Seth Lloyd Quotes

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

I don't like closed systems.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

If you don't fix latent failures in your system, you're asking for trouble.

I'm worried about the future of computer operating systems, as they all seem to be sliding towards a more controlled experience, taking away much of what makes PC games so much fun.

I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system... I just want to smash it.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

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

It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

Dropbox looks really simple to the end user and is extremely magical and just works. But under the hood, the complexity of the technology is huge. The amount of work it requires to store, scale and move this data is pretty intense.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it's become a real problem for administrators that they don't have nice tools to manage their servers and desktops.

Personally, I tend to be more interested in security and performance-related issues than other things.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

People crave predictability, and when you design and use systems, you give people predictability. More importantly, when you build systems, they can help you orchestrate, and orchestration helps you create the habits that continuously improve the systems!

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.