9 year old Caine sets up an arcade in his father’s used car parts store in East L.A., using only cardboard boxes his dad had lying around and a ton of ingenuity. Watch his dreams come true when this filmmaker sets up a flash mob to come and play.
Just watching this may make you a better person.
$82,000 has already been raised for Caine’s scholarship fund!
Four years ago, I began my journey of learning all about the Software Craftsmanship/Agile movements. Let me be clear about exactly what I mean when I refer to the craftsmanship/agile movement. I’m referring to the concepts of Test Driven Development, Iteration, Pivotal Tracker,…
Thoughts on Steve Jobs’ Influence
A friend of mine on Facebook recently posted this:
For the record-Steve Jobs was a genius. A MARKETING GENIUS. Not a technology guru-he didn’t INVENT anything. Just packaged and marketing everything to create an incredible brand and brand following. THAT was what made him great. You want a real technology genius? Andy Bechtolsheim, Steve Wozniak etc etc etc etc. The world lost a marketing visionary-Apple will still create the new “it” items until people stop buying them. With or without Jobs.
It evoked quite a response in me, and so I wrote a response, below:
Being from Seattle as well as a PC gamer, I’ve been very much a Microsoft fanboy for most of my life. I’ve been a vocal and public critic of many Apple products and especially their pricing scheme (overpriced!) in the past. With that said, I am still a fan of Steve Jobs and must disagree with your post here.
Steve Jobs’ influence is much bigger than just a marketing guy. Say what you want about Apple as a company, or their products, their pricing structure, etc, but it is undeniable the influence that Jobs had on all of our lives as a whole. While it’s true that he didn’t personally open up CAD software to design the iPod or write the code that powers MacOS X, the man’s creative and visionary genius was profound. Jobs was instrumental to the success of Apple. In fact, Apple has been without Jobs before - it floundered as a result between the years of 1985 and 1996. Jobs was the center of the culture at Apple, which developed to be the ‘genius style’ where people present him ideas and products and he promotes them or shoots them down. This is in stark contrast to Google’s ‘data-driven style’ in which a team used empirical tests to see which one out of 41 shades of blue was ‘most effective’ for the toolbar.
Additionally, Steve Jobs made a huge contribution to the world beyond just Apple. Pixar movies have been cornerstones of our childhoods. As a kid, I used to watch the VHS of Toy Story every night, wishing I had toys that came to life and take me “to Infinity and Beyond”. There is a certain magic behind Pixar productions that is beyond comprehension ( http://www.eatliver.com/img/2009/4175.jpg ). The design philosophy of ‘simpler is better’ has pervaded beyond just tech products and surrounds modern life. For example, think about the simple interior design of all of the sudden wave of Frozen Yogurt or Cupcake stores popping up around the bay (hmmm new startup idea: YupCakes! Froyo on top of a cupcake). This design movement started somewhere in the mid 2000’s, which is around the same time the iPod and new Macs started gaining steam, differentiating from the feature-packed mp3 players and PC’s of the time.
Beyond that, his influence on the future is immeasurable. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, but re-watch his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. To watch him talk about life and death in today’s context is a chilling experience. As a man and an entrepreneur, he has inspired many young people and challenged them to become innovators in his footsteps. My friend Ricky Yean’s company Crowdbooster probably would not have existed had it not been for Steve Jobs: http://bit.ly/phrGDS As Ricky says, “It’s not about his products. It was his story.” How many other Ricky’s are there out there? How many other younger people will later see Ricky the same way that Ricky saw Jobs? We could never measure this sort of impact.
This is why people are so sad and so affected by his passing. He was more than a glorified pitchman, a la Billy Mays. He was a visionary as well as a creative genius, and all of our lives have been improved as a result.
For those that thought C had been delegated to the internals of your mobile devices or favorite database engine, Daniel Waterworth wants to string you up by the Raphters.
Raphters is a web framework written in C. Yes you heard that right, a shiny new framework for the web written in everybody’s favorite close-to-the-metal programming language. The project gets its name from RAPHT, a pattern that extends MVC that aims for greater security and flexibility:
- Resources include things served up to clients like a database or API.
- Actions provide ways to interact with a Resource.
- Processors transform data.
- Handlers provide the entry point for a request.
- Templates render data.
A simple Hello World example to demostrate the patter might look something like:
#include "raphters.h" START_HANDLER (simple, GET, "simple", res, 0, matches) { response_add_header(res, "content-type", "text/html"); response_write(res, "hello world"); } END_HANDLER START_HANDLER (default_handler, GET, "", res, 0, matches) { response_add_header(res, "content-type", "text/html"); response_write(res, "default page"); } END_HANDLER int main() { add_handler(simple); add_handler(default_handler); serve_forever(); return 0; }If you’re a C developer looking for speed (and security) you might give Raphters a look for your next web project.
Why do people share? It’s such a fundamental question for most businesses but very much a core question for a social news business like us. The New York Times provided the.ANA Digital and Social Media conference on Wednesday with a fascinating run through the findings of a survey they…
Google+ is cool … for now
After a few days of playing with Google+ here are the things we are using at Hearsay and the things we don’t like.
LIKE:
1. Hangouts is useful to us as a company. Hearsay is something of a distributed team and the Hangouts feature when left on all day lets us basically hangout as if we were all in one office instead of in Tampa, LA and San Francisco. The multi-person video conference feature was the only reason I had a Sky premium account. I’m back to basic now.
2. The follow model feels a nice social midway point between Facebook and Twitter. Jay Rosen isn’t ever going to be my Facebook friend. But Google+ gives me the illusion that he is because it so directly replicates the Facebook UI. The odd thing is that in some ways it’s less personal in a good way than Twitter because I don’t have to see other people’s direct messages and wonder why those people were special enough to reply to and I wasn’t.
3. It’s like a guilt-free fresh start on Facebook only with fewer people. Obviously this won’t last but actually Facebook was a victim of being the first place that everyone was on. I have a bunch of Facebook friends that I would nowadays connect with on Linkedin, especially now that Linkedin is actually trying to be social. I have a bunch of
