Making things easy is hard.

So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.

Power corrupts, and obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.

The technicalities matter a lot, but the unifying vision matters more.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

I have long been alarmed by people's sheeplike acceptance of the term 'computer technology' - it sounds so objective and inexorable - when most computer technology is really a bunch of ideas turned into conventions and packages.