Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees—so that rivals know where it is.
From an engagingly critical Economist review of Google’s current state.
Category Archives: Quotes
Quote of the day
The late JK Galbraith once remarked that left-wing governments’ penchant for intervening meant that they needed to be better at management than right-wing ones. The truth is that practically the only areas the government has got half right – the economy and the railways – are the ones it has removed itself from. Everywhere else, ignoring Galbraith and its own heritage, Labour has marched management backwards.
Simon Caulkin, writing on the irony of how “an administration that sets such store by efficiency and private-sector methods should end up resembling Fawlty Towers”.
Quote of the day
Michael Fabricant is back! These days he asks only sensible questions, which is disappointing, but yesterday he was wearing a tie in soft pastel stripes and his summer hair, bright yellow, lustrous and so spotless you could eat your dinner off it. I like to think he leaves it on a stand, and a team of Burmese cats licks it clean every night.
Simon Hoggart, writing in today’s Guardian.
The joys of tourism
“Part of the pleasure of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasures of abandoning them to their fate.”
Jean Baudrillard, quoted by Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment.
Quote of the day
These days, you can be a Labour democrat, a Conservative democrat or a Liberal Democrat, but you can’t be a New Labour democrat because that is a contradiction in terms.
Henry Porter, writing in today’s Observer.
Query of the day
Q: Hey, Melinda, what do you call a crank on a computer?
A: Nicholas Negroponte.
From a sharp observation by John Paczkowski.
Quote of the day
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs, giving the Commencement Address at Stanford last June. It’s a wonderful speech, which shows Jobs at his entrancing best.
Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.
Jane Jacobs on urban planners
“They are all in the same stage of elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century… As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.”
Exactly the same could be said of much of today’s contemporary ‘management science’.
Quote of the day
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.
Richard Holmes, the military historian, claimed on Radio 5 Live today that a printout of this epigram by T.E. Lawrence hangs on the wall of the British Army HQ in Basra.
Quote of the day
From a Technology Review interview with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done…
Technology Review: Computers and the Internet let us do more things, but can they really help us get more things done? How does technology fit into a good time-management system?
David Allen: First of all, you don’t manage time. Time is time, and it can’t be managed. What you manage are commitments. The calendar will let you manage, at a maximum, three or four percent of what you have to do. What you really need is a way to keep track of your commitments. Then you start to get a sense of the huge volume of commitments you’ve made, and you are able to review those commitments.
Which reminds me… I bought a copy of Getting Things Done a while back, but I’ve been too busy to get around to reading it yet.