QoTD: Koby Bahar
"The protective shelters in Haifa are equipped with wireless connections and all Intel employees have laptops, so that hasn't affected work."
-- Koby Bahar, spokesperson, Intel Israel
Wed, 12 Jul 2006QoTD: Tim Lee
"Having open source projects in the mix ensures there will always be some competition for the market-leading firm no matter what happens in the marketplace."
-- Tim Lee
(Are open source projects stronger and more capable in a market where the proprietary choices are less diverse? Does all hope need to vanish for proprietary competitor number two—Netscape, WordPerfect—to get a critical mass of Regular Users to take the plunge?)
Sat, 08 Jul 2006QoTD: Eric Schmidt
"Manually searching the Web is not a sustainable model, long term."
-- Eric Schmidt, 1997
(via Doc Searls)
Wed, 05 Jul 2006QoTD: Paul Graham
"What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through?"
-- Paul Graham
Thu, 29 Jun 2006QoTD: Mark Pilgrim
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning "can't install Debian".
-- Mark Pilgrim (via Rick Moen on the "conspire" list)
(To be fair, debian-installer is pretty self-explanatory, and hasn't given me any trouble. see? easy. )
Wed, 21 Jun 2006QoTD: Sean Park
"I'd sure rather have my pension fund manager investing in a smart sports hedge fund than yet another convertible arb fund chasing the same over-fished, highly-correlated (with other 'traditional' financial assets) markets."
"New Social Security Plan Allows Workers To Put Portion Of Earnings On Favorite Team"
Tue, 20 Jun 2006QoTD: David Bianco
"Instead of talking about encryption, let me propose a much more revolutionary idea: don't put the freakin' data on the laptop in the first place!"
-- David Bianco
Fri, 09 Jun 2006QoTD: Tim Lee
"If you repeal the DMCA and the EUCD, makers of competing MP3 players will reverse-engineer FairPlay and add the capability to play iTunes songs. No further government oversight will be required. But if you pass additional regulations, we’ll have to come back in another decade to figure out how to deal with the unintended consequences of those regulations."
-- Tim Lee
Mon, 05 Jun 2006QoTD: Eric Keller
"Build is back."
-- Eric Keller
(The article has some good figures on what you might call "DIY-IT")
Sun, 14 May 2006QoTD: John Buckman
"I'm not going to be a publisher, because now that I know how publishing works, I know I'd just be taking a cut of your money for nothing more than filling out a few forms with ASCAP."
-- John Buckman
Fri, 12 May 2006QoTD: Bigbook
"It is extremely urgent that you read this book. We've bought you many copies so that you might read it faster."
-- bigbook.com engineering team to their CEO, as told by Marc Hedlund.
Tue, 25 Apr 2006QoTD: Joey Hess
"Somehow the web has evolved a backwards security model that wants sites with dynamic content to be responsible for policing that content for things that could cause security issues, instead of just making browsers actually secure so that no possible html can be a security issue. Which is of course absurd, but the various types of potential cross site scripting attacks that users of your wiki will be vulnerable to if it doesn't try to sanitise its html are nothing to laugh at."
-- Joey Hess
(bonus link: Michal Zalewski. Scroll down for "mangleme".)
Mon, 24 Apr 2006QoTD: Jim Kunstler
"The right wing still pretends we can still drill our way out of this, if only the nature freaks would allow them to. The 'green' folks thinks that we can devote crops to the production of gasoline substitutes, even though a scarcity of fossil fuel-based fertilizers will sharply cut crop yields for human food. Nobody, it seems, can imagine an American life not centered on cars."
-- Jim Kunstler
Sun, 23 Apr 2006QoTD: Bart Simpson
"Let me get this straight. We’re behind the rest of our class and we’re going to catch up to them by going slower than they are?"
-- Bart Simpson (as cited by Stephen O'Grady, via Jeff Waugh)
(Bonus link: Jeff on making the freedom-based computer desktop easier than the legacy kind.)
Sat, 22 Apr 2006QoTD: Matthew Szulik
"Red Hat’s planned acquisition has little to do with future strategies to enter an already commoditised database market."
Bonus Red Hat link: Bill Burke on "Synergies and Cultures" (via Raven Zachary)
Thu, 20 Apr 2006QoTD: Dave Winer
"It's time for all aggregators to learn how to do [BitTorrent]."
-- Dave Winer
Thu, 13 Apr 2006QoTD: Paul Graham
"When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die."
-- Paul Graham
Mon, 10 Apr 2006QoTD: Tim Lee
As in many hot button political arguments, each side is intent on enlisting the coercive power of the state to bring about their preferred result: open or closed platforms, respectively. But the right approach is for the state to remain neutral, neither forcing companies to open their proprietary technologies to others, nor preventing rivals from building compatible devices if they can figure out how to do so without the incumbent's help.
-- Tim Lee
Sat, 01 Apr 2006QoTD: Rebecca Mackinnon
Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you're in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can't do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business.
Wed, 22 Mar 2006QoTD: Steve Jobs
"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."
(via Nicholas Carr)
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
