Quotes About Innovation

Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question?

Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression. "What the fuck is this?" "It's a spork.

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing.

Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.

There's something fun about Sharpies that's really hard to articulate.

When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too. But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened.

I've always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?

Next book. It's embryonic in my head, but it's conceived. I don't want to discuss it for fear of screwing up the zygote.

The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic—geeky and rich and hip.

This document was created in Microsoft Word, which in the year 2014 is pathetic.

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

I am now [email protected]. @ could become the Mc or Mac of the next millennium.

According to Lampson, this contributed to the "perfect system" syndrome. The Star, he says, "had a lot more innovation than necessary. It's the natural thing for engineers to do when they're not constrained. And they were not constrained.

Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolution. Tribes with religion had an advantage over those without. They had direction and purpose, motivation and a mission. The survival value of religion was so spectacular that the thirst for belief became embedded in the human genome.

nothing is impossible. you just need to learn how to bend the rules.

She created a new world for herself. It blew my mind to see this animal acquire language. And then literally reshape her world with it.

Manuel is a superb engineer with no imagination whatsoever, which makes him doubly dangerous - talent married to convention.

artificial intelligence.

There may be no better use of taxpayer dollars than in funding the NIH; it is a shining example of something our government does extremely well

an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a

The three-million-dollar Omega-9 Parallel Processing Computer, which took up a series of large gray boxes along one wall, was now completely silent.

Krugle-like search engine

drug is going to end warfare as we know it." "That's what Alfred Nobel said when he invented dynamite.