8-27-11 Hodgepodge

Quotable

Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal blog ran a collection of quotes from Steve Jobs. I particularly like this one:

[I]t's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light -- that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.

Those aren't just words to do business by; they are words to live by. See also his quote regarding for whom he and his colleagues designed computers.

Weekend Reading

"So now the Left has a new line of attack. Let's tell the public that the rich are intrinsically flawed." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "The 'Selfish' Rich" at The American Thinker

"[W]hile recent volatility has reinforced markets' occasional drama, the biggest and most impactful moves undoubtedly occur over time." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Is This the Dollar's Great Decline" at SmartMoney

Revamped Lexicon

One of my favorite web-based resources is the on-line edition of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, but I have long been mildly frustrated by the inability to link to an individual quote from within a topic. Via email, I have learned that this feature has now been added to the web site.

For example, on the topic Pragmatism, there are seven quotes. In the past, if I were making a point directly related to (or excerpting from) only the second, I could have only linked to the topic page, and then said something like, "Scroll down to the quote starting with, 'In the whirling Heraclitean flux ...'"

Now, there are two ways to send readers directly to a relevant quote, both of which allow readers to see that Rand had more to say: the quote within the topic page or the quote on its own page. Follow the links to see how this works for the second quote.

For other bloggers who might be interested in taking advantage of this feature, the URLs for the two individual quotes are formed as follows:

aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pragmatism.html#order_2
aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pragmatism/2.html

Whether you want the reader to immediately see other context for a given quote or concentrate on just one quote, there is now an easy and effective way to do so.

The Best Learn from Failure

An article about five product lines killed by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs notes the following about the Power Mac G4 Cube, which was his own idea:

While Apple hoped the computer would be a smash hit, few customers could see their way to buying the monitor-less Cube when the all-in-one iMac could be purchased for less, and a full-sized PowerMac G4 introduced a month later with the same specs could be had for $1,599 [i.e., two hundred dollars less --ed]. Apple attempted to re-price and re-spec the Cube in the following months, but Jobs ended up murdering one of his own darlings, suspending production of the model exactly one year after its release. While the Cube's design is still revered (it's part of the MoMA's collection), it proved consumers won't buy a product for its design alone.

And we all know what happened after that...

-- CAV