IT Manager's Journal: The Long Now: Why 'Slower' is the Unnoticed New Frontier

"If you've been questioning whether open-source projects can move beyond mimicry and 'me-too' products to create significant innovation, you might want to take a long look at The Long Now Foundation's open-source Timeline/Calendar project. Conceived by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and others as a server-based rendering engine for timeline visualizations, the timeline software is flexible enough to be tailored for a wide variety of projects, abstractions, and time scales.

"Started by West Coast entrepreneurs--including parallel computing pioneer Danny Hillis--The Long Now Foundation aims to get people thinking slower and better rather than faster and cheaper. 'In my work on parallel computers,' Hillis said, 'I met a lot of people who were obsessed with speed. My customers were always looking at 'faster, faster.' So I naturally began to think of 'slower' as the unnoticed frontier...'"

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