“
You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
” — Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech (via ninakix)(via ninakix)
A cloud computing cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/uqMrmW
(Source: newyorker.com)
“Under the rule of Julia Gillard (from the Left), the Left has felt left out, a feeling stemming chiefly from her enthusiasm for controversial export industries (live animals to Indonesia, live uranium to India and live Sri Lankan teenagers to Malaysia). The Left feels that Julia Gillard (from the Left) has no right to be on the Right of such matters.” —
Once again, Annabel Crabb makes Australian politics not only interesting but also funny: “Today’s ALP: left and right make for queer bedfellows”
Those of you who are familiar with Australian politics will understand what an extraordinary feat this is.
[video]
“Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ” — “Steve Jobs’s Real Genius” - Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker (I am reading the Walter Isaacson biography right now and it is brilliant)
“If you’d told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history … well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.” — Andrew Sullivan (via ericmortensen)
(via rickwebb)
Let me start with a disclaimer. I consider myself a reasonable, moderately left-leaning kinda guy. I enjoy The West Wing, The Monthly, and the editorial pages of the Sydney Morning Herald.
But I just can’t get on board with the Occupy movement. I started out thinking that the protesters are fringe lunatics who would be better off trying to save the world by getting a haircut and a job. This was confirmed when I spent some time at the Occupy Sydney protest in Martin Place last night.
I’m glad I finally dropped by to check out the protests. I’ve been making fun of them all week, and it’s much easier when you’ve seen them in action.
There is certainly much to make fun of. The terrible clothes, the terrible spelling, the terrible rhetoric, and worst of all, the terrible smell.
That’s right - this is a protest movement that’s best observed from upwind.
There’s also the emerging bureaucracy, which makes the movement seem like it’s being run by HR people who are frantically scribbling on whiteboards and preparing meeting agendas. The protesters are carefully delegating responsibility for various work streams to the relevant subcommittees, working groups and task forces. It’s like a protest organised by the UN.
The protesters fancy themselves as modern day Robespierres. They sing songs from the French resistance, but I’m not sure they realise that the French revolution and the French resistance were 150 years apart. And that the French resistance was resisting an occupying force.
Anyway, instead of coming across as brilliant and articulate French insurrectionists, they end up coming across as less articulate - and even less likeable - versions of Michael Moore.
Much has been made of the protesters’ vague (incoherent?) ideology. There is some truth to this:
This is a bizarre ideological union. Ron Paul doesn’t believe there should be a federal government, and Noam Chomsky doesn’t believe there should be a private sector. My guess is that the protesters haven’t bothered to read the Wikipedia article explaining either man’s political beliefs.
This is the worst thing about the Occupy movement. It seems committed to taking the easy way out - intellectually, practically, and morally. The whole thing is a copout.
There were maybe 150 protesters gathered in Martin Place, sitting around eating lentil burgers, drinking wheat grass juice and making signs. They don’t know what they’re protesting against. They don’t have any consistent ideology, apart from “fuck the man” and mumbles about Wall Street’s greed. And they don’t have the PR savvy to make themselves look thoughtful or intelligent in front of the television cameras.
They can’t even organise a decent protest. I mean, they didn’t even occupy the nice part of Martin Place! And they don’t seem much worse behaved than the goons who usually occupy Sydney’s CBD on a Saturday night.
Idling around the fountains taking Spanish classes is so much easier than doing something that will help to bring about real change - like joining an NGO, running for office, or becoming a journalist.
Or better yet, occupying something useful - like a university degree, a career, or perhaps a shower.
Alex Campbell, 9th October 2011
Australians have no trouble getting worked up into a slather of moral outrage. This is never more true than when one of our citizens finds themselves in trouble with the laws of a foreign land.
Last week’s arrest by Indonesian police of a 14-year-old Lake Macquarie boy on drug charges is without doubt a terrible tragedy. Our instinctive and heartfelt sympathy for the boy and his family is just and deserved.
However, the anger and outrage towards Indonesia that this incident has provoked is entirely unjust, hypocritical and frankly absurd.
Let’s think back to June of this year, when our nation could not summon even the slightest outrage when it was revealed that two teenage boys had been locked up for months without charge in a high-security prison.
Most Australians will not have any recollection of this. Why? Because in this case the roles were reversed. It was the Australian government that had imprisoned two Indonesian boys.
THREE boys snatched from an impoverished Indonesian village by people smugglers have been held for months in an Australian jail with paedophiles, rapists and murderers. Instead, the boys aged 15 and 16 face five years’ jail in a high-security adult prison under mandatory sentencing laws.
Fourteen months after 15-year-old Ose Lani and 16-year-olds Ako Lani and John Ndollu were detained on an asylum seeker boat near Ashmore Reef, no Australian police or immigration officials have contacted anybody in Manamolo, the boys’ village on Indonesia’s Roti Island, to establish their ages. No Australian official has informed family members that the boys are being held in an Australian jail.
“Australia Imprisons Indonesian Boys”, Sydney Morning Herald, June 14, 2011
What does it say about our national character that we are perfectly happy for our government to imprison Indonesian children who had not clearly committed any crime, but we become incensed when Indonesia dares to imprison one of our children for knowingly buying drugs in their country?
Given Australia’s gross mistreatment of those who would dare to seek a better life in our country, what moral authority can we really claim over Indonesia on any issue?
Indonesia, and particularly Bali, are always welcoming to Australian tourists. All they ask is that we don’t do drugs in their country. Is that too much to ask? Seriously, what do we expect to happen when we violate their laws?
The outrage expressed in our newspapers this weekend over this matter is completely wasted. The Indonesian government does not fear for what’s being said about them in our papers.
The only thing that might worry the Indonesian government is a decline in their tourism market. Yet despite the disasters that have befallen Schapelle Corby, the Bali Nine and so many others, more and more Australians keep flocking to Bali every year.
If Australians want to protest against this arrest - if Australians really don’t like or want to respect the laws of Indonesia - perhaps they should leave the thongs and singlets back in Newcastle and instead go holiday on the Gold Coast.
“The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate—a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It’s as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory.” — How Whole Foods “Primes” You To Shop (via Nextness)
Dramas don’t suffer at the hands of the networks in the same way that sitcoms do, and, more important, they don’t make us suffer as much. They usually emerge from one person’s imagination, take more risks, and have the power to really hook us. We say that we “love” certain sitcoms, but we become “obsessed” with dramas. Two new dramas that may—may—have potential are ABC’s “Pan Am” and NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” even though they can’t, by any stretch, be called original. Both are the direct spawn of “Mad Men”—shows set in the early sixties that aim at conveying the changes of the era which led us to where we are now. The new shows are more concerned with hitting their marks and getting the sociology right than with character, but “Pan Am” has a bit of style to it, and a note of darkness, and the formula might just work.
‘Another World’ by the always wonderful Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker (via Nextness)
“The fact is that the Libyan operation has been remarkably cost-effective. The direct costs of the Iraq war so far are about $1 trillion, 5,000 American troops’ lives and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers’ lives. The direct costs of the Libya operation so far have been less than $1 billion, about 0.1% of what has been spent on Iraq - and with no American military casualties and minimal Libyan deaths.” — ‘How the lessons of Iraq paid off in Libya’ by Fareed Zakaria in TIME
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The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”
For the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left.
” — ‘Flick Chicks’, by Mindy Kaling in The New Yorker“I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible.” — ‘Flick Chicks’, by Mindy Kaling in The New Yorker