As top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there was a housing bubble and what to do about it, then-Chairman Alan Greenspan argued that the dissent should be kept secret so that the Fed wouldn't lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves.
"We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand," Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting.
At the same meeting, a Federal Reserve bank president from Atlanta, Jack Guynn, warned that "a number of folks are expressing growing concern about potential overbuilding and worrisome speculation in the real estate markets,
I realize I’m taking a bit of arithmetic license—I’m assuming Operating Expenses are uniform for all product categories, and so on. But the essence remains: Apple makes $3B of profit from its iPhone while HP takes in a mere $500M on its PCs—that’s a 6x difference. The Center of Money has shifted.
via mondaynote.com
I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ...
via antipope.org
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
via apple.com
Apple is moving on to the 4.0 stage of its mobile platform, has consistently hit promised milestones, has done yeomen's work on evangelizing key technologies within the platform (and third-party developer creations - "There's an app for that"), and developed multiple ways for developers to monetize their products. No less, they have offered 100 percent distribution to 85 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and one-click monetization via same. Nested in every one of these devices is a giant vending machine that is bottomless and never closes. By contrast, Google has taught consumers to expect free, the Android Market is hobbled by poor discovery and clunky, inconsistent monetization workflows. Most damning, despite touted high-volume third-party applications, there are (seemingly) no breakout third-party developer successes, despite Android being around two-thirds as long as the iPhone platform.
But despite the fact that Apple’s Mac business has never been bigger, it’s already been eclipsed by the iPhone OS business — iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. If you pause and close your eyes, you can feel it — the tectonic plates are shifting underfoot. The long-term trend is inevitable.
When processes happen very fast, and there is no way to isolate one part of the system from another, the system is tightly coupled. Tight coupling allows small incidents to spread into large-scale failures.
It's really time that makes us care about architecture.
Isn't it interesting then, that we never include time as a dimension in our architecture descriptions?
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -Leslie Lamport