Pathetic iMac G5 Copy Cat: Dell’s Hunchback SX280 - TheMacMind - by teens. for all.: “Michael Dell, shame on you for your shameless nepotism. It seems apparent that you’re now hiring your kids or nephews to do your industrial design. [...]”

“It’s not acquisition but reliable filtering”, says Eric Garland, with respect to TV networks and the movie industry. Only yesterday I downloaded ANT. It’s nothing else but an RSS-enclosure aggregator with integrated media-player. It works according to a simple principle: download and play what you subscribe to. It makes especially sense for short pieces of content I think: clips, news, …

A brief essay from Jim McGee that wanders along the personnel involved in the existence and usage of buildings and systems and how systems can be usable. I like the notion that highly flexible and highly focused systems and buildings work for their inhabitants. The challenge for the sponsor and the architect is to decide where to go and not to stop in the middle.
I’d suggest to further deepen the empathy on the architects side more ethnographic analysis, iterative engineering, intergration and design would improve.

Looks like a promising read.

Applied Abstractions: Architecture and buildings: “JohnJim McGee (with whom I briefly overlapped at Harvard) has written an excellent essay on architecture of buildings and systems based on Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn.

I first encountered this perspective back in the mid-90s, when I worked at CSC and Richard Pawson pursued the same ideas, thinking about how systems architecture could learn from the adaptive architecture ideas of Brand and Christopher Alexander (who wrote A Pattern Language, a collection of architectural ‘ideas that work’, much read in the circles that practice extreme programming).”