I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told read more

I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the read more

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

...there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. read more

...there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. In my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours read more

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something read more

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is read more

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But read more

By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are no plans to replace it, since it was never needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It read more

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.