Martin Pannier

Bad bokeh, bad.

Posts

  • August 02, 01:37 PM

    Syracusa, Italy

  • July 17, 06:26 AM

    Survivre aux crises

    Dans toute société, le pouvoir politique appartient au groupe social capable de comprendre suffisamment l’avenir pour le maîtriser, prétendre protéger les autres groupes sociaux contre les risques et façonner une idéologie adaptée. Ce furent successivement les prêtres, les seigneurs, les industriels, les financiers.

    Aujourd’hui ces élites, incapables d’anticiper et de protéger, ont failli à leur mission ; elles glorifient même l’incertitude, théorisant ainsi leur illégitimité. Vivant la liberté comme un luxe, elles en jouissent au maximum et, face aux évolutions dont elles seront les jouets, une fois de plus, comme chaque fois qu’une société se défait, deviendront leurs propres fossoyeurs.

    Jacques Attali, Survivre aux crises

  • June 16, 06:22 AM

    Startups and movies

    When I talk about my project, one thing never ceases to surprise me: the propensity of people to judge the idea and only the idea, and to liken it to ideas already in existence.

    A startup is like a movie. Imagine a movie director comes to you and says: “I have this great idea for a movie, and the story goes like this: there’s this special ops guy whose friend has been captured by the enemy, and he has to break him out of a high security facility in less than 24 hours.” Are you going to answer: “Oh, that sucks”? Or: “It won’t work, it’s already been done a million times”? (Or even: “Wow, that sounds like a great movie!”)

    A startup idea is like a movie pitch. It means nothing. One pitch can give birth to wildly different movies. One pitch can lead to a great movie, or to a dud. Key to the shaping of the movie is the personality of the director, his artistic vision, his experience. Not the pitch.

    (Yes, this is another variation on the “Execution is everything” theme.)

  • June 14, 02:42 PM

    The whole Internet

    A complaint that comes up quite often when discussing the merits and drawbacks of the iPad is this curious sentence : “It doesn’t support the whole Internet.”

    This post was spurred by John Gruber’s linking to a Safari extension called JavaScript Blacklist. It prompted me to do the inventory of all the whole-Internet-blocking extensions that I’ve installed so far on Safari :

    Right now, I’m getting further and further from “the whole Internet” on my laptop as time goes. I don’t have an iPad, but I think the whole Internet argument will not be stopping me.

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