As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”
Nikolas Westerhoff, "Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard," Scientific American, Dec 2008www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways via a tweet from Scobble and ZDNet
It gave it a slimmer design and more storage, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have added, but didn't. Things like a color display not only would make the device pricier and give it a shorter battery life, but would also make the gadget uncomfortable to hold.
"One of the great things about Kindle is it doesn't ever get hot," Amazon Vice President Ian Freed said in an interview at Amazon's downtown office here. That's important, Freed said, given that the company has one main goal with the Kindle--making the product as invisible to users as possible when they are reading.
"The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear," Freed said. That was the goal with the first device and was also a key factor in deciding what would go in the sequel, which started shipping on Monday. There are the obvious factors, like the thinner, sleeker design. But there are also things like an improved cellular modem. As a result, Kindle users will find themselves out of range in fewer places to get updates or buy a new book.
Ina Fried, "Designing the Kindle 2," Beyond Binary - CNET News, 24 Feb 2009, news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10170310-56.html.
Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.
And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.
On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”
He knew — the where and the who.
Timothy Egan, "Stegner’s Complaint," Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com, 18 Feb 2009, egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/.