Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

  • Covenants, Contracts and Promises

    This was a religion assignment that I did not want to do, but was finally convinced to do it.

    As members of this marvelous church, we often are told, and comment, that we are “covenant making people”. I have been told this so much in my young life, that I first what a covenant was and then, if I made so many of them, where did I put them all. Only later in my life did I begin to understand what a covenant was and why they were so important to me.

    I have often heard covenants described as a two-way promise or a divine contract. I would suggest a covenant is at once the same as and nothing like these concepts. While each of these concepts are helpful they are also limited based on our individual mortal experience. To any individual who was promised something they never received or who entered into a contract that was later broken—or to those who have been the one to break a promise or cancel a contract—the mortal experience pales in comparison to the divine experience of covenants.

    Divine covenants do resemble promises and contracts made here on earth in that they are binding agreements entered into by two parties: God, the Father, and an individual child of His. Within these agreements, God promises us certain blessings and rewards based on certain conditions. These conditions are clearly presented, as are the blessings, so that the covenants can be made in full force with no plausible deniability.

    Divine covenants are unlike promises and contracts made here on earth in that they permanently binding based upon our performance; they leave no room “wiggle room” for either party, no subject of interpretation. Either the child did or did not perform the required task, in which case God will give the promised blessing. In this respect, too, divine covenants differ from earthly ones: God fulfills His end of the promise with unfailing exactness.

    There are five basic covenants we enter into with the Lord:

    1. Baptism
    2. Confirmation
    3. Priesthood (for the brothers)
    4. Endowment
    5. Sealing

    I wish to point out that, as with all covenants, the Sealing covenant is between an individual and God, not between two individuals.

    Accompanied with each covenant is a specific ordinance. Just as any earthly contract is not considered valid until some agreed upon ritual or rite is execute, so to with divine covenants. Each ordinance contains a set of specific words and physical motions that are used to signify their performance by one in authority to act in God’s stead and the willingness and understand of the child to enter into and maintain the covenant. Once completed, these ordinances “activate” the covenant and its force in our lives.

    The promised blessings are always based upon our faithfulness and worthiness. There is a separate, inclusive, worthiness standard included with each covenant. In this way, God is available to prevent those who partake in an ordinance for the wrong reasons from benefitting from the process. Personal worthiness is an important part of maintaining covenants. It is not enough to simply complete the ordinance; we must strive to maintain the purity required by God in our day-to-day lives.

    Worthiness disappears as we partake in activities or lifestyles that are contrary to those outlined within the covenants we have made. For example, with the covenant of baptism we promise to care for the needy, remain chaste and to pay tithing. Failure to maintain any one of these will make us unworthy until we repent and begin doing them again. Unworthy activities do not just include failure to perform gospel tasks, but also includes participation in unworthy endeavors. These can include the places we choose to visit, the jokes we choose to repeat, the company we choose to keep, the physical actions we choose to do and even the private thoughts we choose to entertain.

    It is important, if we expect to retain the blessings promised within a covenant, that we maintain our worthiness. When unworthy activities do occur in our lives, it is important to repent of them as quickly as possible in order to restore ourselves to a worthy state and reinstate our lost blessings.

    Worthiness is coupled with justification, a process used to gauge the attempts of actions to remain worthy based on the covenants made, our knowledge and understanding of the gospel, and the intends of our heart. It is through justification that the mercy portion of the gospel is put into action.

    A continued improvement of our covenant keeping abilities allows us to access another portion of the atonement: sanctification. Sanctification is the purifying power of the atonement working to make us better. Where justification is concerned about maximizing our blessing now by ensuring we get as many as we deserve, sanctification is concerned about maximizing our blessing is the future by ensuring that we continue to progress to our full potential.

    In most cases, justification and sanctification work together to propel beyond the lowly constraints of our mortal selves by allowing us to obtain ever greater heights of spirituality and perfection. They can, however, leads to great disappointment if misunderstood. For example, to believe that upon completion of the sealing ordinance one’s exaltation has is assured could lead to a rude shock when, upon death, you are informed that your deviant, post sealing and unrepented behavior has disqualified your salvation.

    While justification can often enable us to receive blessings beyond what we thought we could qualify for, my general rule is that whenever I think I am justified I have just lost the last excuse to receive the justification. Remember, the gospel plan is about becoming like God, not trying to see how much you get away with.

    As we learn to better understand the role of covenants in our lives, the symbolism embedded within the ordinance we use to make those covenants, the grace we receive through justification and the purifying power of sanctification in our lives, we will be better positioned to take advantage of each and use those to progress every quicker towards our final, celestial goal.

  • Everything is a Game

    I found this in my notebook and realized it was never transcribed (or published). It is from 20 December 2009, a rather prolific day for writing.

    Everything is a game. At the highest heights and the biggest wins, it is still a game. At the lowest depths and the biggest losses, it is only a game. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you wish to deny it; it is only a game. Even if you do nothing, if you are lazy, slacked and lethargic, it is still a game.

    You can never avoid the game. It is all present, all being but not all powerful. While the game is pervasive and ever present, it is not omnipotent. The game we are forced to interact with can be played, ignored, racketed and even beat. While the game never ends, it can be defeated. It can be beat because there are few rules.

    These few rules are simple and easy to understand, they are just hard to find. The game does not publish the rules and the crafters and rule makers are not available to ask. The only people who know the rules are the ones that define them while we are in the game. They look as if they have made their own rules, but in reality they have simply defined the game’s own rules and used their own definitions to control the game. And because they control the game, they can make any extra rules they want: like a brilliant game of 1000 Blank White Cards. That is how the game works.

  • The Curse of Assumed Common Goals

    I have a particularly fond memory of my younger brother (though, I must admit that my memories are not the clearest on this topic and I might have embellished parts). It was back when we were all younger. The family, all except my brother, was all gathered in the living room to watch a movie or some such. As we were enjoying our peace my brother came suddenly bursting into the room yelling, “I got it, I got it!” His entrance made such a shock that we all shifted our attached to him and the “it” he had “got”. My mother, in a caring tone, congratulated him and asked if she could see “it”. He was so proud he popped open his hand and showed her. To her great horror, and the family’s astonishment, there, lying in his tiny palm was my mother’s beta fish. It was beyond all help as my younger brother had, in his great excitement, neglected to handle the fish with care and it had been crushed to death while in transit from the upstairs bedroom (where the fish had no doubt been sleeping) down to the living room.

    Though there are many humorous spins and analogies that I could make with this story, there is one in particular that I wish to make: there can be grave danger in assumed common goals. My mother’s goal was to keep the fish alive while my brother thought the goal was to catch the pesky fish. In this case, the assumed common goal (that really was not common) led to the death of a fish, but in many cases the assumed common goals can lead to much greater problems.

    On some level we all know and understand this, but even in the most basic of assumptions we all too quickly dismiss this truth. Instead of soliciting our goals, we assume that everyone, or at least the people in the immediate vicinity of our lives, have the same basic beliefs. Then we are faced with shock, dismay or disappointment when we find out that what we thought was a universal goal was really only a personal goal.

    This curse of assumed common goals is pervasively around us in our daily endeavors and projects. Think of the last time you were driving with a young child in the car. Your primary goal was likely to travel safely and you likely assumed that everyone else on the road had the same goal. This was probably not the case. Instead, most people probably had a primary goal of getting to their destination quickly, or to find out where their friends are before they pass them.

    While driving safely on the road might not be every driver’s primary goal (though it should be) it is still a high goal for most drivers. A better illustration might be a work place venue: collaborating to reduce costs across the company. There are many ways to go about the process of reducing cost, but I will focus on two: by eliminating jobs and rearranging the company accordingly; and by streamlining processes and eliminating positions that are no longer needed. Both methods will result in the end reduction of overall costs for the company, but they each have very different focuses.

    The process of eliminating positions is one that is likely to have a primary goal of seeing what the company can live without. Do we need someone special to clean up, or can we convince other employees to do the work? Do we need someone to oversee these workers, or can we assign them to a different manager and expect less supervision? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like dieting with a very definite list of things that you can and cannot do without.

    Consider working under the assumption that the other departments in the company were also operating under this same paradigm. Imagine the shock and horror you would experience when you found out that another department was in fact binging instead of dieting. They have been spending money on projects that, in the dieting mind set, should have been cut. This horror is likely to come because the offending department is operating under a different way of reducing costs.

    The process of streamlining is one that is likely to have a primary goal of automating as much as possible. Is there any way to digitize this data without manually inputting it? Can we make this paperwork flow smoother so it takes less time? Can we create self-help forums for employees to handle basic issues by themselves? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like exercising with a list of practices that will allow you to stay trim without foregoing all of the good stuff.

    While both of these methods can produce the same desired results, reduced costs, they have very different methods of achieving those results along with different operational positions (the basis for which decision are made) and the end results that each gains. It is while considering these minor differences that the real differences between the common goals becomes pronounced and, as they continue, begin to clash.

    The elimination of positions (dieting) is operating from a position of retreat or withdrawal. It says, “We have overreached and done too much to possibly be able to maintain our position so we must cut back even if that means that we give up some good stuff.” It is a defensive reaction to the environment and sends a clear signal that the only way to survive is to cut back.

    The irony of these two styles is that both are equally valid expressions of the same goal, it is entirely possible for managers in both departments to do extensive work (even while working together) to reduce costs and only towards the end of the process realize that the other has been going about the process entirely differently than they have. The incorrect assumption of a common goal is not likely to bother the streamlining manager, but is likely to cause quite a stir for the eliminating manager because he has been sacrificing and “going without” for the benefit of the company only to find out that others have been enjoying themselves and still saving money simply by “exercising” a little.

    The two styles will clash dramatically when the cost savings proposals are put forth. The elimination position will present a plan that requires cut equal to the savings. It will present no long term incentive for taking action but will instead focus on how the cuts will benefit the company now. As operations improve, this position will insist that the eliminated workers are restored in order to keep up with the new demand.

    The streamlining position will present a radically different plan that requires upfront investment in order to improve systems. Upon the completion of the system improvements, efficiencies will be realized such that positions can be eliminated or reallocated. There is no short term incentive for taking action (in fact, spending money to make money is often considered a disincentive) but the plan will instead focus on bringing savings to the company in the long run. As operations improve, this position will not insist on a directly proportional increase of workers because the improved systems can handle more throughput with less workers.

    In the end, both managers will have put forth effort to reduce costs, both managers will have action plans that will save money for the company and both managers will be in alignment with the overarching company goal of reducing costs. They will, however, have plans that look nothing alike and the end results will be dramatically different all because they did not share the same common goal.

  • The Virtues of Closed Versus Open

    I keep hearing HTML 5 this and HTML 5 that. The funny part, to me, is that while people are making stuff in HTML 5, it is not a standard yet. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the people who are in charge of defining HTML) is taking forever to settle the finer points of how the new web standard should work. I am not exaggerating too much when I say that. Consider that HTML 3 (January 1997) was released a little more than a year after HTML 2 (November 1995) had been published. HTML 4 was released less than a year after that (December 1997). In the year 2000, the W3C gave us HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 to help make programmers lives easier when using new media content (notice that was when the internet started looking and feeling more like it does today). The newest version, HTML 5 is designed to make the programmers lives even easier and thus make the internet even more amazing of a place. Work on the new version started in 2008, now three years later we are still waiting. A “working draft” has been published meaning, “We think it will look something like this, so start programming but do not be shocked if we change it on you later on.”
    While the “draft” has been published and programmers have been slowly working with it, many companies such as Mozilla (makers of Fire Fox), Apple and Google are pretending that the draft is gold (a programming term that means, “this is the final release for production”) and are running hard to make the browsers play well with the new almost standard. The problem with this is that they are almost standards, but not quite, and many of the particulars have not been settled which means that different browsers are handling things differently. For example, drop shadows in Fire Fox work differently enough from Safari and Chrome that web programmers (the people that these standards are supposed to help) have to right triple the code in order to use the cool new effect (once the HTML 5 way, once the Fire Fox way and once the Safari way). And triple is not even counting all the extra coding that has to be for Internet Explorer that does not play nice with anyone else.
    Back to the main point of this post: the main reason for this splintering is because HTML 5 has taken longer to develop and get out the door than any prior version of the standard. You may ask why this is the case. Surely this is not because HTML 5 is so much technically superior that a lot of extra effort has to be taken to develop it, a lot of the technical coolness is in making the code flow freer. It certainly is not because the W3C is waiting to see how that world will continue to evolve, HTML 6 can take care of that. No, the reason that it is taking so long to get HTML 5 from draft to standard is because the big boys (that were not there, or at least were not as big, for previous versions) spend too much time fighting amongst themselves that they cannot decide anything. Google wants to support their WebM video format because it is free and open. Apple wants to use their H.264 MP4 format because they think it is the best (and they happen to control the H.264 standard), but no one else wants to use it because Apple often does crazy things that throws everyone for a loop. (For example, the whole Photoshop on the Mac issue, a summary follows.)

    In case you missed it: When Mac OS X was released in March 2001, Apple caused a major stir amongst computer programmers. OS X was the first major operating system to severely break backward compatibility. Most other systems (namely Microsoft Windows) typically took great pains to remain reverse compatible while adding new features. But Apple, in a very “Steve Jobsish” way, suddenly said, “Um, world, we are going to change our core programming language in our next release (later that year) so start rewriting your programs because your old programs won’t work as well.” This threw everyone for a loop and the computer world was full of a lot of grumbling, mostly over the incredible expense of rewriting an application in a new language and on such short notice. Because of this last minute switch, there were few applications ready for OS X when it was released. Most of the programs that were available were from Apple itself. Adobe, creators of the extremely popular Photoshop software (and in many ways a competitor with Apple’s popular Final Cut Pro and Garage Band software) rolled their eyes and released a compatible version of Photoshop a year later. Fast forward several years to October 2007 when, concurrent with the release of a new version of OS X, Apple announced that once again, they were changing the foundational programming of the operating system, this time they would end support for 32-bit programs. Microsoft made similar announcements concerning Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Adobe was ready with an updated version of Photoshop that moved in Microsoft’s desired direction shortly after the launch of Windows Vista and 7 (Windows 8 has yet to be launched or even finalized, but is supposed to be the first version of Windows that only support 64-bit, this means that Microsoft gave the world more than 5 years advanced notice for what Apple gave a few month’s notice). Does Adobe love Microsoft so much more than Apple? Maybe. Does Adobe love Windows users so much more than Mac users? Not really, especially considering that Adobe has a strong Mac customer base and the Windows customer base just recently caught up. Why then was Adobe ready for Microsoft’s changes and not Apple’s? The difference is in the subtleties of the timings. Apple announced their dramatic change months ahead of the release of the new OS (mid-2007), giving the company little time to do anything but sneeze. Microsoft announced their dramatic change in 2003 and 2005 for Windows Vista, 2005 and 2007 for Windows 7 and 2007 and 2009 for Windows 8. The difference is that Apple has a history of surprising everyone with big changes that are happening right away while Microsoft (and most other large companies like IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Google) tend to give other companies a lot of notice for big changes. By the way, Adobe didn’t release an updated version of Photoshop until April 2010, two and a half years later. The lengthy delay and the “nasty-gram” sent just after Apple’s announcement were meant to say, “knock it off or we will stop playing nice.” Apple responded by not supporting Flash on the iPhone and then banned applications made using Adobe Flash tools (until the government started eying them for anti-trust law violations).

    Adobe, who also sits on the W3C, wants to continue to push Flash to the forefront tauting that with Flash, users do not have to worry about the format, the people building the site do. While Microsoft is fighting for their favorite WMV format, which stands for Windows Media Video and thus no one wants to touch it even with a long stick. All this, and we have not even touched to the “groups” yet. Consider the Motion Picture Experts Group. Heard of them? Probably not directly, but they are the people that invented, and control, the MPEG standards including the incredibly popular and world famous MP3 format, MPEG 1 and 2 formats (used for DVDs and satellite TV respectively) and MP4 which is quickly replacing the previously mentioned formats. Each iteration allows for more compact files (read: faster download times) without sacrificing quality (but your computer has to do a lot of extra work). All of these companies and groups are arguing over which formats and standard must be support, and this is just for video. I am not even going to touch audio or graphics.
    All of this lengthy process of deciding on which video codec to use as the new web standard, a standard that within the next couple of years will need to be revised and at that point, the most current and popular video codec can be added. But, what we see here is all of these companies realize the extreme value in being the “chosen” codec until the new standard can be published.
    —
    As a direct competitor to HTML 5 (at least in the mind of Apple Inc.,’s Steve Job) we have Adobe Flash. Originally released in 1995 as Future Splash by Smartsketch, Flash has been bought out twice: once by Macromedia, in 1996, and again by Adobe in 2005. According to Adobe’s computer census, Flash enjoys a nearly perfect market penetration, with recent (being the current and previous version) versions on 99% of computers on the internet. That is a huge market penetration, of which I can think of no other non-governmental product (i.e. electricity, water and sewer) that comes close. In more than 15 years, developers and consumers (mostly forced by developers) have consistently chosen Flash so strongly that even in an era of cutthroat business practices including the great Dot Com Bubble burst of 2000, Flash has expanded adoption in order to capture the entire market and has kept pace to maintain its market share. (In fairness, Flash was aided by being included as a default plugin with Microsoft Internet Explorer for a time.)
    Now, let us consider what Flash has done in their 17 years of existence. Flash came from humble beginnings, as rightly it should. It was originally developed as a pen drawing tool that was built out to include vector animation for the then fledgling internet (very few people had internet access in those days). The few people who did have internet had very limited bandwidth. This bandwidth limitation kept most web pages confined to simple text and  basic backgrounds (in HTML, colors are set with a simple hex code such as #000000 for black or #FFFFFF for white, hex code takes up a lot less bandwidth than graphics). While some graphic formats were available for animation, such of Compuserve’s GIF, which included transparency too), these graphics were limited by color restrictions (GIFs can show 256 colors, 255 if one color is transparent), a lack of support (the Motion Picture Experts Group’s MPG format still is not well support in browser), a difficulty to produce (no easy-to-use MPG animation tools were around in 1995), and if developers had been able to overcome all of the aforementioned obstacles they were likely to have ended up with a “huge” file that, though small by today’s standards, would have taken web page viewers hours to download. All of this meant that the not so wonderful animation was not likely to be viewed by anyone and thus was billed as wasted effort.
    The introduction of Flash changed all that. Flash used vector graphics. While not the best for every application—people pictures do not look too good in them—they are excellent for general shapes and lines. In computer speak, shapes and lines are simply geometric formulas that are easy to store, easy to transmit and easy to render.  Using HTML’s simple hex color codes made coloring them really easy too. Finally, because vector graphics are simple calculations, they are really easy to make bigger and smaller: for twice the size, simply have the computer multiply by 2 (or whatever other multiplier you want). As vectors get larger they maintain their crisp, sharp look, unlike the alternative graphic formats.
    Macromedia produced two components to Flash: the authoring tool and the plugin which is used to view Flash. The authoring tool meant that designers could produce their own animations without having to wait for programmers or video producers to work with them, a huge benefit for the designer. While the authoring tool costs money, developers could show their work to the world without worrying about their consumers having the right plugin: if a consumer did not have Flash, or the correct version, they could quickly download it for free. This setup led to Flash’s strong adoption throughout the early internet among both producers and consumers.
    After releasing the first version of Flash, Macromedia continued to add features that were of great benefit to developers, features that, in effect, severed the need pervasive trend (at least, to an ever increasing larger degree) of a programmer to work with the designer to make compelling content. While this may not seem significant, consider the two different worlds that programmers and designers come from and how difficult it can be to for one to communicate the vision of what they are trying to do in a way that the other can readily understand and accept.
    In 1997, two years after Flash’s first release, Macromedia added a host of new features and laid the foundation that producers would be using for years to come. The next year, in 1998, Macromedia sensed that the relatively new MP3 format would become a powerful market force and added support for playing the new format from within Flash. This greatly expanded the capabilities of Flash. Prior to that point, Flash could only handle WAV and MIDI files. WAV files are actual recordings of real sound that generally include a full audio spectrum, but also includes a full file size (good quality wave audio is about 10mb a minute, far too large for the still restrictive bandwidth to allow, especially when compared to MP3’s 1mb a minute). MIDI is synthesized sounds and music; while the files are really small, they are also very limited in quality and sound more like a Queen song that the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The following year, streaming MP3 support was added allowing consumers to start listening to sounds and music without downloading the whole file.
    The years 2000 and 2002 saw the introduction of Actionscript and video support respectively. The addition of Actionscript welcomed programmers back into Macromedia’s internet development arena by providing them a programmatic interface in which they could further enhance Flash animations by giving them custom logic sets (to do things that Macromedia had not imagined Flash doing) and allowed for dynamic content. No longer was the developer limited to text, words, video and information that was available at publication, using Actionscript, content could be added and updated on the fly without republishing the Flash project. The introduction of video not only extended the features of Flash, but also offered a solution to a prevalent problem across the maturing internet: producers, developers and consumer could not decide on a video production tool and plugin. Adding it to Flash made the choice simple, especially when their then more than 90% market penetration was considered. Almost everyone on the internet already had Flash, so why not use it. Additionally, Flash allow the developers to make custom interfaces so the video frame looked and felt like the rest of the site; the producers could protect their video against download and theft (though, later tools would emerge to work around this); customers often need do nothing, the magical plugin they downloaded in the past would magically play the video they wanted to watch.
    The 2003 release of Flash completed the foundational process of turning Flash into a truly ubiquitous platform both on and off the internet. This release included Actionscript 2, extending and deepening Flash’s programmatic abilities over the previous version that made advanced programming functions such as database interaction and dynamic content rendering more powerful and easier for the programmers; extended support for popular graphics formats, Adobe Illustrator files (a popular and powerful vector graphics program, think of it as Photoshop for vectors); inclusion in the popular (especially amongst business users) Adobe Acrobat; and charting features for business users. By this time, Flash had already achieved nearly universal distribution across internet connected computers and these additional features strengthened its position amongst both business users (who want to ensure the secure, as in difficult to steal, and reliable distribution of corporate information, and consumers who had begun to rely on the internet as not just a source of information, but a source of rich and engaging media.
    After Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, the development of Flash continued including the release of Actionscript 3 (continuing the strengthening of the developers’ side of Flash while securing Flash by disallowing Flash to interact with the host without the users knowledge), and the inclusion of upcoming video encoding standards including H.264 and MP4, and tighter integration with Adobe’s other development environments such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
    In 2009, Adobe delivered on their promised goals announced when Adobe bought Macromedia: Flash became an open standard. By publishing the specifications for Flash, Adobe knocked down one of the last barriers in adoption of Flash (not that very many people were actively opposed to it). Now everyone could see exactly what made Flash tick and could even build their own Flash plugins and development tools if they so desired. While some effort has been made to create a less expensive alternative to Adobe Flash (the development program) the comparative difficulty of programming a suitable development environment to the low cost of Adobe Flash has proved too difficult to overcome. Adobe has maintained a competitively priced product by separating the more advance Adobe Flash features into Adobe Flash Professional, leaving a lower featured and prices, though still adequate, Adobe Flash on the market and by including Adobe Flash in their Creative Suite bundles.
    As to custom plugins, no one really trusts another company to develop a better, more stable plugin than what Adobe itself produces so Adobe’s Flash plugin is still the ubiquitous one plugin.
    Publication of the Flash specifications signaled a clear direction for Adobe and their Flash product: they want to make money off the authoring tools, not the technology itself. This directional signal has been further reinforced by the diversification of Adobe Flash (less featured and lower cost versions) and Adobe’s strong efforts to extend Flash onto every available platform with variants including Linux, Macintosh, Windows, iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android with continued to attempts to get Flash onto ever more devices. In this context, the opening and broadening of Flash is the only course that makes sense. Any company can build Flash into their device, any programmer can build Flash extensions and any user can use and enjoy Flash.
    With the completion of the Flash foundational platform in 2003, Macromedia added the last vital features needed to make the broad base of developers and consumers happy with their product. In fact, every addition and development made by Macromedia and later Adobe, have been delivered in direct response to the requests, suggestions and demands of their consumers. It is, as Adobe is well aware of, in their best interest to continue to develop the platform to meet their customer’s needs. Any slip, any mishap, will allow room for a competitor to enter. Once a competitor has a toe hold, they will have a niche within which to establish and eventually erode Adobe’s position.
    —
    While HTML and Flash may seem to be unrelated topics, the two stories, when compared, shed valuable insight on the processes and functionality of the two different styles of development: open (HTML) versus closed (Adobe), shared interest (or self-interest) versus vested interest (singular interest), responding to personal needs versus responding to customer needs.
    In the HTML development process, the WC3 had great success early in the development process. Even though the process has continued to remain open, the self-interest of the individual companies involved has driven the development process from one of harmony and continuity into a contentious frenzy with each company seeking to position themselves in the most profitable position possible. On the other hand, the closed (though transparent) development path chosen by Adobe has led to continued dramatic improvement over time, specifically responding to customer needs over time and focusing on building a solid business framework. There is no one but Adobe to be responsible for a good product (which will make them money) or a bad product (which will loss them money). In the closed environment, the needs of the customers, their actual needs as opposed to the perceived needs that would be represented and skewed in favor of the company demanding them, are the point of focus instead of whatever will make the company a core component while leaving others to rely upon them.

    (Thank you to Google and Wikipedia for providing the invaluable assistance in bringing all the details together for this essay.) 

  • Masters of Camouflage

    I was reading Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways while pondering on my recent Disneyland experience. In his book he talk about a variety of things including the purpose of camouflage. Fletcher describes camouflage as “making the conspicuous inconspicuous or the inconspicuous conspicuous” and that “[t]he objective of camouflage is to mislead rather than conceal.” I was struck at how well Disneyland is able to camouflage their operations, not by trying to make the disappear (a powerful feat that even the best magicians cannot sustain indefinitely) but rather to make them blend in or seem insignificant. This was particularly notable while waiting in line for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, a ride that has an incredible long wait time and is entirely underground. The wait time does not seem so bad because we are presented with a vast array of fun (and detailed) things to look at. Even the fact that the entire ride is underground is misled from our mind by having us enter the “temple”. Naturally, in the temple we do little to track our elevation and the gradual decline is further masked by even more intricate details to observe and look at. It is almost like an entire movie set put before us just to keep us distracted from the truth: we waited far too long, mostly underground, for a ride.