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Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design

 Orts  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 
  1. Good design is innovative.
  2. Good design makes a product useful.
  3. Good design is aesthetic.
  4. Good design helps us to understand a product.
  5. Good design is unobtrusive.
  6. Good design is honest.
  7. Good design is durable.
  8. Good design is consequent to the last detail.
  9. Good design is concerned with the environment.
  10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Core competencies of Web 2.0 companies

 Tech Notes  Tagged with:
Nov 202010
 

Tim O’Reilly’s core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

  1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  3. Trusting users as co-developers
  4. Harnessing collective intelligence
  5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
  6. Software above the level of a single device
  7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Eknath Easwaran: “The Sufis advise us…”

 Orts  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 

The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates.

At the first gate, we ask ourselves, “Are these words true?”

If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go.

At the second gate, we ask, “Are they necessary?”

At the last gate, we ask, “Are they kind?”

Robert McNamara’s Lessons from The Fog of War

 Orts  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 
  1. Empathize with your enemy.
  2. Rationality will not save us.
  3. There’s something beyond one’s self.
  4. Maximize efficiency.
  5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
  6. Get the data.
  7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong.
  8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
  9. In order to do good, you have to engage in evil.
  10. Never say never.
  11. You can’t change human nature.

Virgil – from the “First Georgic”

 Poems  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 

All things by nature are ready to get worse,
Lapse backward, fall away from what they were,
Just as if one who struggles to row his little
Boat upstream against a powerful current
Should but for a moment relax his arms, the current
Would carry him headlong back again downstream.

translated by David Ferry