Quotes

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast. Modernity can be wrenching, as indeed can capitalism, and there will always be “out” groups who feel themselves disrespected or left behind. The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist.

For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril.

The coffeehouse may just be mankind’s greatest invention. It certainly is the most collective one: In the classic, which is to say Viennese, form, the coffeehouse is perhaps the finest collaboration between Europe, Asia and Africa. It is almost as if every great civilization in the world had taken a brief time-out from trying to kill one another to brainstorm what a perfect public space should look like.

I’m more convinced than ever that the path to feeling whole and happy means bucking up, dropping the “poor me” act, and stopping everything you need to until you figure out the next thing you can do that would make you feel alive and useful — driven by something other than the need to rationalize why you aren’t where you want to be.

Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts they’re not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else.

A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn’t going to be endorsed by Apple.

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.

It’s not that the Droid is a bad phone; it’s fine. It just has a slower chip than the Samsung Moment, a clunkier body than the Palm Pre, a more basic UI than HTC’s Hero, and… a puzzling alarm-clock stand. The Moment’s speed, the Pre’s slick design, and the Hero’s UI are the only things that put those things on par with Apple’s iPhone. The Droid has nothing those phones don’t, except of course for this commercial. Which is cool, if you like commercials, but less important if you like smartphones that do stuff well.