Personally, I am not fond of Apple products, but I can not help but admire Steve Jobs. I am enjoying a compendium of Steve Jobs quotes from the Wall Street Journal. This one hits close to home:
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
I work for an Information Technology bellwether, which is both highly profitable and obsessive over maintaining its profit margins. Costs must always be contained. While we have a variety of interesting technology we are working to develop, we are presently completing our latest round of workforce reductions. I wish our leadership could be a little more like Steve Jobs:
“This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.”
You know what John Chambers might say to that?
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it. That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.”
Really, the whole collection is worth a read.
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Rolled in early to the far side of campus for an All Hands meeting, and these clouds caught my eye.
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I do not know the provenance of the source material, and can make no claims of intellectual property rights here. TinEye finds 550 similar images.
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Second test of Android photo sharing to WordPress. Maybe I can get back on the photo-a-day wagon . . .
Boston airport, terminal B.
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I am a fan of transit maps, but in San Jose, the light rail system is two lines and a little stub. There doesn’t seem to be much consistent bus service, either. Instead, San Jose is a city built around a set of highways. So I built this Harry Beck-style transit map of San Jose’s transportation system.
It is designed for printing on a sheet of US letter paper as a quick reference. I’m confident that a better resource would opt for a display of the major roads that comprise the irregular street grid, so you can see what flows to where, turning in upon itself and changing names along the way. I might even build a map like that, but for now, I just wanted to blow a mind or three by rendering highways as if they were a transit system in a clearly iconic fashion.
Incomplete interchanges have been omitted, and I’m sure there’s an error in there somewhere.
The fare? An automobile and a licensed driver!
Links: PNG: 3300×2550, PDF: 8.5x11in, Inkscape SVG (source)
Update 2011-08-19: Dixon Landing moved North of CA237, San Tomas spelled correctly.
Update 2012-06-26: For a future project, check out code by Andrew Godwin for his “Twin Tubes” map.
Update 2013-05-23: John Galantini has rendered a Tube Map using HTML and CSS, which is utterly amazing. For example, the little wheel chairs are a list of items, each representing say, the wheels, the back, the arm, all rendered using the CSS box model.
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Netflix has two awesome distinctive features going for it:
- It knows my taste enough to effectively recommend content.
- They do streaming and DVDs!
Right now I watch old TV shows on the streaming service, and maybe 1 DVD/month. For this I pay $10/month. That’s a good deal.
But now they want to cleave their business between DVD operations and streaming, and charge most customers more. Plenty of folks have gotten upset over this. Personally, I am irritated that they’re screwing the pooch on one of their distinctive features. What I had perceived as “hey, in order to satisfy our customers, we do DVDs and now we do streaming” now sounds more like “we want to be a streaming company but shipping DVDs is so expensive so we need to separate these different operations to keep the DVD taint off our streaming business!”
Which makes their distinctive feature list look like this:
- It knows my taste enough to effectively recommend content.
They do streaming OR they do DVDs.(Oh wait, that’s nothing special!)
Amazon.com offers me a bunch of “free” streaming through Prime and newer TV shows a la carte. I can get DVDs from the local library, not to mention any number of commercial outlets. I don’t need Netflix for only one or the other.
For my existing plan of 1 DVD at a time plus unlimited streaming, I pay $10/month. The new price for this same plan is to become $16/month. That’s a 60% increase.
I could go unlimited streaming only for $8/month. There goes the $2 extra I had been paying to watch the occasional DVD.
They do have a limited DVD plan for $5/month, but I called and confirmed that I can not combine that plan with unlimited streaming. That’s too bad, because $8 for unlimited streaming plus a few dollars more for limited DVDs is basically what I want.
So, for now, I am downgrading to their $5/month limited DVD plan. If Netflix wants to be a streaming-only provider they need to have way better streaming content. If Netflix wants to stick with their original plan of providing entertainment I like at an affordable price via the most cost-effective delivery option, then I look forward to signing up for an unlimited streaming plus limited DVD plan.
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From frumforum.com via jsonp.cc:
House Republicans could have kept the debt ceiling issue wholly separate from the budget cut issue.
Instead, Republicans put the gun on the table. They raised the menace of deliberate default in a way it has not been raised before.
Then, having issued the threat, they discovered that their own core supporters would not allow the gun to be holstered again.
They issued demands they knew could not be met, for budget cuts much bigger than Republicans ever enacted when they had the power to enact them. They cocked the weapon. And now here we are: the demands are unmet and Republicans find themselves facing a horrible choice between yielding on their exorbitant demands or pushing the United States into financial upheaval.
David Frum was a speechwriter for President George W Bush.
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Some article in The Atlantic about how President Obama has decided to stop being the reasonable guy who makes every last concession imaginable and then some and as of last night is now playing Chicken with the Republicans, daring them to screw the country over, since they’re likely to take the greater share of the blame. Yeah, anyway, this part got me laughing:
There’s an old Soviet joke that a friend once told me. An old man has been standing in line for bread for eight hours. His feet hurt, his back hurts, and he is faint from hunger. Finally, finally the door opens and the baker comes out. He starts to salivate. He fingers the rubles in his pocket.
“Comrades, go home,” says the baker. “There is no flour to make bread today.”
Something in the old man snaps. He has been waiting in these lines for decades, and he has had enough. “This is ridiculous!” he shouts. “I fought in the Great Patriotic War! I worked for forty years in the factory! Now you make me wait in line for eight hours when there’s no flour? You didn’t know this eight hours ago? I spit on you, and I spit on the regime!” And he spits in front of the baker.
A man steps out of line behind him. “Careful, comrade. You know how it would have been in the old days if you had said these things.” With his thumb and forefinger, he mimes a gun being fired at the temple.
Defeated, the man steps out of line and trudges home with everyone else. He goes into his apartment and sits down at the table. His wife walks in just as he pours the last of his vodka into a glass, and drinks it down in one gulp.
“Sergei, what’s wrong?!” she cries, seeing the look on his face. “Don’t tell me they’re out of bread!”
“It’s worse than that. Much worse.” he says heavily.
“What could be worse?”
“They’re out of bullets.”
Americans should maybe be stocking up on their dark humor.
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I don’t have a well-structured argument ready to post, but here’s a little rant I just made on IRC:
Danny: Talking to a guy at Google, he suggested that the plan is to introduce autonomous cars into an environment with less restrictive regulations.
Danny: I think autonomous cars are just a matter of time. Possibly the majority of new cars in 20 years, hopefully a lot sooner. The safety issue will become “why would you want a car controlled by fault-prone humans?”
Response: I expect there will be piles of social and political resistance.
Danny: Well the biggest resistance might be taxi drivers. That’s an effing industry in India. But I could picture the military going for it. “The road is mined and full of ambushes, yet the the supplies must go through. We can pay mad money for insane truck drivers or we can send robots.”
Danny: What interests me will be the impact on public transit. I think if cars can pick you up at your house, car ownership will drop, and people will use inexpensive autonomous car hires as the “last mile” connection to high-density transit services.
Danny: . . . the autonomous cars will happen. I swear that industry is like the Internet circa 1989. I would love to get a foot in the door! If Google nixed that program they are effing dunces–Like HP telling Steve Jobs that the PC is just a little too “out there.” I would buy the effing Apple I Autonomous Car Kit and install it myself.
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Q: “What would help make communications more clear, simple, and transparent for you?”
A: I come from a startup culture, where the Fearless Leader will once a week stand up an a table and enthusiastically explain what new deals and products are in the pipeline, in terms his Grandma would understand. Then we drink cool-aid.
Compared to that, most corporate communication is Kremlinology.
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I was playing with an idea for someone.
Transit lines laid along Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
The idea wasn’t really working, but I am happy to share it here.
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