I just watched a talk by Eric Ries (IMVU founder and investor) that he gave to Stanford ETL. He goes over stuff that’s mostly taken for granted at startups in the valley, these days. (I picked up most of these lessons from working at Facebook and Quora over the past two summers.)
But, I’ve never heard these startup ideas articulated this clearly before. This is an excellent talk.
Steve Jobs narrates the first Think different commercial Here’s to the Crazy Ones. It never aired. Richard Dreyfuss did the voiceover for the actual TV spot that aired.
Also, this is my favorite Steve Jobs quote:
Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
An excerpt from Orson Scott Card‘s Xenocide, where two aliens of different species are conversing.
< You spoke a moment ago as if you believed that human beings had actually acheived intelligence.>
< Clearly they have.>
…
< Self-delusion. Even at their best, they never, as individuals, rise above the level of manual laborers. Who among them has the time to become intelligent?>
< Not one.>
< They never know anything. They don’t have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that’s really going on is that they’ve got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo-knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.>
I want to thank all the people who voted for me — I feel so honored and humbled by all the attention. I’ll do my best to keep making cool stuff that delights people.
Also, I want to thank the good people at .Net Magazine for putting on this awesome award series to recognize so many of the creative people who work in web design and development.
Age of Empires II is a real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft in 1999. After it came out, it was the standard by which all other RPG games were measured for many years. Some say it still is.
What’s so crazy about this game is that people still play it at LAN parties, over 12 years after it came out. Talk about longevity! Of course, they’re now playing it on Windows 7, instead of Windows 2000.
It’s hard to believe it, but Age of Empires II was originally released for Windows 98 and 2000 — it came out a whole two years before Windows XP existed! Its requirements were a 166 MHz processor, 32 MB memory, and 200 MB disk space. It’s hard to believe that a video game — or any program for that matter — could possibly run with just 32 MB memory! How times have changed…
And four OS releases later, it still runs flawlessly on Windows 7. If Microsoft excels at any aspect of software development it’s definitely backwards compatibility.
Hi, this is Feross. I'm a computer science student at Stanford University. I'm interested in Internet technology, web development, and computer security. I like hacking on cool software projects, running, basketball, retro video games, and shiny gadgets.
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