“Quotes” Article Archive

A reader wrote into Information Week in response to an article about Global Warming Skeptics with this interesting observation:

"The best supercomputers in the world, knowing initial conditions with maximum accuracy, still can't determine how the smoke of a cigarette in a car will dissipate. Now imagine a planet the size of the Earth where we don't know all initial conditions."

Reason enough to deny human-causes global warming? Probably not, but it does raise an interesting point of view.

I love it when the speed of things are put in perspective. Take this quote from CNN today regarding the world's fastest supercomputer which was unveiled recently by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp.

"If every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day."

This supercomputer is twice as fast as it's nearest competitor which is itself 3 times as fast as anything else in use.

Full article on CNN.com.

According to Groundwell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

"Harriet Klauser, Amazon's top reviewer, reads two books a day and has reviewed over 14,000. She's well known to publishers, who send her fifty books a week."

It's inconceivable to me that I'd be able to sleep while a hurricane was bearing down on my home. And yet, not only are there people that managed to sleep, by they managed to OVERSLEEP!

"Paul and Kathi Norton overslept as Hurricane Ike closed in on their coastal Texas home, so they decided to tough it out because their evacuation route was already flooded."

Found on CNN, but they've since removed the article link.

It's not always easy to sum up a profession in just a couple of sentences, but I think a recent quote from a CNN article did a good job at capturing the 95% of the essence of politics.

"John McCain’s campaign said Tuesday Barack Obama’s reference to “lipstick on a pig” to describe the Republican’s vow to bring change to Washington was offensive language, and a slap at VP nominee Sarah Palin – despite the fact that the Arizona senator himself used the phrase last year to describe a policy proposal of Hillary Clinton’s."

Research from the AIIM Market Intelligence Group has revealed that:

"44% of end users say Enterprise 2.0 is important"

but…

"74% admit they don't know anything about it."

Doh!

Arbor Networks ran an 18 month study using 1,300 routers and determined that:

"Between 1 percent and 3 percent of all traffic on the Internet is meaningless packets of information, used in distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) to know websites offline."

First read in CIO Magazine.

In a recent edition of Fortune Magazine, Elizabeth Spiers, as part of a pro-nuclear energy article, wrote:

"We're willing to tolerate the health risks and environmental repercussions of other fuels to avoid the infinitesimally small and comically improbable possibility of a catastrophic accident that resembles something out of a 1979 Jane Fonda movie, the likes of which have never happened in the history of nuclear power."

A recent issue of Fortune Magazine had this quote that made me once again wish I did something else for a living:

"The flavor of the day is buying your own debt at below face value. I'm buying bank debt in my deal with leverage from the bank that made me that deal." — David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group

Whether you lean Republican or Democrat, you have to admit that Christopher Buckley's (a conservative) endorsement of Obama is worth raising an eyebrow. And this quote is pretty tell too.

"Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case," he also wrote.

Spotted here.

Not too long ago in Information Week magazine, I read an announcement from RedHat that they would end development and support for a desktop version of Linux. That's quite a blow to the effort if you ask me.

"The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative."

The quote rings true. And anyone that isn't happy with Microsoft's offering, is probably more inclined to go to Apple than to Linux.