“There’s always an upside. When stocks go down, bonds go up. When any hamster-based startup can raise $50 million on a $1 billion market cap, there’s not much market for new ideas. Why bother, when the same-old-stuff can make you rich. But when the bubble fades, it’s time to get creative. Because tech will reboot. The question is, what’s the next wave.”
Category Archives: Quotes
Quote of the day: Cogito Interruptus
“Cogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols or symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, ‘You see, there are seven…,’ then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that unmistakable sign.”
Umberto Eco, quoted here.
Quote of the day: lucky you, lucky me
From Daniel Dennett, who is 70 today.
Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.
From his book, Freedom Evolves
Quote of the day
“No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result.”
Peter Drucker
Quote of the Day
“If you can imagine something, then you can build it.”
— Ray Ozzie, formerly Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
This is the most succinct articulation I know of the essence of software.
Quote of the day
“The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too.”
Quotes of the day
“What this whole business goes to show is that Stone is no scholar and Trevor-Roper is no gentleman”.
V.H. Galbraith, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, commenting on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s demolition job on Lawrence Stone in the Journal of Economic History.
“I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.”
John Habakkuk, Joint Editor of the Journal of Economic History, in a letter to his fellow-editor, Michael Postan.
Sources: Adam Sisman’s biography
Quote of the day
“The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.”
Tom Wolfe, Advice to Writers
Quote of the Day
Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things. Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress.
Theodore Gray, from his blog. You need to read the entire piece to understand his logic.
Quote of the Day
My Observer column about why it’s important to teach kids to program — or at any rate to give them the opportunity to learn how to do it — stimulated lots of feedback, retweeting etc.
Many people picked up on this passage in the column:
What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented. It’s pure “thought stuff” – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC. You don’t need capital or material resources or adult permission.
Several respondents quoted Yeats’s aphorism about education not being like filling a bucket but about lighting a fire (which is true). Then I stumbled on this quote on the wonderful Brain Pickings site which captures the same idea: that being able to create software gives you tools for liberating yourself from the constraints imposed by other people’s imaginations.
When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Who said it? Steve Jobs in a 1995 interview conducted by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, while Jobs was still at NeXT.