I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." -- Paul Graham

A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longuer anything to add, but when there is no longuer anything to take away. -- Antoine de St Exupery.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense. -- E.W. Dijkstra

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. -- Sherlock Holmes

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. ~Margaret Thatcher

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. –Babe Ruth

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. ~Swami Vivekananda

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. ~Bill Gates