well alrighty then. the air traffic control system command center makes my life a whole lot easier by offering realtime airport status updates. although personal experience makes me a bit suspicious when i read that at chicago ohare, “Traffic is experiencing Gate Hold and Taxi delays of less than 15 minutes in length.”
[via camworld]
can’t remember where i swiped it from, but best beats first is an interesting counterargument to the ubiquitous ‘first mover’ platitude:
“In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn’t even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM. Similarly, the first portable computers came from now-dead companies like Osborne Computer. Today we use portables primarily from such companies as Dell and IBM. Or consider the ubiquitous Palm-Pilot. It was hardly the first to market, lagging years behind early leaders Sharp and — in particular — Apple, with its high-profile Newton MessagePad.”
“The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant’s prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.”
mental note: for the ears – mp3 on linux howto. for the eyes – easily extractable m$ truetype fonts for linux.
[mp3 howto via rc3 | truetype fonts via zeldman]
ben brown bounces back bearing a box:
“happyNETbox will very shortly be a open platform, open development browser assistant and information
management system.”“While there will be some functionality overlap with my former company’s product, Deepleap, this is an
entirely new code base based on different technology, and with a different focus. This is not Deepleap, version 2. This is something new.”
[it’s nice that ben hasn’t completely succumbed to the dark side]
“look ma! golly, it’s action item!”
“no, no jimmy. the resemblance is uncanny from a distance, but it’s actually the geek superhero -captain perl! oh jimmy, watch him obfuscate those evil ne’er-do-wells.”
[ geek superhero link via moodswings]
joel spolsky is merging the spirit of the cluetrain and opensource with his open blueprint companies proposal:
“I’ve begun to notice a variation on Open Source, where people share code, which I’m going to call Open Blueprint, where people share plans and ideas for creating companies.”
“It’s just like the open source process, but it’s not code I’m creating: it’s a company blueprint. I get patches from all over. I get a few wrong, dumb patches from people who suggest that I should pay everybody what they demand, which I don’t add to my blueprint. I get a lot of bug fixes, like the person who gracefully pointed out that I misspelled both Torvalds and Stroustrup. I get a lot of smart discussion about the hard questions, like equality within levels. I apply the patches that are good and ignore the ones that aren’t with a polite “thanks for sharing”.
Not a lot of companies have their compensation policies on the web. (ArsDigita does). In fact most companies seem to make it a secret; telling other people what your salary is can be a firing offense. That’s outrageous. Fog Creek is an Open Blueprint company: the “code” for running our company is up there for anyone to see, copy, enhance, and tweak.”
interesting that his first ‘app’ is the company’s compensation policy.
maybe you’ve got some extra time on your hands and you’re interested in <cheap joke>how to be a guru</cheap joke>
[via dack]