Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Google Earth

Keywords: Google



Google Earth
Link

Description: "A downloadable 3D mapping application that starts you out looking at a view of the entire planet, and lets you fly all over Earth to locations you specify, search, add bookmarks and annotations to places and get directions.

Save your searches, overlay images onto maps, save maps as images, see the lattitude, longitude, elevation and display location indicators of ATMs, gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies. Google Earth is simply awesome; the only unawesome part are the somewhat limiting system requirements: Windows 2000 and up only (Mac coming soon), a Pentium III or better, at least 128 MB of RAM, and certain video cards. (In other words, a fast, relatively new computer.) Free download."
Source: Lifehacker

Google Earth Sightseeing - Top 10 Sites:
Link

News:
Google - Topix.net

Reviews:
Inside Google
First Impressions: Google's Amazing Earth - PC World's Techlog
Google Earth Flies Free - Search Engine Watch
Profile - Google Earth (relaunch) - TechCrunch

Discussion:
Google Earth Launching For Free - Slashdot

Tags:
Google - Technorati

Photos:
Google - Flickr

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Photo of the Day: The world's fastest supercomputer

Keywords: supercomputer

"Sixteen racks of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer can perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second, making it the fastest machine known so far."
Link
Source: CNET News
[via Search Views]

Tags:
Supercomputer - Technorati

Learn:
What is the world's fastest computer? - Howstuffworks

Blog of the Day: TechCrunch

Keywords: blog, web 2.0

TechCrunch
Link
Feed
Description: " TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service."
[via John Furrier]

Blogs:
Read/Write Web
alarm:clock

Tags:
Web 2.0 - Technorati

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

What the Future Will Bring


What the Future Will Bring
Originally uploaded by divedi.
Keywords: Ray Kurzweil, future

" 'Follow your passion,' Ray Kurzweil advised graduates in a commencement address on May 21 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, one of the nation's earliest technological universities. 'Creating knowledge is what will be most exciting in life. To create knowledge you have to have passion, so find a challenge that you can be passionate about and you can find the ideas to overcome that challenge.' Kurzweil also described the three great coming revolutions-genetics, nanotechnology and robotics-and their implications for our lives ahead."
Link
Source: KurzweilAI.net

Blogs:
Future Blogs - The World 2 Come

Tags:
Future - Technorati

Audio:
Accelerating Change 2004 - IT Conversations
The Long Now Foundation: library

See also:
The Best of Steve Jobs - The World 2 Come

Monday, June 20, 2005

Interview of the Day: James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency"

Keywords: peak oil, energy, James Howard Kunstler

"This interview covers U.S. military strategy in the Middle East, myths about alternative forms of energy, the effect of peak oil on the housing bubble, and Kunstler's views on a forthcoming reevaluation of what is considered valuable within our society."
Link
Source: Global Public Media

Blogs:
Energy Blogs - The World 2 Come

Friday, June 17, 2005

How We Would Fight China


How We Would Fight China
Originally uploaded by divedi.
Keywords: China, USA

Robert D. Kaplan writes for the June Atlantic Magazine:
"For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.

In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium.

How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns."

Link
Source: Theory B

Discussion:
AlwaysOn

See also:
Hubbert peak - Wikipedia
The Global War of the 21st Century - The World 2 Come

Blogs:
Thomas Barnett

Audio:
U.S. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett speaks about his speeches on peak oil - Global Public Media

Book:
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore

Thursday, June 16, 2005

The Best of Steve Jobs


The Best of Steve Jobs
Originally uploaded by divedi.
Keywords: Steve Jobs

Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford University:

"This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5ў deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much."

Link
Source: Stanford Report

Discussion:
Steve Jobs In Praise of Dropping Out - Slashdot

Blogs:
Steve Jobs - Technorati

Tags:
del.icio.us/tag/SteveJobs

Update:
Let's compare Steve Jobs with Larry Ellison.

Interview:
On the record: Larry Ellison - San Francisco Chronicle

Audio:
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison - On The Record - San Francisco Chronicle

Update 2:
I've replaced the Slashdot transcript with the Stanford one.
Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech - Slashdot

Update 3:
Listen to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs: Commencement Address at Stanford University - American Rhetoric

Friday, June 10, 2005

Podcast of the Day: Global Voices Online

Keywords: podcasting

Global Voices Online
Link
Feed
Description: "Global Voices is an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard."
[via Dave Winer]

Tags:
Podcasting - Technorati

Bookmarks:
del.icio.us/tag/podcasting

Learn:
How Podcasting Works - HowStuffWorks

Finance Blogs


Finance Blogs
Originally uploaded by divedi.
Keywords: blog, finance

Highlights:
Seeking Alpha
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
The Kirk Report
The Prudent Investor
PFBlog.com

Tags:
Finance- Technorati

Bookmarks:
del.icio.us/tag/finance

Learn:
Howstuffworks "Money Channel"
Sloan School of Management - MIT OpenCourseWare

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Podcast of the Day: PodTech.net

Keywords: podcasting

PodTech.net
Link
Feed
Description: Silicon Valley, technology, media, business, entrepreneur, startup and venture capital issues.

Tags:
Podcasting - Technorati

Bookmarks:
del.icio.us/tag/podcasting

Learn:
How Podcasting Works - HowStuffWorks