[gb] Studio

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.

Surprise, surprise… most people don’t like to pay you squat unless they have no other choice. And aside from the user’s disinclination to pull out their wallet, there’s also the problem of wallet friction itself—payment conversion is shitty for many reasons other than just price. Mainly it’s because we can’t remember our password. I’ll repeat that about a million times in this post so you don’t forget.

WE. CAN’T. REMEMBER. PASSWORDS.

The stream of hipsters (which, per the SoHo model, gradually turns to young professionals, then the occasional lawyer, then hedge-funders) “pioneering” new neighborhood with a more classic, chain-store-less urban feel harms the areas both by dramatically driving-up the cost of living and generating a new and oppressive ideal of taste.

… the hunt for authenticity is inevitably followed up with lobbies for new zoning laws, and Starbucks, condos, IKEAs, and strangely hip sushi bars begin to pop up awkwardly alongside the newly formed monuments of counter-culture.

For a public that doesn’t even know what a web browser is, what Gmail lacked was not a bolted-on Buzz that further complicates what’s already a poorly designed email reader. What’s needed is not a knee-jerk reaction to Facebook and Twitter that would make Microsoft proud, but a fundamental rethinking of the presentation of Google’s sole cash cow: search. In 2010, the design quality of its search results is a disgrace for a company as ambitious as Google.

…I thought I had seen indescribable poverty before today, then we visited a different school in an even worse area that had a classroom in one room and 150 chickens in the room right beside it—just amazing. 500 kids all smiling and having a great time—36 of them orphans, most of them with parents unable to pay anything to send them. They are getting their only good meal at the school…

Above, Mr. Zucker says the original decision was made by Hulu’s management. That is correct, but as Jason Kilar (Hulu’s CEO) wrote in his post, the request came from NBC. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.”

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

But tomorrow’s computing systems, heralded by the iPhone, are not for DIYers. You don’t add Default Folder or FontExplorer X Pro to your iPhone, you don’t choose your iPhone’s browser, and you don’t install plug-ins in your iPhone’s browser. This lack of extensibility may not please the Slashdot crowd but it’s the future of computing and browsing. The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with it wants a computing experience that works.

Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None.

Here is a hint. If you want to see more jobs created by Small Businesses and entrepreneurs REDUCE the amount of paperwork required. Dramatically simplify the tax code. In other words, if you REDUCE THE OVERHEAD of small business, you effectively create capital for them through reduced costs. Not only do you improve their financial position, but you reduce that great big time suck known as dealing with your accountants and lawyers. The more time wasted with “professional services”, the less time spent doing your job. This seems to be a concept lost on government.

And then I realize: you can’t resize it.

And a bright light did shine upon my liberated face and a voice did whisper a thunder: You’re free. Free of pointless preferences and finger-baiting adjustments.

This is the new PC. Sure, there are some things missing, and it’s not as capable as your HP netbook, but it really doesn’t matter: it does everything you need it to do, and it’s sexy as hell. Don’t pretend you didn’t ever buy a Britney record for exactly those reasons.

Apple loves hardware, but only insofar as it lets them develop awesome software which then does what they want it to do. Rest assured that they read this sequence the right way: from human need to idealized solution to actual implementation.

Music industry executives may well not like what’s happened to their industry, but is it really bullying from Apple? Or isn’t it simply that Apple does not do what the music executives wish? That Apple runs its music store its own way? What the music industry really doesn’t like is the whole idea of downloads. They want to go back to selling $18 discs. Pre-iTunes, “music downloads” were pretty much all free bootlegs.

As you can see, the client configuration currently at risk is Windows XP running IE6,” the blog post reads. “We recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP. Users of other platforms are at reduced risk. We also recommend users of Windows XP upgrade to newer versions of Windows.

As far as your suggestion that me and my family “go back east,” I can only surmise that you belong to one of the indigenous tribes of this area. And while I am sorry about the encroachment of Europeans into these lands, I firmly believe that if I were to return, another person of European descent would take my place.

Thing two that I think is special is that there’s very little friction here. There’s no commutes; we’re living in a world where it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting at your desk in your office, you’re sitting in your home, you’re sitting in a coffee shop, you can get work done. Especially with software and Internet-related things, you’re always connected, and as a result, the integration and probably the ability to sustain a level of intensity that’s required is higher.

One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn… We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

So what we’re seeing today isn’t new. It’s neither the unprecedented flowering of human potential nor the death of intelligent discourse, but rather the correction of a historical anomaly. There was a brief period of time in the 20th century when “media” was understood as something professionals created for others to passively consume. Collectively, we rejected this idea.

Our brains aren’t very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare events. Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we’ve had to deal with throughout most of our species’ existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks modern society forces us to face. We exaggerate spectacular rare events, and downplay familiar and common ones.