Une belle vision et des directions intéressantes à lire dans Transport durable et stratégie industrielle active pour le Québec.
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I too believe that consumers should choose what they want. But if the Minister were a true free market advocate he wouldn’t believe in copyright reform. Indeed, he wouldn’t believe in copyright at all. In a true free market, there’d be no copyright legislation because the market would decide how to deal with intellectual property.
Copyright law exists in order to regulate and shape a market because we don’t think market forces work. In short, the Minister’s legislation is creating the marketplace. Normally I would celebrate his claims of being in favour of “letting consumers decide” since this legislation will determine what these choices will and won’t be. However, the Twitter debate should leave Canadians concerned since this legislation limits consumer choices long before products reach the shelves.
—minister moore and the myth of market forces
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Maybe they’ll just get stuff done, without having to worry about interrupt conflicts or file systems or DLLs or viruses or moths squished in relays. Maybe, instead they’ll write a novel, or paint a picture, or use technology in ways that we can’t even dream of, because some significant percentage of the crap that we currently suffer through just to get it going will be gone. To dismiss them as mere “consumers” because they may not be programmers — because they may not waste their lives fetishizing the rituals of a dying priesthood — is arrogant and insulting.
—Making the Future
iPad Coverage Oups
Some articles concerning the iPad that I’d thrown in a text file in the hopes of writing something about but completely forgot. So as much for my own archive as to show you, here they are:
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.
—The Failure of Empathy
Fast. Fast, fast, fast. I did absurd things, like zoom in and out of webpages with fast twitches of my finger tips. The iPad kept right up with me, millisecond by millisecond. When you drag something, you feel like you’re physically sliding a photo across a surface; no need to wait for the OS to catch up with you. When you turn the iPad, the screen switches display modes almost instantly.
This sort of responsiveness enhances the whole experience. In so many touch-based systems — yes, I’m flashing an impatient glance at Android devices — the interaction feels like “I have made an input gesture; the ebook reader app has received the ‘turn to the next page’ command; the computer is now rendering and displaying an animation of a page turning in this ebook.” On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.
—Hands-on with the Apple iPad – it does make sense
So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one’s hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.
—The Essence of iPad
And finally The Days of Miracles and Wonder which doesn’t talk about the iPad all that much but reminds us about perspective and is very funny.
HackFwd
An interesting new Y Combinator like model out of Europe. HackFwd takes a lot more equity than existing models (27% vs 2-10%) but also offers quite a bit more money and a much more flexible model.
Startups will get funding for one year, with the aim of roughly matching the founder’s current yearly salary. Founders keep 70% equity, with 3% going to advisors and 27% to HackFwd. However, that said, they then take care of “legal and admin stuff… so you can focus on your product.” Help is given with UX, marketing and brand “through us or our partners”. Since it is not an incubator, the startups they invest in are created wherever the founders are. “Quarterly un-conferences in cool places so everyone can share and learn,” are arranged instead to allow everyone to meet up. That should appeal to the distributed nature of European startups where distances are an issue.
Funding amounts to up to €191,000 (depending on the size of the team).
—XING founder Lars Hinrichs launches HackFwd, a product-oriented pre-seed fund
Check out their excellent intro video which explains the concept better.
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Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture…
If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past.
—Book Expo America Luncheon Talk
Webcamp mai 2010
Comme d’habitude, j’ai eu ben du fun au Webcamp (un gros merci à Webcom Montréal encore une fois) mais je n’ai pas vraiment pris le temps d’en parler ici. Par chance, ça faisait plusieurs fois avec Sylvain et quelques autres qu’on se disait que certains discussions pourraient être enregistrées et être intéressantes à mettre en ligne. Je ne suis pas certain si celle-ci compte comme intéressante mais c’était le fun et simple à faire. Donc le premier On Devrait Juste s’Enregistrer™.
Mercredi en fin de journée on s’est retrouvés sur une terrasse (celle de la Cinémathèque Québécoise) pour prendre quelques minutes pour se faire une conversation sur le dernier WebCamp Montréal… on a décidé d’enregistrer le tout, vous pouvez écouter ce que ça donne: WebCampMTL-Debrief-20100602.mp3 (c’était expérimental comme setup, merci à Sylvain Grand’Maison pour l’équipement audio, cliquez sur l’image pour une série de panophotos réalisées par Bruno)
—Debrief WebCamp Mai 2010
Mon plus gros “take away”, mentionné dans le debrief si je me rappelle bien; être plus hacktivists (et plus hacktifs). Dans le contexte de notre discussion, ça veux dire : arrêter de bretter et philosopher sur des idées, des rêves, des questions et des projets et exécuter plus. Vincent s’enligne sur quelque chose pour cet été et il faut en lancer d’autres. PlanQc c’est beau mais on en a pas fait grand chose. Souvent vaut mieux s’y mettre à moins and just ship.
