I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I’ll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I’m not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.
Gold is the corpse of value...
It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.
The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.
Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.
To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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.