Synergy

The behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken seperately.

--Synergetics, by Buckminster Fuller, 1975.

The term is abused as widely as it is used effectively.

A few tips for supporting its effective use:

• It's not synergy if it's not a surprise, but
• Novelty itself is not novel. It's omnipresent. So cheerleading with the term is somewhat irrelevant.
• To be used technically, it must be articulable in detail without reference to the behaviors of the component parts taken separately. Otherwise, it is mention, hope, or hype.

In Business:

Sought by many, achieved by few. Synergy happens when the value created from the combination of two business units exceeds the value of the two units working independently. The sum of the two is less than the whole.

It creates interdependence between two units by sharing resources (people, technology ect). Synergy creates a wealth that shareholders cannot duplicate by diversifying their own portfolio, thus, justifies the firm's investment.

A good sample of synergy is Sharp, which uses its display technology from calculators to personal organizers. Another example is Disney, whose marketing not only sells their movies, but their theme parks and toys.

However, synergy fails far more frequently than it succeeds. For example, when Starbucks went from coffee peddling to on-line retailer of furniture on living.com. Starbucks lost millions trying to overstretch the marketing ploy called the "Starbucks Experience".

Synergy is most apparent when two people who love each other are always together. The activities they partake in and their own behaviours create a synergy that is unbreakable enhancing their own performance. Here are some examples:

- When my significant other and I are seperated, both of us plod along and sometimes are in disarray with a loss of direction. But once we are conjoined, we fully regain our senses and orientation (and then some).

- Mountain biking in the Gatineaus with my SO made us both appreciate the scenery as well as focus on our bike handling skills. This would not have happened if we rode alone.

Also the name (nom de muzak?) under which Larry Fast made electronic music. His first CD, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, consisted of electronic arrangments of orchestral pieces. Very sweet.

Other CD's by Synergy were mostly original compositions (I think). Larry Fast also worked with Peter Gabriel and Nektar.

Synergy CD's were hard to find until they re-released them in 1998.

Here's a list of Synergy CDs:

1. Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra
2. Sequencer
3. Cords
4. Games
5. Audion
6. Computer Experiments Vol. 1
7. The Jupiter Menace
8. Semi-Conductor
9. Metropolitan Suite

Larry Fast's Synergy website can be found at this URL: http://www.eclipse.net/~synergy/

A range of digital cordless phones manufactured for BT in the UK.

I have a Synergy 2110 base station and two handsets. It is useful in that it allows several handsets to be used with one base station, meaning you can scatter the things about your abode with reckless abandon. They operate digitally meaning clearer calls, and in practice will allow 4-5 hours of talk-time between recharges (extra charging units can be purchased seperately). Best of all, the caller-ID means you can avoid talking to inconvenient people by cunningly pretending you're not home, you wily fox!

However on the flip-side of the coin, it's not so useful in that the ringer is barely audible, the signal continually drops between handset and base station, and most irritatingly that the fucking thing never stops beeping! Even the slightest misdemeanour, say entering an overlong number, will result in a shrieking tone that seems to last for hours. Also, it seems bizarre to me that I can buy a mobile phone with an intuitive menu system for £40, yet this £90 wonder requires a veritable marathon of finger-numbing button sequences to manage even a speed-dial.

I thought I'd never be sad to see the back of our old, massive, crackly analogue cordless phone. But using this appliance makes me regret the day it met its high-velocity end against the living-room wall. Oh, and it's ugly. Avoid at all costs.

Introduction to Synergy

Synergy is a free program that is useful to people who have multiple computers. It lets you easily share a trackball (or mouse) and keyboard between several different computers with different operating systems, each with its own monitor, without any additional hardware.

Because it provides a way to cut-and-paste text across operating systems and computers, people can spread their work applications across multiple machines; thus, Synergy is an alternative to running two monitors on a single computer.

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard to a different computer is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers on Windows machines so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all.

Synergy is open source and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

System Requirements:    

• Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me    
• Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP    
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher    
• Unix (Linux, Solaris, Irix, etc.; X Windows version 11 revision 4+; XTEST extension)
• support for TCP/IP networking

The Mac OS X port is not complete. It does not synchronize the screen saver, only text clipboard data works (i.e. HTML and bitmap data do not work), non-US English keyboards are untested and probably don't work, and there may be problems with mouse pointer and mouse wheel acceleration.

Synergy may be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/

Installation Issues

Installing and running Synergy on two Windows machines should be fairly straightforward if you follow the instructions, but make sure that both machines are running the same version of Synergy. Different versions can result in program malfunction.

When installing Synergy to communicate between a PC and a Mac, be aware that determining the Mac's true name on an organizational network may be challenging. The Mac's name will normally be machinename.local -- you will need to append .local in Synergy.

However, some Macs on a LAN may appear under an obsolete name on the network. This happens when the active directory name doesn't update to the Mac's name because it was never released by the previous PC computer using that IP address. The solution is to get the IP released by network personnel so that the name gets updated in the active directory.

Microsoft Sidewinder, Trillian, and iTunes Compatibility Issues

The compatibility between the Microsoft Sidewinder software and Synergy is not complete. If a user inadvertently hits a Sidewinder button while the cursor is moving off-screen, the button may become "stuck" and Synergy will rapidly and repeatedly input the button command into whichever computer is on mouse focus. This can result in emails being prematurely sent, files being prematurely closed, and other problems that can seriously disrupt your computer use.

The solution to a "stuck" button in Synergy to to reboot the machine that is used as the host for Synergy.

Two pieces of software can cause the same problem on a Windows XP host computer running Synergy: iTunes and Trillian, a popular chat client. Trillian makes the problem especially bad; the software conflict mechanism is unknown. Running iTunes by itself does not seem to make Synergy especially unstable, but running iTunes and Trillian leads to severe Synergy instability.

The best solution at present is to avoid running Trillian when doing a lot of between-computer cutting and pasting in Synergy.

Nothing's perfect. Rather all life, all things imitate perfection.

God created man in His image remember? But there's a problem if we begin and end our relationship with perfection there, because if we're willing to accept that Perfection created man then it's not a far step backwards to admit that Perfection created everything beforehand too. But we don't see much of God anymore. Well at least not in the same grandeur of the Big Bang or whatever you want to call the beginning, but "in His image" is more than just a 3D model of a formless mass of everythingness? Then "in His image" goes beyond man and skin. It suggests that this might just be the best of all possible worlds. Optimistic. But we're losing track of the point here. Life imitates Perfection. Incompleteness is the important part here. Because Perfection (as Hesse taught us) implies oneness.

Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One!,

if man is also one with himself then why does God need to remind us that he is just like us? It's absurd that an affirmation of faith would draw God to a parallel with man rather then keep him at a distance. Moreover, if God is just like man and yet is God it leads a man to worship man or worship himself, ultimately breaking God's second commandment. So no, we've misinterpreted. Instead, there is one God and he is one and he is oneness. But in that realization comes the understanding that man is not God, man is an image of Perfection, an imitation.

Synergy is "An effect of the interaction of the actions of two agents such that the result of the combined action is greater than expected as a simple additive combination of the two agents acting separately." Synergy is creating oneness from the multiplicity of oneself and coming out of it with more than you started. Oneness is the goal of the keen imitation that strives for Perfection.

Syn"er*gy (?), n. [Gr. . See Synergetic.]

Combined action

the combined healty action of every organ of a particular system; as, the digestive synergy.

An effect of the interaction of the actions of two agents such that the result of the combined action is greater than expected as a simple additive combination of the two agents acting separately.

© Webster 1913.