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Monthly Archives: August 2013

Microsoft Needs An Update

August 27, 2013 Leave a comment

by Patrick Appel

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced on Friday that he’s retiring. Derek Thompson explains the decision with the chart above:

Windows, along with Intel, got its clock cleaned by Apple and Google in the last decade. Their global market share of operating systems fell from 96 percent around 2000 to 35 percent in 2012. Apple and Google wedged their way into our laptops, phones, and tablets, while Microsoft saw its sliver of the mobile market decline between 2005 and 2012.

Timothy Lee doesn’t blame Ballmer for Microsoft’s woes:

Ballmer’s larger problem is that throughout his 13-year tenure, he was swimming against some very powerful economic currents. His company’s fate was inextricably tied to the success of the PC, and the PC’s fortune peaked with the Nasdaq around 2000. The emergence of interactive Web applications around 2004 began to turn PCs into interchangeable commodities. Then Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007…

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11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures

August 24, 2013 Leave a comment

Thought Catalog

The relationship between words and their meaning is a fascinating one, and linguists have spent countless years deconstructing it, taking it apart letter by letter, and trying to figure out why there are so many feelings and ideas that we cannot even put words to, and that our languages cannot identify. Visit Maptia for more interesting posts.

The idea that words cannot always say everything has been written about extensively – as Friedrich Nietzsche said:

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the absolute truth.

No doubt the best book we’ve read that covers the subject is ‘Through The Language Glass‘ by Guy Deutscher, which goes a long way to explaining and understanding these loopholes – the gaps which mean there are leftover words without translations, and concepts that cannot be properly explained across cultures.

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51 Genius Quotes That Prove George Carlin Was A Modern Philosopher

August 24, 2013 Leave a comment

Thought Catalog

In many ways, the comedian has the ability to be the philosopher of our era, a social critic and theorist whose words have the ability to shape public thought. As we saw from my piece on Louis C.K. a few weeks ago, comedy — at its best — pushes our buttons and challenges our ways of thinking. To me, no person is a better example of that than George Carlin, a savage satirist and brilliant thinker who was just as much of a writer and a philosopher as he was a comedian. His medium was stand-up, but he touched on issues of race, class, politics and American life — saying the kinds of things no one else dared.

Carlin got famous for his bit about the “words you can’t say on television,” but his legacy speaks of so much more, wisdom and wit that deserve to live on through the…

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