💬 Quotes
Rene Descarte Was A Boring Old Fart?
In Hume’s view, Descartes' program of demolishing the world through doubt and then rebuilding it through logic is bound to fail. Instead, we have to accept that our knowledge of the world is not absolute, as much as we might like it to be.
💬 Stowe Boyd
You know - I was just thinking that. Thanks Stowe.
Someone Else Who Doesn't Get It
A piece by Robert Scoble on 🔗 ‘Why Tim Cook better worry’. Scoble opens with his take on ‘the fourth visible user interface of the personal computer era.’
The first was character mode. MS-DOS.
The second was the GUI, graphical user interface. Macintosh and Windows.
The third was touch. iPhone and Android.
The fourth is spatial computing.
…. and then goes on to suggest that Cook ‘doesn’t get it’ and Apple should be worried.
He seems to forget that Apple.
- is never first
- never talks about what they have until they are ready
- always puts market readiness ahead of vaporware
And - remember this piece was 🔗 written by the guy that wrote that he would never take his google glass off … and was generally THE world’s leading advocate of same. But that was in 2013.
Then last year he wrote;
Last night before Skrillex at Coachella came on two guys were talking next to me. One said ‘I want to get away from the Google Glass guys.’ I turn around and there are two guys wearing Glass. Google does have a problem here. I haven’t worn mine at all this weekend. What is going on here in a world where I am carrying around a camera and EVERYONE uses their phones or a GoPro but Glass feels freaky and weird? Google has launched this product poorly, is what. But wearable technology needs a different set of skills than Google has. What? Empathy.
and just last week;
Yes, Google Glass had its problems, but that’s because it was released too early. It was a misunderstood product that could stand up to neither expectations nor criticism.
Meanwhile - Apple’s R and D spend is running close to 10 billion a year - do we really think they aren’t working on interesting, game changing, futuristic ideas ?
As Asymco’s Horace Dediu wrote;
While other companies make a bigger show of their projects, ‘Apple’s’ work is in secret. It is substantial and calibrated by market opportunity.
Update - June 2nd - 2016
Funny - this just in today - from a piece called ‘When Should Apple Introduce Its Innovations’. (Sorry the mangling - see below - lost the link)
A couple of choice quotes;
What Apple’s critics stubbornly fail, or refuse, to acknowledge - even though the evidence before them is overwhelming is that it’s not first that matters, it’s first to get it right. The critics want Apple to invent the next big thing. But Apple doesn’t invent. They never have invented. They reinvent.
and
Everything at Google IO so far: Here is our answer to a rival’s product. Ours is way better. It will be out later this year.
💬 Farhad Manjoo on Twitter
#word
Update - Jan 24th - 2024
I rediscovered this post on Jan 23rd, 2024 it having been imported from one of my other blogs a while back. It had clearly got severely mangled in the process. So I have just demangled it - including moving out of that ‘special’ Wordpress HTML that we all ‘love’ so much and reformatted with Markdown and added some of my little emojis for better discovery in the future. Otherwise what you read above is what went live way back then.
Quotes For The Times
- The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, ‘If you were my husband I’d give you poison,’ and he said, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.'
2) A member of Parliament to Disraeli: ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.’ ‘That depends, Sir,’ said Disraeli, ‘whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.'
3) ‘He had delusions of adequacy.’ - Walter Kerr
4) ‘He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.’ - Winston Churchill
5) ‘A modest little person, with much to be modest about.’ - Winston Churchill
6) ‘I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.'- Clarence Darrow
7) ‘He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.’ - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).
8) ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?’ - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
9) ‘Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.’ - Moses Hadas
10) ‘He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.’ - Abraham Lincoln
11) ‘I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.’ - Mark Twain
12) ‘He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.’ - Oscar Wilde
13) ‘I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend…if you have one.’ - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
14) ‘Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.’ - Winston Churchill, in response.
15) ‘I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.’ - Stephen Bishop
16) ‘He is a self-made man and worships his creator.’ - John Bright
17) ‘I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.’ - Irvin S. Cobb
18) ‘He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.’ - Samuel Johnson
19) ‘He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.’ - Paul Keating
20) ‘There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.’ Jack E. Leonard
21) ‘He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.’ - Robert Redford
22) ‘They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.’ - Thomas Brackett Reed
23) ‘In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.’ - Charles, Count Talleyrand
24) ‘He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.’ - Forrest Tucker
25) ‘Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?’ - Mark Twain
26) ‘His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.’ - Mae West
27) ‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.’ - Oscar Wilde
28) ‘He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination.’ - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
29) ‘He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.’ - Billy Wilder
30) ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.’ - Groucho Marx
ITS.A.JOKE.PEOPLE
Originally Posted On Humor.Philpin.com - a now defunct site. I moved the content here for posterity. The date of this post is the date that it was originally published on that site.