from these dangers and discomforts, I could
never
call this place home.
So in order to make places like this habitable to us, as we destroyed
the places in the cradles of human civilization that were habitable to
us naturally, we had to reform them with our cities and farms, until
they became unrecognizable, nothing like the pictures above --
terraformed, civilized, converted to a dreadful sameness all over the
planet. These cities and farms were as alien to us as they were to the
creatures that retreated in their wake. When we try to imagine how
bizarre it would be to live on a space station, or on the moon, we
should consider that we have already made a much more profound and
barren adaptation here on our suffering planet.
But these cities and farms are not natural places for humans. They are
not where we lived and thrived for three million years before their
invention. Then we lived in the warm climates of Africa, of South Asia
and of the Southern edge of Europe, when all those lands were heavily
forested. We were and are, like all primates, creatures of the forest,
and specifically of the tropical forest. And while three million years
is but an instant compared to the hundred million years that the giant
green turtles of Tortuguero have called that place home, that tropical
forest is still the place our DNA tells us is our home, our place.
Most of that tropical forest is now destroyed, cleared for cities and
farms, and we have been gone from there so long that the thought of
returning there even if there was room for us, which there is not, is
too terrifying to countenance. So we moved from there to less
hospitable and more dangerous lands and remade them into cities and
farms as well: Since we could not live in these hostile environments
we
destroyed them and built ourselves artificial landscapes, vast alien
prisons which protected us from the terrors of nature and weather but
detached us completely from any sense of place.
So now we are all homeless, six billion of us living in an artificial
world of our own making. We have destroyed our own three-million year
home and most of the homes and places of every other species on Earth,
making them mostly homeless, too, those that we haven't yet made
extinct.
I bow my head to the turtles of Tortuguero. They are so much wiser, so
much more alive than we shallow newcomers to this planet can ever hope
to be. They know the importance of place. They know how to live as
part
of a world to which all life on this planet once belonged. They show
respect for the grand design of our fragile, troubled world, and know
their part in it.
While we are merely astonishingly fierce, wondrously adaptable,
utterly
homeless, arrogant beyond reason, hopelessly lost and addicted to the
perpetuation of our own folly.
|
"talks about the importance "
"talks about the importance "
08/27/2004 01:45 PMImportance of a PPC Bid Manager
Importance of a PPC Bid Manager
11/25/2002 10:07 PMStickysauce Nov 25 2002 9:20PM ET
The importance of dreams
The importance of dreams
08/22/2004 07:25 PMI'm back home again; a day later than I was supposed to. With some
very interesting tan lines, I might add.
My Thursday night was one of the strangest ever. Suffice to say that
I ended up alone, in an Irish pub in Reykjavik, listening to
melancholic guitar music and downing a horribly expensive beer. I
also had a fever (of which I was not aware of the time), which
produced some of the most vivid and strangest dreams I've seen in a
long while, when I finally clambered to the youth hostel.
So I dreamed. In one dream, I was crossing a street, and as the
traffic lights went green, all of the cars turned to horses and had to
be herded away so I could cross the street. In a second dream, I saw
myself find an internet terminal, and buying tickets to Oulu for the
day that I arrive in Helsinki.
I wake up - still feverish - and recount some of the dreams to my
travel companion. She looks at me, with a slightly worrying look, as
I start to ponder that the idea from the last dream is not really that
bad.
In our hotel, on the last night, I find a free Internet terminal that
looks just like the one in my dream. So I buy tickets to Oulu,
wondering who the heck gave my subconscious a free reign over my
credit card.
For the rest of the trip, I worry about whether I'm going to make the
connection, or the inevitable gaping hole that will be left on my bank
account, or whether this was such a good idea at all, since I have
been doing nothing but travel, and I shall be doing some heavy travel
in the near future as well. (Bleargh.)
But Outi meets me on the airport, and one hug removes all doubt and
weariness.
Later in the evening, the air is charged with a magical feeling that
cannot be described in my crude words. It's as if one touch could
set the world on fire; as if the thunder outside came from your mind;
as if one look made your heart explode; as if tears and laughter and
pain and pleasure were all the same thing. No masks, no hiding behind
them. No buts, no ifs. Just...
*sighs deeply* This belongs to poets and songwriters and
philosophers; not simple engineers like me. Shutting up now.
The Importance of Collaborative
Development
The Importance of Collaborative
Development
04/12/2004 08:48 AMThe Importance of Information
Architecture
The Importance of Information
Architecture
11/20/2002 04:37 AMThe Importance Of Email Backup
The Importance Of Email Backup
07/28/2004 04:58 PMWebDevInfo Jul 28 2004 9:01PM GMT
Importance of the ODP to Search Engines
Importance of the ODP to Search Engines
02/09/2003 10:57 PMWho can name a major SE that doesn't use the Dmoz data?
The Importance Of The Betamax Precedent
The Importance Of The Betamax Precedent
01/27/2004 02:53 PMBy now, most people are quite familiar with the old Supreme Court
"Betamax" ruling that said that a technology was legal as long as it
had "substantial non-infringing uses." That's the standard under
which many technologies we use today have been developed - and
now it's under attack by the entertainment industry. Lawyers
for the entertainment industry insist they're not trying to reverse
the Betamax precedent, but to just set some limits on it. Supporters
of the original decision say the entertainment industry still has
always been looking for ways to get around the Betamax decision (and
did so partially via the DMCA). What the article forgets to point out
however, is the biggest joke in all of this: the entertainment
industry that battled so hard against the Betamax decision was, by
far, the biggest beneficiary of that decision. The fact that they
still won't admit they made a mistake twenty years ago, and that
maybe, just maybe, opening up technologies leads to
more
opportunities to profit shows just how short sighted the industry
is. They're trying to kill off a legal ruling that has helped them
generate billions of dollars each year.
Cocoa# and the Importance of Developers
Cocoa# and the Importance of Developers
08/14/2004 08:45 PMApple understands the flow-on effect of having Java/.Net developers
using their platform. Chris Adamson, was asking whats the benefit of a
great java environment from Apple, if there are no Desktop Java Apps.
Well, couple of things, firstly some of these guys are writing simple
Swing Apps in Java, and its good to know they will work and look good
on Macs. But secondly, these developers are making sure software
doesn't break when used on Macs.
The Importance of Microsoft Being
Transparent
The Importance of Microsoft Being
Transparent
02/01/2005 09:56 PMAt next week's VSLive conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Corp.
will be announcing the status of such tools as Visual Studio 2005 Beta
2, SQL Server 2005 Beta 3 and the first Community Technology Preview
of Indigo. S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the
Developer Division at Microsoft, who is one of the show's keynote
speakers, sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft to discuss
the company's plans for these tool releases, as well as the developer
ecosystem, dealing with open source and more. Prior to his current
role overseeing the developer division, Soma served as corporate vice
president of the Windows Engineering Services and Solutions group
within the Windows Division. Prashant Sridharan, senior product
manager for Visual Studio Team System, joined Somasegar in the
interview.
Explaining the importance of context in
ID mgmt.
Explaining the importance of context in
ID mgmt.
06/17/2005 04:49 PMLast week, I asked if an identity needed to be unique, and answered
that yes, it does, within a given context. That seems like an
excellent segue to a discussion of context and how it relates to
identity.
Instant Messaging Taking On More
Importance
Instant Messaging Taking On More
Importance
04/27/2004 11:42 AMFor all the talk of a battle over search and web-based email, not as
many people have been paying attention to the
growing battle
over instant messaging services. Many people spend a lot of time
each day in their IM programs - sometimes even more than their
browser. Realizing this, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are all working to
more closely integrate other aspects of their service into instant
messaging. I'm still surprised that none of them have more actively
turned their instant messaging program into a Friendster-like social
networking service - since it seems like a much more natural fit than
having to go into a website and list all your friends. With most IM
services, you already have your list of friends
and there's an
actual practical use to it beyond surfing through friends of friends.
The article also mentions (as we have
before) the idea that Google should offer their own instant messaging
client. Of course, the article brushes over the issue of
interoperability, claiming that people haven't really been asking for
it. That's not true. I've been asking for it for years, and know
plenty of others who have as well. While the various services believe
they need to stay as separate islands for the purposes of "lock-in,"
they're simply driving people away. I wouldn't need to use products
like Trillian if Yahoo or AIM worked with each other. Just like text
messaging on phones and email systems over a decade ago - once people
decided to let them communicate across boundaries, they found that
everyone did a lot more with them. It doesn't take people
away, it makes them use the services more.
The Importance Of ... Law and IT: Apple
v. Real v. Microsoft
The Importance Of ... Law and IT: Apple
v. Real v. Microsoft
09/03/2004 12:59 AMCorante Sep 3 2004 4:45AM GMT
Labour stresses importance of web for
campaigning
Labour stresses importance of web for
campaigning
09/27/2004 03:09 AMPublicTechnology.net Sep 27 2004 7:12AM GMT
Importance of Inbound Anchor Text
Importance of Inbound Anchor Text
03/11/2003 01:22 AM"The cache states "These terms only appear in links pointing to this
page:". "
Google Gives Web Page History More
Importance
Google Gives Web Page History More
Importance
06/17/2005 03:39 PMStickysauce Jun 17 2005 7:02AM GMT
IMUs Gaining in Importance for Robots
IMUs Gaining in Importance for Robots
03/06/2004 02:03 AMA new
article at Small Times discusses the growing importance of tiny
gyroscopes and accelerometers for use as sensors in the next
generation
of robots. Together these sensors form an Inertial Measurement Unit
(IMU) and provide robots with a sense of acceleration and angular
rate of rotational motion in multiple degrees of freedom. An IMU is a
must if you're building a Segway-like 2 wheel balancing robot, a
dynamically balancing biped, an AUV or any number of other advanced
robot designs. The cost of building an IMU has been greatly reduced in
recent years thanks to high-performance, low-cost MEMS gyros
and accelerometers.
Companies like Rotomotion are now
able to sell complete
IMUs inexpensive enough for hobbyists but of high enough quality for
commercial and military applications.
Motorola centre grows in importance
Motorola centre grows in importance
05/10/2004 09:46 PMthestar.com.my May 11 2004 1:49AM GMT
The Importance of the Hypertext Document
Title
The Importance of the Hypertext Document
Title
04/17/2004 03:30 AMWebmasterBase Apr 17 2004 7:49AM GMT
The Importance Of Interface Text (part
1)
The Importance Of Interface Text (part
1)
03/20/2003 03:17 PMThe words that a user sees on your application's menus and labels
are often as important as the code that drives the application. Using
the
wrong word, or a term that is ambiguous or hard to understand, can
often
make the difference between an application that is easy and fun to
use, and
one that is just plain irritating. This article discusses the
importance of
interface text and offers tips and advice to help you create clear,
usable
and easily comprehensible text for your application's ...
Quality control: The importance of
website testing
Quality control: The importance of
website testing
12/12/2003 04:32 AMThe importance of design symmetry in
your Java types
The importance of design symmetry in
your Java types
09/17/2004 08:21 AMZDNet Sep 17 2004 12:39PM GMT
Microsoft Learns the Importance of
Knowing Geography
Microsoft Learns the Importance of
Knowing Geography
08/19/2004 06:40 PMU.S. companies don't always do so well when it comes to knowing their
geography. When Delta Airlines bought Pam Am's famous international
route network in the 1990s, they had to hand out atlases so the
employees and company executives would know where the airline was
flying. Now comes a story in the Guardian about the
c
ostly blunders Microsoft has made through geographic ignorance.
Their gaffs cover not only geography but also political and cultural
sensitivity issues. While some of the errors probably couldn't be
avoided, what is surprising is that others could have and should have
been caught, but Microsoft took a lackadaisical approach. Working
worlds away in Redmond, the issues probably seemed trifling compared
with the importance of getting the software out the door on time.
Microsoft acknowledges that those errors cost real money and more
importantly tarnished the company's reputation. Given the arrogant
way they acted in the past about such things, it's almost nice to see
them publicly admitting to messing up, and agreeing that they need to
be more culturally sensitive (even if, yes, it should help them avoid
multi-million dollar blunders involving having their own software
banned or their own employees tossed in jail).
The Importance of...: The Obsessively
Annotated Introduction to the INDUCE Act
The Importance of...: The Obsessively
Annotated Introduction to the INDUCE Act
06/25/2004 04:10 AMthis detailed analysis .. deconstructs ..
withering
corante.com/importance/archives/004563.html
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EU Commissioner comments on the
importance of eHealth in Europe
EU Commissioner comments on the
importance of eHealth in Europe
12/15/2003 07:01 AMPublicTechnology.net Dec 15 2003 6:09AM ET
Businesses declare importance of skills
training
Businesses declare importance of skills
training
01/05/2005 06:47 AMPersonal Computer World Jan 5 2005 10:47AM GMT
Search Gains Importance at Online
Retailers
Search Gains Importance at Online
Retailers
12/10/2003 07:50 PMAnalysts quoted in a story by CNET News.com's Stephanie Olsen called
the move a direct challenge to eBay and Google to stake out territory
as the premier ...
Defence White paper stresses importance
of technology for MOD
Defence White paper stresses importance
of technology for MOD
12/12/2003 04:35 AMPublicTechnology.net Dec 12 2003 3:14AM ET
Recalling World War II, Bush Stresses
Importance of Iraq
Recalling World War II, Bush Stresses
Importance of Iraq
06/02/2004 04:47 PMPresident Bush told new Air Force officers today that the campaign in
Iraq is worthy of America's mission in history and is central to
defeating terrorism worldwide.
WTO rules on food names: geography
retains importance
WTO rules on food names: geography
retains importance
03/17/2005 03:27 AMA little snippet of rather ambiguous, but darn interesting news came
out this week from the World Trade Organisation and I’m rather
surprised that it hasn’t been discussed more in the
blogosphere….
Direct and Related
Links for 'WTO rules on food names: geography retains
importance'
The Importance Of Back-Ups: Tech Firms
Often Unprepared To Replace Their CEO
The Importance Of Back-Ups: Tech Firms
Often Unprepared To Replace Their CEO
08/03/2004 07:34 PMSilicon Valley's business culture is partly to blame: It traditionally
has worshiped its visionary companyf ounders and charismatic leaders.
Tech companies' rapid product cycles add to a short-term mentality.
And executives working on cutting-edge technologies are loath to
embrace stodgy management structures. By Deborah Lohse and Dean
Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News (via MyAppleMenu)
Guest Writer Simon Waldman: The
Importance of Being Permanent
Guest Writer Simon Waldman: The
Importance of Being Permanent
02/01/2005 08:40 PMThe Guardian's Web guy: "Without permanence you slip off the search
engines. Without permanence, bold ideas like 'news as conversation'
fall away, because you're shutting down the conversation before it has
barely started. Without permanence, you might be
on the web,
but you're certainly not
part of it."
Corante > The Importance of... >
Copyright Office on INDUCE Act (IICA):
It isn't Strong Enough
Corante > The Importance of... >
Copyright Office on INDUCE Act (IICA):
It isn't Strong Enough
07/24/2004 06:11 PMCopyright Office on INDUCE Act: It isn't Strong Enough .. Copyright
chief wants crackdown .. There
is
corante.com/importance/archives/005218.php
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site | 3 links
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