Software Quotes - Page 26

• With multimedia, everything blurs. Software takes the concept of the imagination and makes it something you can edit, tweak, and transform with digital techniques. Everything becomes an edited file.

  DJ Spooky

  Imagination, Technique, Digital

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

  David Parnas

  World, May, Bugs

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• The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.

  Grady Booch

  Simple, Simplicity, Computer

  "Qt for Symbian". Book by Frank H. P. Fitzek et al., 2010.

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• The use of pirated software in China is really quite a sizeable loss to our software producers.

  Lael Brainard

  Loss, Use, China

  C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics, www.cfr.org. January 21, 2011.

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• Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

  Bill Nye

  Running, Memories, Numbers

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• Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

  Wietse Venema

  Business, Effort, Maintenance

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• You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves - those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

  James Gosling

  People, Use, World

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• When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

  Eric S. Raymond

  Pain, Writing, Data

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.44, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Programming, Faster, Hardware

  "Excel HSC Softw Design&Devel + Cards SG". Book by Geoff Lancaster, 2001.

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• We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enourmous ammount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor.

  Steve Blank

  Waste, Wasting Time, Ends

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• Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

  Richard Stallman

  Beer, Thinking, Liberty

  Richard Stallman (2002). “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, p.35, Lulu.com

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• Frame is a good enough piece of software that there are actually rewards to taking an intelligent and formal approach to your problem. But if you want to be stupid, you can think of Frame as a version of Microsoft Word with most of the bugs taken out.

  Philip Greenspun

  Stupid, Taken, Thinking

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• The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.

  Richard Stallman

  People, Should, Flash

  OpenBSD mailing list, Subject: "Re: Real men don't attack straw men", marc.info. December 14, 2007.

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• Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

  Richard Stallman

  Running, Writing, People

  Kde-licensing mailing list, marc.info. April 13, 1998.

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• A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”

  Richard Stallman

  Mean, Community, Mit

  Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing, www.gnu.org. 1996.

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• Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

  Richard Stallman

  Fun, Helping Others, People

  Richard Stallman (2002). “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, p.75, Lulu.com

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• To create a usable piece of software, you have to fight for every fix, every feature, every little accommodation that will get one more person up the curve. There are no shortcuts. Luck is involved, but you don't win by being lucky, it happens because you fought for every inch.

  Dave Winer

  Fighting, Winning, Curves

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• Cooperation is just like two pagodas - one hardware and one software. Combined, we can take the leadership position in the world.

  Wen Jiabao

  Two, World, Cooperation

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• The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?'

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Law, Growing, Knees

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• Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.

  Joel Spolsky

  Looks, Way, Succeed

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• … what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Maturity, Engineering, Snakes

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• We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer - and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply.

  Tom Van Vleck

  Agony, Water, Suffering

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• You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window.

  Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

  Loyalty, Iphone, Apples

  "Hell Freezes Over: Warner Music claims Itunes is Digital Music Done Right" by Bryan Gardiner, www.wired.com. November 14, 2007.

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• I don't like creating software anymore. It's too exact. It's like karate; there's no room for error.

  John Maeda

  Errors, Creating, Rooms

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• Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.

  Roger McGuinn

  Artist, Years, Laptops

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