According to BoyGeniusReport.com, Woz is predicting cloud computing tragedy as the world slowly realizes they no longer own anything–that they’ve basically ceded ownership of all of their digital stuff.
While I’m sure Woz knows more than most of us, I have to wonder what it was we used to own anyway. Apparently I’ve already drunk the Cloud Kool-Aid, but I can’t think of anything I now store online that would’ve been better confined to a single hard drive. Maybe it’s just that the pace of things has accelerated to the point where nothing we “have” is of any value any more.
“Ownership” has been on my mind since the Danzig patent and the various chaos surrounding patents in the bike industry these days. Intellectual real estate certainly seems to be tightening up in some industries. I’ve been storing backups of all my Solidworks files online, and I still think of those as mine. But even though I’m pretty fond of this suspension system right now–sort of all-consuming–I can still see it as an evolution. What it is right now, isn’t what it’ll be in the future.
I think that’s the weirdest thing about designing something. Whether it’s a little computer code or this bike frame, you have to be completely invested in it. At the same time, you have to realize it’s only a moment in time. Put a little more simply, for me the hardest thing about designing something is stopping.
Case in point: in the process of reshaping the crankcase that houses the lower link, I started to notice a few more things I could do with the lower link. I’ve lowered the pivot locations again, and shortened the link, forcing a reset of the system that I believe–at the other end of a bunch of additional hours–will be better. Here’s where it sat as of last night.
I’m pretty committed to the idea of the even shorter lower link, and I’m liking what it lets me do with everything else. That’s what I’m working on right now.
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