Kev's Collection of Cool Quotes

Education
Computers (Windows vs. the World)
Computers (ActiveX)
Computers (General Observations)
Media and Markets
Politics
Life
Kev Sez

Education

The collection of education quotes has been moved to its own page:

Education Quotes

Computers (Windows vs. the World)

"Microsoft netted around $4 billion from OS sales last year -- you'd think they could spend a few bucks fixing it all. But it's more likely that O.J. will nab the real killer on the back nine at Pebble Beach than that Microsoft will voluntarily banish the heartache it puts users through."
-Paul Somerson, PC Computing

"Never ask a man what sort of computer he drives. If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?"
-- Tom Clancy

"I understand Windows as well as most technical-support personnel. I can edit a config.sys file and delete bad lines in an autoexec.bat with the best of them. I can partition a hard drive in FAT32, manually configure a dialup adapter and scour my systems folder for obsolete DLL's.
But why would I want to?"
-- Douglas Rushkoff, "A Prodigal Son Returns to the Mac", The Globe and Mail (Canada), November 14, 1998

"The iMac embodies a lot of the things I'm talking about [computers designed as networking machines]. Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us."
-- Intel chairman Andy Grove, October 1998

"Windows 98 is a six-story building on DOS's log cabin foundation."
--BYTE Magazine, June 1998

"In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?"

"My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS."
-- Dave Barry

"Around the [mid-1980s], [Vice President Al Gore] purchased his first home computer: one of the original, clunky IBM PCs. Shortly after that, he bought the newly introduced Apple Macintosh computer -- and immediately fell in love with it. 'I was a big Mac fan,' he said. Gore upgraded through several Macintosh models, eventually to a laptop that would 'dock' in a desktop unit. But last year, in what Gore calls 'a sad story,' he reluctantly switched over to PCs that run on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. 'I did it because of the problem in getting new software on a timely basis and the fact that some programs are not done for the Mac now,' he said. 'I still believe it's a superior format and I still prefer it. But for my purposes I've had to switch over, and I hate it.'"
-- Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1997

"DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
-- New York Times, November 26, 1991

"Good evening, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 and all references to it from my hard drive."
-- The winning entry chosen by Arthur Clarke in a "birthday" celebration contest asking what the HAL 9000's first words would be today.

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."
-- The Guardian (UK)

"I don't do .INI, .BAT, or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files. I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby."
-- Shane Anderson

"You recommend Macs to your friends, and Intel machines to those whom you don't mind billing by the hour."

"Windows didn't steal everything it has from Macintosh. It also stole from OS/2 and UNIX."
-- Jim Louderback, "Windows Sources" magazine

"For some reason unbeknownst to us, Apple management refuses to abandon the theory that the best technology wins."
-- William Gurley, First Boston Corp

"Do you really want to support an operating system made by a company whose goal is to eliminate every other software company? It's like shopping at the Martian Boutique and then wondering where they get all that money they spend on cow mutilation equipment."
-- William Shipley

"To say that Windows 95 is just like the Mac is like finding a potato in the shape of Jesus and thinking you have witnessed the second coming"
-- Guy Kawasaki

"When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95."
-- Jean-Louis Gassee

"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 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, p. F2)

"If I had a dime for every original idea Bill Gates had ... why I'd have nothing!"
-- Christopher Meinck

"Indeed it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the personal computer industry as a massive effort to keep up with Apple...[The Macintosh] went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computers."
-- BYTE, December 1994

"It's not like Windows users don't have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought"
-- Steve Jobs

"[Steve Jobs] is about as visionary as a flexible sigmoidoscope."
-- Brad Hutchings

"...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them."
-- Machiavelli, "The Prince", chapter 6

Computers (ActiveX)

"ActiveX [is] an extremely powerful technology: Witness the controls that power-down your machine, that automatically upload all of your Word documents and publish them in HTML, and that instruct Quicken to perform a funds transfer from your bank to another bank without ever asking your permission."
-- IDG Communications

"Of all technology floating around the Web, ActiveX components ... cause the greatest worry. ... ActiveX is dangerous because ... it can affect anything on a user's system."
-- Information Week

"ActiveX scares me to death."
-- Mason Rotelli, senior VP of IS at Anixter Inc.

"ActiveX is extremely dangerous." -- Robert Lum. Lum is the author of an ActiveX control called Exploder: when an innocent Windows95 user happens upon a web page with the Exploder ActiveX control, Exploder takes control and shuts down the machine. A more malicious programmer could have an ActiveX control do anything.

Computers (General Observations)

"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, writer and French aviation pioneer

"I've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet."
-- Steve Jobs (quoted in BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998)

"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright."
-- Steve Wozniak

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
-- Andy Finkel

"It would be just like programmers to shorten 'the year 2000 problem' to 'Y2K'-- exactly the kind of thinking that created this situation in the first place."
-- Steven C. Meyer

"The single most damaging influence on user interfaces is the necessity to impress strolling executives in the trade-show context, by showing off lots of features in the minimal time."
-- "Tim", quoted on Bruce Tognazzini's website

"Seldom is a concept as brain-damaged as 'zero administration' hyped with such straight-faced sincerity. The idea, promoted in slightly altered forms by Microsoft and various NC proponents, is that we can reduce the administrative headache for MIS departments by centrally managing software and preventing individual users from making any changes to their desktop computers. It's sort of like taking away your kid's bike: sure, it may keep them out of harm's way, but you've just made yourself their full-time chauffeur."
-- Steve Steinberg (in Wired magazine)

"Think about all the paper you see today. For practically all of it, the source is an electronic file."
-- John Jessen, CEO of Electronic Evidence Discovery

"I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions."
-- Dave Winer

"Industry Mistake Number One was to leave Pascal and move to C thereby allowing programmers who could not program in assembler to make assembler level mistakes."
-- James Goebel

"It is very easy to be blinded by the essential uselessness of [these devices] by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all"
-- Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for the Fish"

"Their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws"
-- Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for the Fish"

"As great visions move out, all the best parts get stripped away"
-- Alan Kay

"The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'."
-- Ted Nelson

"Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet"
-- Alan Kay

A candid error message: "Bad User on Device"

"(The computer) is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated."
-- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984

"Computers still feel more like erector sets -- lots of hard, inflexible little parts -- than like clay."
-- Dave Johnson, develop Magazine, March 1993

What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

"Complexity is Preserved." (also known as Tesler's Second Law. It means that complexity can be moved around from one area to another, say, from the user to the developer, but the total amount is constant.)

"The fax machine has been a serious blemish on the computer landscape. ... Around 1980 the previous steady growth in computer-readability took a nosedive because of the fax."
-- Nicholas Negroponte

[In designing computer systems] "Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers."
-- Stewart Brand

Definition of "word": a series of characters between two spaces.

"On the Internet, you can form a community without having to go through the trouble of meeting anyone."
-- Ian Jack, MRI

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate termination of their C strings"
-- Robert Firth

Why do programmers get Halloween and Christmas mixed up?
Because OCT 31 = DEC 25

"Well you know, C isn't that hard, for example, void (*(*f[])())() defines f as an array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions that return pointers to functions that return void... I think"
-- author unknown

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

I really hate this damned machine
I think that I should sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.
-- author unknown

Media and Markets

"Imagine if TV were actually good: It would be the end of life as we know it."
-- Marvin Minsky

"The only thing I like about television is its ephemerality."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, Republican Party Reptile

"Television is often called a medium because it's so rarely well done."
--Ernie Kovacs

"Brand loyalty is the consumer's defense against having to make decisions about things that don't really matter."
-- unknown

"Once a new technology rolls, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
-- Stewart Brand

"Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence."
-- Stewart Brand

"Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus."
-- Marvin Minsky

"The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life."
-- Stewart Brand

"Somebody who's designing something for himself has at least got a market of one that he's very close to."
-- Steve Wozniak

"Advertising ... is an important historical factor in the West's version of a free press. ... Not until the present century was it possible, in many parts of Europe, for newspapers to operate under a banner of political neutrality. It was advertising that enabled the doctrine of impartiality or objectivity to take root in newspapers."
-- Anthony Smith

Politics

"It is amazing how many people think that the government's role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want."
-- Thomas Sowell, Ph.D.

"If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government."
-- Milton Friedman

"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."
-- P. J. O'Rourke

"Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."
-- Dean Steacy, Canadian Human Rights Commission

"I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They're convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians ... "
-- Lech Walesa, started the Solidarity trade union in Poland that defied the Communist rulers, won the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, and went on to lead Poland to a free society as its president from 1990 to 1995.

"Goliath lost"
-- miniusa.com

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.
In the first, it is ridiculed.
In the second, it is opposed.
In the third, it is regarded as self-evident."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th century German philosopher

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for or a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-- George Washington, January 7, 1790

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."
-- G. K. Chesterton

"I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance."
-- Samuel Coleridge

"Tolerance is another word for indifference."
-- Somerset Maugham

"Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion."
-- Will Rogers

"It is easy to be tolerant of the principles of other people if you have none of your own."
-- Herbert Samuel

"Precise knowledge is the only true knowledge, and he who does not teach exactly, does not teach at all."
-- Henry Ward Beecher

"He that hath knowledge spareth his words."
-- Proverbs 17:27

"Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself."
-- Samuel Johnson

"To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease."
-- Lao Tzu

"What more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of poper no longer suceptible to any definition."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1791

"I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor so far as it in no way interferes with any other man's rights."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - G. K. Chesterton

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." - G. K. Chesterton

Life

"Everything starts as somebody's daydream."
-- Larry Niven

Why park rangers hate Emerson:
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or foe, depending on his bringing up."
-- Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, Jewish scholar, physician to Abd-ar-Rahman, Ban HaMelek VeHaNazir, ch. 7

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
-- David Wright

"'Euphemism' is a euphemism for lying."
-- Bobbie Gentry

"Two wrongs don't make a right -- but three lefts do."

"Kahaha ko'u na'au i ke 'ano o ka mea 'ai ma keia mokulele." (Hawaiian for "I am filled with admiration for my in-flight meal.")

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
-- Mark Twain

"She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar", maxims from "Following the Equator"

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
-- Albert Einstein, explaining radio

"Two individuals, arguing a topic in front of a blackboard, will refer each other to diagrams, equations and terms on the basis of where they had been written, even long after they have been erased"
-- Richard Bolt, discussing the "motor-memory reinforcement"

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
-- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

"The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1773

"All solutions should be as simple as possible and no simpler."
-- Albert Einstein

Columbus' journal on Day 35: "Maybe it's Mars that's the round one."
-- Mister Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin

"If you can't write about things you know, write about things you know no one knows anything about.
-- Mister Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin

"Anytime you see a turtle atop a fence post, you know it had some help."
-- Alex Haley

As lacking in insight as a fortune cookie that says, "You will soon be finishing dinner"
-- idea from P. J. O'Rourke

"I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute; that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that's not fair. You were born in America; that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you."
-- P. J. O'Rourke

Irish wish: "May you live to be 100, plus an extra year to repent"

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
-- Alan Kay

"Indecision is the key to flexibility"

"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety nine who only have interest"
-- John Stuart Mill

"The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the housemartin or the plummer may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land."
"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Nothing matters but the weekend from a Tuesday point of view."
-- The Kings, Switching to Glide

"Beware the lollipop of mediocrity. Lick it once and you suck forever."

"Number one on list of worries if I ran the space program: 'The duct tape might burn off on re-entry'"
-- Mister Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin

"As inevitable as the Wright Brothers' second flight"

"Think of how stupid the average person is and realize that half of everybody is stupider than that."
-- George Carlin

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
-- Douglas Adams

"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose."
-- unknown

"Some of the things that live the longest in peoples` memories never really happened."
-- Manoj Srivastava

"We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
-- Tolstoy

"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur."
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)

Heisenberg was driving down the Autobahn when he was pulled over. The policeman asked him, "Do you know how fast you were going back there?" to which Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know where I am."

"If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on the Creation, I should have recommended something simpler."
-- Alfonso X, King of Castile (1226--1284)

"When someone asks you, 'A penny for your thoughts' and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?"
-- George Carlin

"You'll be entering into a cryogenic chamber where you'll be frozen until such time as you can be revived and brought back into society to serve a useful purpose" -- Things they tell turkeys.
-- Mister Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
-- Arthur Carlson, WKRP

"Those TV weathermen are so unpredictable."
-- Kev's Mom

All my life I've wanted to be somebody, I realize now that I should have been more specific.

When my time on earth is completed, I want to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather ... not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.

Is the glass half empty, or half full, or twice as big as it needs to be?

668: The Neighbor of the Beast

Kevin Kev Sez...
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