This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
I’m strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I’d probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea.
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.
Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.
It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we’re really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.
A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That’s applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person.
Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas “Fscking” Edison.
I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.
Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we’d never been born.
One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I’ve lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers – It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments – Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us.
She’s not afraid. She’s wearing a dentata.