Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

Software is a gas ! It expands to fit the container it is in !

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

I am a programmer.

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

I'm a tech geek.

Software is the language of automation.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.

Each system will depend on resources available, not from the bottom up or top down. In other words, if you put 500 passengers in an airplane that's designed to carry 100, it won't get off the ground. So all decisions are made based upon the physical equipment you're working with, or the environmental resources available. They're not made by Fresco or any other person. They're arrived at by studies and research.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

People are starving in the world, not because we don't have enough food, but because we're not organized. And computers are part of that.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.