Quote of the day

Putting [Lotus] Notes on iPhone is like getting out a piece of exquisite Wedgwood china and using it to serve a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you ever seen Notes? It’s not software, it’s a form of punishment. Companies that use Notes have to staff not only a help desk but also a suicide prevention center — it’s that bad. Even the poor bastards at IBM, who are forced to use it, do nothing but complain…

From the The Fake Steve Jobs diary.

Quote of the day

“The market in the short run is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”

Benjamin Graham (1894-1976), economist, professional investor and mentor of Warren Buffett.

Looks as though there’s a lot of voting going on just now.

Jobs on Kindle

From a conversation with John Markoff

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Quote of the day

At the end of 10 thrilling and memorable days in American electoral politics, we should recall the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan – who was, by coincidence, Hillary Clinton’s predecessor as senator for New York. People are fully entitled to their own opinions, he observed, but they are not entitled to their own set of facts.

Martin Kettle, writing in today’s Guardian.

Reckoning the odds

Dick Cheney famously warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a one per cent of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty. Since the odds are approaching 100 per cent that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney’s rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, a soulmate of Al Gore.

Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, writing in the Financial Times, January 5/6, 2008.

Quote of the day

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

John Brockman.

Where did 35mm film come from?

Interesting aside to a discussion about the Leica M8:

As an aside on the whole sensor size issue—I guess there is some practical or economic limitation that keeps most sensors at 75% of the standard 135 film size, thus forcing all of the rethinking of lenses and such, but it’s interesting to note where the 35mm standard came from. Apparently, in 1889, Thomas Edison was developing the Kinetoscope and a worker asked him how wide to cut the film. He held up his thumb and forefinger and said “About this wide…” and the 35 millimeter standard was born…

Quote of the Day

HM the Queen on Proust (as envisaged by Alan Bennett in his new story, An Uncommon Reader):

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up’ “.

From yesterday’s Guardian.

Quote of the day

The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.