confused of calcutta

In late 2004, we had quite a kerfuffle where I work, trying to decide what to do about Firefox. For sure it wasn’t the standard browser. For sure, if we blocked its use, it would not become the standard browser. So like everyone else we ummed and aahed, I spoke to my boss, and we [...]

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal had an article headlined “It’s Not Easy Being Lean”, and reading it, I formed the kernel of this particular snowball.
In the article, a steel company called Nucor is characterised as having just three layers of management between the CEO and the hourly workers on the factory floor. And Toyota, one [...]

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Many years ago, when I was working at Burroughs Corporation, we were building software for mainframes with dumb terminals. And then, as now, we would get regular complaints from “users” about the system being “slow”. [An aside: An old friend, David Taylor, recently reminded me at a conference that the term "user" now seems reserved [...]

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I’ve been at Release 1.0’s Flight School 06 with Sean for the last couple of days. You can read his early comments here. It was another classic Esther Dyson session, she (along with her team) has this uncanny ability to spot something important going on and then bringing together all the movers and shakers into [...]

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I guess it behooves me to document the genealogy of this particular snowball. I’m privileged to belong to a mail list on internet economics moderated by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report. Gordon referred me to a piece by Peter Nicholson, President, Council of Canadian Academics. You can find the speech here. And Gordon in [...]

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Kris Tuttle makes a very interesting point in his comment on my last post.
I have watched with awe as my children share their buying rationales with me, for devices as well as “content”. What they see value in, what they abhor. The polyphonic ringtones example is a classic.
Even if we got conned downstream, many of [...]

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Imagine this. Imagine you are part of a household of three people, living in the same house. Make it simpler, assume you are related by blood and marriage (or its civil equivalent). You have a bunch of 33rpm vinyl albums, some cassette tapes, some videotapes and quite a few CDs and DVDs. Maybe some lacquer [...]

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As recommended by Coding The Markets, I ordered Larry Harris’s Trading and Exchanges; and as recommended by Martin Geddes, I ordered Adam Seligman’s The Problem of Trust.
I’ve now received both books, and I’m working my way through them. Thanks again to both.
A few quick observations:
1. When I looked at Harris’s definitions of trustworthiness and creditworthiness, [...]

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For the last week or so, I’ve noticed that I get the odd site linking to me that has nothing at all to do with the subject or tone of my blog. I guess link-spamming has been happening for a while and I’ve just been lucky so far.
Since I don’t actually display those that link [...]

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I’m trying to get more information, but this story got my attention this morning.
I quote from the press release:
A program to train over 400 thousand people in open source software - as part of Mission Science - will start on Monday, June 12 in Venezuela. This training program will be carried out by the National [...]

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