Month: July 2007

Fat Buddha and regular buddha

Have you ever felt that the fat buddha that you can buy in various shops was somehow a little too common, too vulgar when compared to the serene, calm and wise Buddha that you are normally used to? The Straight Dope has an answer:

The fat, laughing guy isn’t the capital-B Buddha but a lesser buddha called Hotei (or Miroku or Miluo or Budai or Putai, depending on language). The model for Hotei was (probably) a cheerful, overweight Chinese zen monk or healer who wandered the countryside helping people circa 950 AD. In Asia the belly is one’s spiritual center and source of power, so rubbing the laughing buddha’s belly brings good luck, and is as close to achieving buddha nature as most of us will get.

And here’s some more information that you did no have (and probably did not want):

  • The earlobes [of any Buddha statue] are elongated, partly to indicate the Buddha is all-hearing and partly as a reminder of the heavy earrings that weighed them down before Siddhartha renounced material things to seek enlightenment.
  • The Buddha’s head is usually enlarged (sometimes by a large bump on top) to symbolize wisdom; a jewel in the bump denotes brilliance.

Adobe’s invisible weapons

Robert X. Cringely argues in this post that Adobe is in a great position to become the next big platform:

Adobe is moving into developer tools in a big way to support its grab for mindshare in the interactive/rich web application space where much of the excitement lately seems to be. Some people think of this as Browser Wars 2.0, but I think it is more fundamental than that. Here are the players. Microsoft is putting massive resources behind Silverlight. Sun is trying to take Java to the next level with Java FX. Mozilla is trying to improve its position through AJAX, Canvas support, and better offline support. And Adobe is leaning hard on Flash, Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR (formerly code-named Apollo), and Flex. My money is on Adobe simply because of those two invisible weapons, PDF and Flash.

What could PDF, Adobe’s Portable Document Format, possibly have to do with this? It’s a 30 megabyte download living right now in more than a BILLION computers. Same for Flash — a BILLION computers. That’s more than 60 megabytes of Adobe code living in nearly every computer on every desktop or laptop in the world — greater market penetration by far than even Windows enjoys. And what’s IN there? Nobody outside Adobe really knows. Is there room in that 60 megabytes for the Adobe Reader, Flash, and a few hooks or applets Adobe might throw in to assist with some future product or service roll out? Sure, why not? That’s the power of invisibility.

See full article.