Narry....retrospecting

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 10:16:00 +0000

The Great Pyramids at Giza- One never gets tired of them

The mystifying Pyramids at Giza, which I got to visit recently gave me a chance to see the Wonder of the World, the first I got to see. The Giza town is a suburb of the Cairo city. The pyramids there are considered the second set of pyramids built after the step pyramids at Sakara. There are 9 pyramids at Giza with 3 large pyramids and 6 smallers ones. One can see the sandstone on the pyramids still. They were built at around 3000 B.C. and they are still intact.

I took a horse ride to go around. I need to mention about the horse too... this was the first time I was on a horse :-) The horse was intelligent enough for me, it never started running around till the guide kicked it.

I got my first view from the cab and it is on a high ground compared to the city.

I took a guide to go around the place. The guide could talk and understand English which was a blessing for us as very few locals understood or could talk good English. We were 3 of us and each took a horse and one of them yelling once he was on the horse... we rode into the desert which I should say started from Giza. I was holding the horse in one hand and clicking the camera to glory with the another. Normally one starts with the Sphinx and gets to see the Great Pyramid of Khufu, then the Pyramid of Khefre and then of Menkaure. This we realised after we finished visiting each of them.

We started from the side entrance of the Giza plateau. We rode over the desert for sometime looking at the cemetries of the servants of the Pharoahs where some escavation work was still going on. When we went over a raised desert sand, I got the best view of my life... I cud see the three Great Pyramids before me not far not near.... I stood there staring at them for sometime as I cudnt take the fact that I was looking at that wonder which I always wanted to see and just saw them on Discovery or NGC or read on the net. We stood there admiring the desert and panaromic view of the pyramids. We could see all the pyramids from there all 9 of them. Though they were still far from where we were standing they looked huge. We set out to go closer to them. We took some snaps of the panaromic view, me trying to cover all the 9 of them in one shot.

As one can see from the picture above it was a desert plateau and we rode down and up again in the desert sand and went closer to the third largest one the Pyramid of Menkaure. There are three small pyramids beside it, one of the wife of Menkaure and other 2 of the wives of Khefre.

Once could go into the pyramids by paying a small fee and the fee is different for each of the pyramids. By the time we reached the smaller pyramid it was closed for tourists. So we planned to go into the second pyramid as the first was closed completely for tourists. I could see the shadow of the clouds on the pyramids moving slowly. Luckily it was a cloudy day and the forecast said few showers. We rode on to the second Great Pyramid which fascinated me the most since the start. One can see the sandstone on the top of this pyramid which hasnt eroded since ages. As we were riding I suddenly realised that the cover of my camera (it's a Sony T3) fell over somewhere. The guide went on the horse back and could find it in a minute to my luck. We asked the guide to hold the horses and we set to go into the Pyramid of Khefre. We paid 40 L.E. took tickets and set to get into them. When we inquired at the counter how long will it take inside he gave a smile and said 10 mins to 4 hrs... its ur wish if u want to stay inside. We had to deposit our cameras as they were not allowed inside.

The path way into the pyramid was a low one where one has to bend down and walk. The way went like fill steep down and up. It got darker and the air heavier. It was hot inside and we walked up the pyramid (not much). The passage is small so one had to wait in case some one is coming from the other side. Finally we entered into a small room and we realised that it was the end of our visit inside the pyramid. The room had a high roof and had a tomb on the right. The tomb was empty as we were told that whatever was found at these sites were moved to the Egyptian Musesum. So we looked around in that room and set back down and up. In the path way I realised that there were other paths more inside the pyramid where lights were on but was blocked for tourists. We came out had some fresh air to breath. Then we took some snaps before the pyramid and we set to climb the pyramid atleast a few blocks. We climbed a few blocks and took some snaps. Each block was as high as I (5'8") was.

We set out again on the horse to see the largest of all, the Pyramid of Khufu. It normally looks smaller compared to the pyramid of Khefre as the pyramid of Khufu is on a lower ground. It was a perfect pyramid with all the sides with equal dimensions before the top block fell over some time back. Still from what I have read the pyramids are perfect geometric structures with the maximum error between side lengths an astonishing 0.1%Now one can see a tower on the top which I guess is used for communication or for saving the pyramid from lighting. These pyramids are under restoration and to save them from nature. I read a Arab proverb "Man fears Time, yet Time fears the Pyramids". All the time I was trying to take a mental picture of the pyramids which I could remember in the years to come.

We rode on the tar road through the cars and vehicles going through. We took some snaps there and as it was closed for public entrance we set out further to see the Sphinx. The Sphinx as we know is a women with a body of a Lion. One of the theories is that it is the protector of the Pyramids and sits there guarding the pyramids. The Sphinx was under restoration and we were not allowed near it. We took some snaps from the far and we set ourselves in a coffee shop opposite the site. By this time the clouds became dark, which allowed me to take some more pictures as the sun was helping me. Then wonders in wonder it started raining. Normally it rains 3-4 days in a year and when I visited the pyramids it started raining. Luckily for us we finished visiting them when it started raining. We could see the face of the Sphinx getting wet in rain. The rain lasted for 10 mins and again it became sunny - a perfect desert temperature.

I took pictures of the trio, the pyramid of Khefre, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Khufu. It was hard to leave the place as it was a magninficiet view from there and I wanted to sit there staring at 40 centuries old monuments.

As I started writing this blog some 3 weeks after I saw them, I can remember each of those views and each of those mystic pyramids. One can never get tired of them.

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 07:35:00 +0000

'Brain itch' keeps songs in the head

I just can't get that song out of my head...

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3221499.stm

Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.

In Germany, this type of song is known as an "ohrwurm" - an earworm - and typically has a high, upbeat melody and repetitive lyrics that verge between catchy and annoying.

Songs such as the Village People's YMCA, Los Del Rio's Macarena, and the Baha Men's Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a "cognitive itch," according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.

"A cognitive itch is a kind of metaphor that explains how these songs get stuck in our head," Professor Kellaris told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.

"Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.

"The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds."

'Insidious and blatant'

Professor Kellaris has presented the early results of his earworm research at a conference on Consumer Psychology.

He said that virtually everyone suffered from a cognitive itch at one time or another.

The Village People owed much success to earworms

"Across surveys I found that from 97% to 99% of the population is susceptible to earworms at some time," he stated.

"But certainly some people are more susceptible than others. Women tend to be more susceptible than men, and musicians are more susceptible to them than non-musicians."

The research is of particular interest to both the pop industry - looking to boost sales - and to advertisers, who often use jingles to get their brand name stuck in the head of listeners.

"For both advertising purposes and pop music purposes, you want something that once heard is not forgotten quickly or easily," explained jingle writer Chris Smith, adding that a good earworm was "Insidious - and often quite blatant".

"One of the key elements of an earworm is repetition," he said.

"If you have something with a lot of varied content, it's not so easily assimilated.

"So really, I would have thought that for practical purposes an earworm is really something that people can take on very quickly and then reproduce while walking down the street, much to everybody else's annoyance."

Clearing the mind

Even the greatest musicians had suffered with earworms, Mr Smith said.

Mozart's children would "infuriate" him by playing melody and scales on the piano below his room - but stopping before completing the tune.

"He would have to rush down and complete the scale because he couldn't bear to listen to an unresolved scale," Mr Smith related.

Even Mozart suffered with cognitive itches

Professor Kellaris said that his research had shown that there was, however, no standard for creating an earworm - people could react differently to different tunes.

"I compiled a top 10 list of earworms in the US, but the number one item is simply the category 'other' - which means that any tune is prone to become an earworm," he said. "It's highly idiosyncratic."

And he added that there was also no guaranteed way of ever getting the song off the brain.

"Replacement strategies rarely work, because as we search our memories for a replacement tune, we're likely to come up with another earworm," he admitted.

"Some people swear by completion strategies - if you listen through a piece in its entirety, some times that will make it go away."

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:17:00 +0000

Latest email virus will delete data files every 3rd day of the month.

F-Secure Virus Information

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:27:00 +0000

Yahoo! Answers - A place where u can Ask. Answer. Discover.
Yahoo! Answers - Home

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:58:00 +0000

The greatness of Apple Computer uniting with chipmaker Intel -- a corporate tie-up that publications worldwide hailed as "historic."

From: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/14/BUG70GN6MS1.DTL

Macworld Expo came to a close at San Francisco's Moscone Center on Friday, leaving an awestruck world to ponder the glory and the greatness of Apple Computer uniting with chipmaker Intel -- a corporate tie-up that publications worldwide hailed as "historic."

To which I say: Get over it.

It's a computer, for goodness sake, a plastic box that does lots of really cool things. Does it matter any longer how it does them?

Who cares if the box has bits and pieces made by Intel or IBM or Samsung or any one of thousands of other electronics manufacturers?

Reality check: You pick up a phone and you get a dial tone. Do you honestly care how this happens?

Even more miraculous, you place a bag of kernels in a microwave oven and you get popcorn, without any visible heat source. Can you even begin to understand the physics of that? Do you really want to?

A computer's no different.

I stopped by the Apple Store near Union Square on Friday. I wanted to see what others had to say about our supposed love affair with tech.

I found Kris Caberto, an 18-year-old student, fooling around with a sleek iMac computer. I asked if she cares what kind of chip the machine contains.

"Not really," Caberto replied with a shrug. "A computer's a computer. As long as it works, right?"

Read more at : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/14/BUG70GN6MS1.DTL

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 13:43:00 +0000

Mustang! This is Ghost Rider 110...

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:38:00 +0000

ChromoZone - The Vivid World

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 08:01:00 +0000

Airtel vs Hutch: And the winner is...
Amit Ranjan Rai & Aarti Menon Carroll January 04, 2006

Airtel vs Hutch: And the winner is...

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:28:00 +0000

Active FTP vs. Passive FTP, a Definitive Explanation
(http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html)

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:58:00 +0000

The World's Most Admired CEOs of 2005; Microsoft's Bill Gates Named Most Admired Global Leader in Burson-Marsteller's New Reputation Survey

DECEMBER 14, 2005 - 07:00 ET

NEW YORK--(CCNMatthews - Dec 14, 2005) -Despite the continuing controversy surrounding today's corporate executives, leadership still shapes a company's destiny. A new global study conducted by Burson-Marsteller with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) names Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, the world's most admired business leader. The 2005 CEO CapitalTM study asked more than 600 global business influentials in 65 countries to write in which CEO or chairman they admire most in the business world today. The CEO/chairman rankings appear below.

2005 World's Most Admired Chief Executives
Rank CEO/Chairman Company Country

1 Bill Gates Microsoft U.S.
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2 Steve Jobs Apple U.S.
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3 Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway U.S.
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4 Michael Dell Dell U.S.
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5 Richard Branson Virgin Group U.K.
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6 John Browne BP U.K.
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7 Carlos Ghosn Nissan Motor & Renault Japan/France
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8 N. R. Narayana Murthy Infosys Technologies India
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9 Jeffrey Immelt General Electric U.S.
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10 Rupert Murdoch News Corporation Australia
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11 John Bond HSBC Holdings U.K.
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12 John Chambers Cisco Systems U.S.
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13 Jorma Ollila Nokia Finland
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14 Terry Leahy Tesco U.K.
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15 Lakshmi Mittal Mittal Steel Netherlands
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Source: Understanding CEO CapitalTM, 2005, Burson-Marsteller.

"The selection of Bill Gates as the 2005 world's most admired leader not only recognizes his ongoing stewardship at the company he founded but it also acknowledges the powerful effect that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has had on Bill Gates' reputation," remarked Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, Burson-Marsteller's chief knowledge & research officer worldwide and the study's architect. "Leaders and their companies can no longer safely ignore the value placed on corporate responsibility and commitment by 21st century citizens." Several interesting characteristics about the world's top 15 most admired leaders surfaced:

1. Despite the predominance of American companies among the top four most admired leaders, more than half (nine of 15 or 60 percent) represent other regions -- UK (4), Finland (1), Netherlands (1), Japan/France (1), India (1) and Australia (1).

2. Eight of the top 15 leaders (53 percent) are company founders.

3. All of the global most admired are insider CEOs (CEOs who have been with the same company for three years or more).

4. No female CEOs or chairmen were chosen.

"Business decision-makers clearly voted for long-term performance and proven track records over fleeting success," said Patrick Ford, Burson-Marsteller's Global Corporate/Financial Practice chair. "The tenures of these top-ranking CEOs are not short-lived. They had an average tenure of 21 years to repeatedly prove themselves."

About the 2005 CEO Capital Study

Burson-Marsteller has been conducting landmark research on CEO and corporate reputation since 1997. The new 2005 CEO Capital study was conducted in 65 countries online with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) between May and July 2005. It was completed by 685 business influentials -- CEOs, senior executives, financial analysts, business media and government officials. Roughly one-third of respondents came from North America (26 percent), Europe (32 percent) and Asia-Pacific (32 percent), and one-tenth from Latin America (10 percent). Participants were drawn from a cross-section of 19 industries. Please visit www.ceogo.com for more information.

About Burson-Marsteller

Burson-Marsteller (www.burson-marsteller.com), established in 1953, is a leading global public relations and public affairs firm. It provides clients with strategic thinking and program execution across a full range of public relations, public affairs, advertising and web-related services. The firm's seamless worldwide network consists of 50 wholly owned offices and 43 affiliate offices, together operating in 57 countries across six continents. Burson-Marsteller is a part of Young & Rubicam Brands, a subsidiary of WPP Group plc (NASDQ: WPPGY), one of the world's leading communications services networks.

About the Economist Intelligence Unit

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) (www.eiu.com) is the world leader in global business intelligence. It is the business-to-business arm of The Economist Group, which publishes The Economist newspaper. The EIU provides geopolitical, economic and business analysis on more than 200 countries, as well as strategic intelligence on key industries and management practices. With over 300 full-time professionals in 40 offices around the world, supported by a global network of more than 700 contributing analysts, the EIU is widely known for its unparalleled coverage of major and emerging markets.

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 14:22:00 +0000

What is it with Wikipedia?

Technology commentator Bill Thompson is a big fan of the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia, despite its faults. But that does not mean he is not aware of them.

John Seigenthaler wrote a scathing article about Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that is created entirely by its readers, with entries which can in the main be edited by anyone who feels they have something useful to contribute, has had an interesting few weeks.

Last month Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg found his Wikipedia biography had been vandalised and contained a number of libellous statements, a story which was widely covered in the national press.

Then former MTV VJ and podcaster Adam Curry admitted to anonymously editing the podcasting entry to remove credit from other people and make his own role in the early days seem more significant.

And at the end of the month, US journalist John Seigenthaler wrote a scathing article in USA Today about the libellous material in his Wikipedia biography. The material was later revealed to have been a prank by someone who thought that the encyclopaedia was a joke site.

Following Mr Siegenthaler's article, the site team changed its policy to require creators of new content to register, although since there is no verification of identities this is hardly likely to make a big difference to anyone intent on vandalism or character assassination.

It was also confirmed that you cannot sue the Wikimedia Foundation for libel in the US because it is a hosting company and not a publisher, and US laws protect online publishers from legal action.

Of course, now that a printed version of the German edition is to be made available this may not keep them out of the courts, at least over in Europe.

Testing time

In the midst of all this controversy, Nature published the results of an analysis of a broad range of entries from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica which shows a different picture.

No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and we should not place complete faith in something which can so easily be undermined through malice or ignorance thanks to its open architecture

Wikipedia survives test

They asked experts to review articles covering scientific topics, without telling the reviewers which source they were looking at; although since the writing styles of the two publications are rather different, it cannot be assumed that the reviewers did not realise.

Even so, the results were impressive. After looking at 42 articles, according to Nature, "only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia.

"But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

One response to this is to wonder at how we manage to live with such inaccurate reference materials. But as the partner of a writer of children's non-fiction work I see at first hand how much work goes into fact-checking for publication, and can sympathise with those writers and editors who occasionally slip up.

Most Wikipedia entries are written and submitted in good faith, and we should not let the contentious areas such as politics, religion or biography shape our view of the project as a whole.

Wikipedia certainly has its detractors. Andrew Orlowski, writing in The Register, a UK-based technology website, is scathing in his dismissal of the site as a cult-like organisation where faith triumphs rationality, and even suggests we look at Wikipedia as "a massively scalable, online role-playing game" where "players can assume fictional online identities and many 'editors' do just that".

The publishers of other encyclopedias, especially the Encyclopedia Britannica, have been similarly negative about the project, although they have a commercial interest in undermining the use of this free online resource so are not completely neutral.

Filtered information

The achievement of the Wikimedia Foundation should not be underestimated, but we should not be surprised if there are errors. No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and we should not place complete faith in something which can so easily be undermined through malice or ignorance thanks to its open architecture.

That does not devalue the project entirely, it just means that we should be sceptical about Wikipedia entries as a primary source of information, and not accept the claims that it marks some form of emergent collective intelligence, a new era in human consciousness or the rebuilding of the Library of Alexandria.

Wikipedia is produced by volunteers, who add entries and edit any page

It is the same with search engine results. Just because something comes up in the top 10 on MSN Search or Google does not automatically give it credibility or vouch for its accuracy or importance.

It tells you something about how the page or site under consideration is viewed by the search engine, but that is really all.

One benefit that might come from the wider publicity that Wikipedia is currently receiving is a better sense of how to evaluate information sources.

Ofcom, the UK's media regulator, is also responsible for media literacy; although it sits oddly with its role investigating competition in the telecoms market or reporting on broadband uptake.

The days when everything you saw on a screen had been carefully filtered, vetted, edited and checked are long gone. Product placement, advertorials and sponsorship are all becoming more common.

An educated audience is the only realistic way to ensure that we are not duped, tricked, fleeced or offended by the media we consume, and learning that online information sources may not be as accurate as they pretend to be is an important part of that education.

I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking.

If the fuss over Siegenthaler, Stoltenberg and Curry means that other readers do the same then it will have been worthwhile. We should not dismiss Wikipedia, but we should not venerate it either.

Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4534712.stm

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:26:00 +0000

Blogger, a product of Pyra, started in August of 1999, and never stopped growing...

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 07:25:00 +0000

The Hindu Business Line : Infosys, Microsoft: Sharing success and silver jubilee

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 03:28:00 +0000

Made in USA
(Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html )

November 2004

(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters. It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)

A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished. "It's so ugly!"

People from other rich countries can scarcely imagine the squalor of the man-made bits of America. In travel books they show you mostly natural environments: the Grand Canyon, whitewater rafting, horses in a field. If you see pictures with man-made things in them, it will be either a view of the New York skyline shot from a discreet distance, or a carefully cropped image of a seacoast town in Maine.

How can it be, visitors must wonder. How can the richest country in the world look like this?

Oddly enough, it may not be a coincidence. Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We're good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at what we're bad at. We're impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it.

This works well in some fields and badly in others. I suspect it works in movies and software because they're both messy processes. "Systematic" is the last word I'd use to describe the way good programmers write software. Code is not something they assemble painstakingly after careful planning, like the pyramids. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, like a charcoal sketch.

In software, paradoxical as it sounds, good craftsmanship means working fast. If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowly and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you.

It sounds like making movies works a lot like making software. Every movie is a Frankenstein, full of imperfections and usually quite different from what was originally envisioned. But interesting, and finished fairly quickly.

I think we get away with this in movies and software because they're both malleable mediums. Boldness pays. And if at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can figure out some hack that will at least conceal the problem.

Not so with cars, or cities. They are all too physical. If the car business worked like software or movies, you'd surpass your competitors by making a car that weighed only fifty pounds, or folded up to the size of a motorcycle when you wanted to park it. But with physical products there are more constraints. You don't win by dramatic innovations so much as by good taste and attention to detail.

The trouble is, the very word "taste" sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears. It seems pretentious, or frivolous, or even effeminate. Blue staters think it's "subjective," and red staters think it's for sissies. So anyone in America who really cares about design will be sailing upwind.

Twenty years ago we used to hear that the problem with the US car industry was the workers. We don't hear that any more now that Japanese companies are building cars in the US. The problem with American cars is bad design. You can see that just by looking at them.

All that extra sheet metal on the AMC Matador wasn't added by the workers. The problem with this car, as with American cars today, is that it was designed by marketing people instead of designers.

Why do the Japanese make better cars than us? Some say it's because their culture encourages cooperation. That may come into it. But in this case it seems more to the point that their culture prizes design and craftsmanship.

For centuries the Japanese have made finer things than we have in the West. When you look at swords they made in 1200, you just can't believe the date on the label is right. Presumably their cars fit together more precisely than ours for the same reason their joinery always has. They're obsessed with making things well.

Not us. When we make something in America, our aim is just to get the job done. Once we reach that point, we take one of two routes. We can stop there, and have something crude but serviceable, like a Vise-grip. Or we can improve it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. When we want to make a car "better," we stick tail fins on it, or make it longer, or make the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion.

Ditto for houses. In America you can have either a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, or a McMansion-- a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, but larger, more dramatic-looking, and full of expensive fittings. Rich people don't get better design or craftsmanship; they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.

We don't especially prize design or craftsmanship here. What we like is speed, and we're willing to do something in an ugly way to get it done fast. In some fields, like software or movies, this is a net win.

But it's not just that software and movies are malleable mediums. In those businesses, the designers (though they're not generally called that) have more power. Software companies, at least successful ones, tend to be run by programmers. And in the film industry, though producers may second-guess directors, the director controls most of what appears on the screen. And so American software and movies, and Japanese cars, all have this in common: the people in charge care about design-- the former because the designers are in charge, and the latter because the whole culture cares about design.

I think most Japanese executives would be horrified at the idea of making a bad car. Whereas American executives, in their hearts, still believe the most important thing about a car is the image it projects. Make a good car? What's "good?" It's so subjective. If you want to know how to design a car, ask a focus group.

Instead of relying on their own internal design compass (like Henry Ford did), American car companies try to make what marketing people think consumers want. But it isn't working. American cars continue to lose market share. And the reason is that the customer doesn't want what he thinks he wants.

Letting focus groups design your cars for you only wins in the short term. In the long term, it pays to bet on good design. The focus group may say they want the meretricious feature du jour, but what they want even more is to imitate sophisticated buyers, and they, though a small minority, really do care about good design. Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do the same.

Apple is an interesting counterexample to the general American trend. If you want to buy a nice CD player, you'll probably buy a Japanese one. But if you want to buy an MP3 player, you'll probably buy an iPod. What happened? Why doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players? Because Apple is in the consumer electronics business now, and unlike other American companies, they're obsessed with good design. Or more precisely, their CEO is.

I just got an iPod, and it's not just nice. It's surprisingly nice. For it to surprise me, it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.

Cars aren't the worst thing we make in America. Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities-- or rather, exurbs. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to build towns that didn't suck. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life. [1]

But the just-do-it model does have advantages. It seems the clear winner for generating wealth and technical innovations (which are practically the same thing). I think speed is the reason. It's hard to create wealth by making a commodity. The real value is in things that are new, and if you want to be the first to make something, it helps to work fast. For better or worse, the just-do-it model is fast, whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of VisiCalc in a weekend, or a real estate developer building a block of shoddy condos in a month.

If I had to choose between the just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it. But do we have to choose? Could we have it both ways? Could Americans have nice places to live without undermining the impatient, individualistic spirit that makes us good at software? Could other countries introduce more individualism into their technology companies and research labs without having it metastasize as strip malls? I'm optimistic. It's harder to say about other countries, but in the US, at least, I think we can have both.

Apple is an encouraging example. They've managed to preserve enough of the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to write software. And yet when you pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem American. It's too perfect. It seems as if it must have been made by a Swedish or a Japanese company.

In many technologies, version 2 has higher resolution. Why not in design generally? I think we'll gradually see national characters superseded by occupational characters: hackers in Japan will be allowed to behave with a willfulness that would now seem unJapanese, and products in America will be designed with an insistence on taste that would now seem unAmerican. Perhaps the most successful countries, in the future, will be those most willing to ignore what are now considered national characters, and do each kind of work in the way that works best. Race you.

Notes

[1] Japanese cities are ugly too, but for different reasons. Japan is prone to earthquakes, so buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is no grand tradition of city planning like the one Europeans inherited from Rome. The other cause is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the government and construction companies.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Barry Eisler, Sarah Harlin, Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and Eric Raymond for reading drafts of this.

noreply@blogger.com (Narry) — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:54:00 +0000

I got a 404 error when I opened my blog and didnot publish anything... so I thought this article makes some sense...

HTTP/1.0 Room 404 Object Not Found (http://www.room404.com/)

The history of 404

Before the beginning of time, when the Internet was still very much under the spell of bare Unix shells and Gopher, before SLIP or PPP became widely used, an ambitious group of young scientists at CERN (Switzerland) started working on what was to become the media revolution of the nineties: the World Wide Web, later to be known as WWW, or simply 'the Web'. Their aim: to create a database infrastructure that offered open access to data in various formats: multi-media. The ultimate goal was clearly to create a protocol that would combine text and pictures and present it as one document, and allow linking to other such documents: hypertext.

Because these bright young minds were reluctant to reveal their progress (and setbacks) to the world, they started developing their protocol in a closed environment: CERN's internal network. Many hours were spend on what later became the world-wide standard for multimedia documents. Using the physical lay-out of CERN's network and buildings as a metaphor for the 'real world' they situated different functions of the protocol in different offices within CERN.

In an office on the fourth floor (room 404), they placed the World Wide Web's central database: any request for a file was routed to that office, where two or three people would manually locate the requested files and transfer them, over the network, to the person who made that request.

When the database started to grow, and the people at CERN realised that they were able to retrieve documents other than their own research-papers, not only the number of requests grew, but also the number of requests that could not be fulfilled, usually because the person who requested a file typed in the wrong name for that file. Soon these faulty requests were answered with a standard message: 'Room 404: file not found'.

Later, when these processes were automated and people could directly query the database, the messageID's for error messages remained linked to the physical location the process took place: '404: file not found'.

The room numbers remained in the error codes in the official release of HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) when the Web left CERN to conquer the world, and are still displayed when a browser makes a faulty request to a Web server. In memory of the heroic boys and girls that worked deep into the night for all those months, in those small and hot offices at CERN, Room 404 is preserved as a 'place on the Web'. None of the other rooms are still used for the Web. Room 404 is the only and true monument to the beginning of the Web, a tribute to a place in the past, where the future was shaped.