In a piece on Borderlands's closure, I wrote that, while Beatts planned to hold a meeting to hear thoughts from customers about how he might keep his store open, he doubted that it would bring to the surface any usable ideas.
Only feasible and usable ideas are converted into reality.
The rest of country may not follow all their strictures, but our would-be Ecotopians could produce some interesting and even usable ideas.
But this would have been little more than a photocopier with re-usable paper an idea that had been tried before and had failed.Instead, Xerox is expected to pursue the idea of printing on Gyricon with a "magic wand"—a tool covered with an array of electric contacts and memory devices.
Sketching on paper is free-flowing and easy, but the challenge for designers is then having to quickly turn it into usable work — transferring ideas from paper to digital either by scanning and tracing, or recreating a digital version of what they sketched.
PE's sales force and financial strength make the company an attractive partner, and it excels in the combination of chemistry, biology, engineering and software needed to turn raw ideas into usable products.
A properly tuned device could capture background radio-frequency energy and rectify it into small amounts of usable power.Although all these ideas have been shown to work in theoretical tests on lab benches, they all suffer from the same handicap: intermittent operation.
Langille, and his co-founder Lee Sherman, both hail from Mint.com, and as with that site, which attempts to make personal money management tools into something usable by everyone, the idea is that Visual.ly can also have a wider remit.
Building a usable product is about collecting ideas, trying them out, playing with them and seeing what works.
With nine countries now believed to have nuclear weapons, including North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, the world does not need America's encouraging the idea of more usable bombs.
This is grim news, and too hard a sell even for Freud, whose consolation was the idea of a usable past, whereby "a crucial aspect of the individual's sense of free will is a knowledge of his own history that does not dominate, overburden, or destroy him".
