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On November 7, China’s top legislature adopted a cybersecurity law to safeguard the sovereignty on cyberspace, national security, and the rights of citizens. The law has seven chapters that define specific regulations in various areas, such as network …
What is the best time to plant a tree?
A popular answer to this question is that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and the second-best time is now.
This is often claimed to be an ancient Chinese proverb. Or an African proverb. It is unlikely to be either of these.
And obviously we are not supposed to take this proverb literally. Because if the best time was twenty years ago, the second-best time would be nineteen years ago.
But instead of interpreting this logically, we are presumably supposed to interpret it as a motivational statement. Don’t waste time regretting that you didn’t plant a tree twenty years ago, act now to make sure you don’t have similar regrets in twenty years’ time. (Do real Chinese proverbs do motivational statements? I suspect not.)
In his new book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly talks about the opportunities for internet entrepreneurs thirty years ago. “Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an ambitious entrepreneur back in 1985 at the dawn of the internet?”
He then looks forward to the middle of the century. “If we could climb into a time machine, journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2050 were not invented until after 2016.”
In other words, for an internet start-up the second-best time is now.
By the way, I’m not the first person to use the pun about ‘boughing’ to the inevitable. For example, @rcolvile used it in the context of ash dieback. “Half the trees in the country were going to be torn down. He’d already had to veto a particularly insensitive press release describing him as ‘ashen-faced’ about the situation, but ‘boughing to the inevitable’. Meanwhile, Google is asking me if I meant ‘coughing to the inevitable’. Thanks Google, it’s always useful to spot something you haven’t yet mastered.
KK.org, The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly, The Internet Is Still at the Beginning of Its Beginning (Huffington Post, 6 June 2016)
On The Best Time to Plant a Tree (Reddit)
Robert Colvile, Friends: The One with the Guy in a Yellow Tie (Telegraph, 3 November 2012)
What is the best time to plant a tree?A popular answer to this question is that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, and the second-best time is now.This is often claimed to be an ancient Chinese proverb. Or an African proverb. It is unli…
As the consumerization of technology continues to grow and converge, our way of constructing business models and systems need to evolve as well. We need to let data drive the business process, and incorporate intelligent machines like Watson into our infrastructure to help us turn data into actionable results. … Continue reading →
We’re excited to announce the formation of a new forum, specifically designed to advance The Open Group vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ by helping enterprises to take advantage of these convergent technologies. This will be accomplished by identifying a set of new platform capabilities, and architecting and standardizing an IT platform by which enterprises can reap the business benefits of Platform 3.0. Continue reading →
Today, the lack of trust in online Identity forces organizations to set up their own identity management systems, dishing out their own usernames and passwords/PINs for us. The result is that we end up having to remember well over 50 different online identities, which poses a large problem. Continue reading →
Didn’t catch the walled garden tweet jam? Here is the official summary of the event. Continue reading →
The Open Group will be hosting a tweet jam on Tuesday, July 10 at 9 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. BST. The topic will be on “Facebook walled gardens” and is open to anyone interested in participating through Twitter. Please read on for more details C…
The core dilemma in public cybersecurity: Balancing boundarylessness and data security. The solution isn’t easy, but long-term, it lies in not relying on the security of the pipes or the perimeter, but improving the trust and security of the data itself. Security needs to be associated with data and people; not the connections and routers that carry it. Continue reading →