Interesting Quotes

"Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name...without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art." -- Bill Gates, 1983 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, p. F2)

"Microft is like a great white shark...devouring everything in its path" -- (Chicago Tribune)

"If I start looking over my shoulder every time I think about putting new stuff into the software, then we'll fail." - Jeffrey S. Raikes, a Microsoft Vice President. (BusinessWeek, June 8, 1998, p. 74)

PC Week even recommended using Retrospect on a Mac to back up Windows machines

"Microsoft has done it again and again," observed Barry Schuler, who runs most of the online services at AOL. "Microsoft sits back, waits for rivals to make mistakes; it improves its product and then it leverages its platform advantage into new markets." - "Again, It's Microsoft vs. the World", New York Times, Feb. 13, 2000

"man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world" -- Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy Interview, http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_03.html

"This whole Internet thing is very intriguing." - David Filo, Yahoo!
http://www.sun.com/950523/yahoostory.html

 "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
  --Edward Tufte

Think of it this way, if you will. Tom J;s version of how the country was
to be run as like SGML. What we wound up with was HTML 1.0
 - Tom Whore , FoRK

"Everyone has write access to your mind." - me
(this can be tied in to everyone can write to the Semantic Web)

"Let's not pretend that a different URI scheme
will somehow magically provide more stability
than http/dns; stability depends on
social practices, not just technology."
 - Dan Connolly, mid:3A67B3B6.8E13DEB8@w3.org
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2001Jan/0010.html

"CRIPA's (Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act) statutory language explicitly includes State or local facilities in which youth are detained or confined (for any purpose other than education)"
http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/pubs/walls/appen-d.html
 - WL

"I consider my education to have only been stopped by my schooling"
    - Winston Churchill (via Josh)

"If we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium. " --Berners-Lee (via Robb Beal)

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (via Adam Rifkin on FoRK)

"a decade of experience with scalable identifier systems suggests that using arbitrary strings sucks dead puppy dogs tails." - Tim Berners-Lee, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0804.html

"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America as an
independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who
dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it
would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion
out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar
things. and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions
would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest
opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation
would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to
lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to
sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know
it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools
and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks.
They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our
lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

-- John Swinden, 1953, then head of the New York Times, when asked to toast
an independent press in a gathering at the National Press Club

(from philg/writing, I belive )

I was asked back in the early days of the lawsuit [against Microsoft] to
write an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, but they didnt print it. I got
a letter back from the editor months later saying that maybe theyd run it,
but it needed a little fixing. So, [I said] re-write it. I wrote
Microsofts a monopolist and the Times wanted to edit it to say,
Microsoft is innovative. The funny thing is that I had started out in my
own head without having a bias. I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that
were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system.
Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly. I
specified the strong penalties they should undergo. Eventually I found out
that the New York Times had tight friendship ties with Microsoft and that
one of Microsofts key people had an editorial column in the Times. They
were trying to use me. But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment
and they can tell any lie knowing its a lie and theyre protected if the
persons famous or its a company. - Woz, http://failuremag.com/failure_interview.html

"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known." - deschooling society

Hmm, sounds like the Web...

Interesting QuotesIn honor of Douglas Adams

AaronSw: "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps even a stupid machine can deal with, you've ce
AaronSw: from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, page 19
AaronSw: by Douglas Adams, may he rest in peace
AaronSw: oops, rest of the quote: "rtainly learned something about it yourself."
AaronSw: Anyone who has written logic documents in RDF probably feels similarly. ;-)
AaronSw: From the same book as: "What we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things." (FoRK cite)
AaronSw: DanC started a new-age cult with the phrase "We Believe in the Interconnectedness of All Things."
"I think we need to start letting our kids, with our involvement, choose a life of their own so that they are the authors of their life rather than the recipient of a life passed down to them."
-- Alvin Rosenfeld, M.D. ( I was way off on the spelling of his name)

<jilll> Googlin' is pretty cool. It's like a combination of workplace and grad school.
<jilll> I've never met so many almost-PhD and PhD folks in my life except at the university.
Jill Lundquist, Bogon Wrangler (on working at Google*)

Zooko: XML: the most inappropriate encoding possible for an API
HTTP: the most inappropriate transport possible for an API
Put them together and its magic! A world-wide hype extravaganza! Whoo-hoo!

<xover> The Semantic Web is a fluffy cloud of pretty nothings and empty promises. There's a lot of goof stuff in there when you get down to the technical nuts and bolts, but that overall "vision" leaves me thoroughly unimpressed.

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