Pc Build Quotes

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Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales. I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time. If Alanis Morrissette can play God (banned) in Dogma (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")? Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men). As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.
Denise Duhamel
Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
The word spread. It began with the techno-literates: young summoners who couldn’t quite get their containment circles right and who had fallen back on Facebook to keep themselves occupied while the sacred incense was cooked in their mum’s microwaves; eager diviners who scoured the internet for clues as to the future of tomorrow, and who read the truth of things in the static at the corners of the screen; bored vampires who knew that it was too early to go out and hunt, too late still to be in the coffin. The message was tweeted and texted onwards, sent out through the busy wires of the city, from laptop to PC, PC to Mac, from mobile phones the size of old breeze blocks through to palm-held devices that not only received your mail, but regarded it as their privilege to sort it into colour-coordinated categories for your consideration. The word was whispered between the statues that sat on the imperial buildings of Kingsway, carried in the scuttling of the rats beneath the city streets, flashed from TV screen to TV screen in the flickering windows of the shuttered electronics stores, watched over by beggars and security cameras, and the message said: We are Magicals Anonymous. We are going to save the city.
Kate Griffin (Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous, #1))
Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. “Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business,” Markkula said. “You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” Jobs didn’t say much, but he agreed.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
They spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. “Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business,” Markkula said. “You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” Jobs didn’t say much, but he agreed.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
PC or not, Middle Eastern groups, including Abu Nidal’s, are not tacticians. They walk into nightclubs strapped with explosives, plant car bombs, spray crowded markets with machine-gun fire, and fly hijacked planes full of fuel into buildings. Plain and simple, they’re cowards. They won’t confront anyone on a one-to-one basis. They don’t have the savvy or the courage to do in-your-face operations.
Brad Thor (The Lions of Lucerne (Scot Harvath, #1))
To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness. It balances short term with long term. It balances going for the grade and paying the price to get an education. It balances the desire to have a room clean and the building of a relationship in which the child is internally committed to do it—cheerfully, willingly, without external supervision. It’s a principle you can see validated in your own life when you burn the candle at both ends to get more golden eggs and wind up sick or exhausted, unable to produce any at all; or when you get a good night’s sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day. You can see it when you press to get your own way with someone and somehow feel an emptiness in the relationship; or when you really take time to invest in a relationship and you find the desire and ability to work together, to communicate, takes a quantum leap. The P/PC Balance is the very essence of effectiveness. It’s validated in every arena of life. We can work with it or against it, but it’s there.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them. ‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So, in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into it – hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver. ‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said, “Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.
Greg Egan (Teranesia)
When you have come to the full knowledge of life, then will you quit struggles and begin to build yourself to rhyme with nature's plan, at the right time.
Nnaji P.C.
Dell Inc.’s low relative costs up through the early 2000s came from both sources. Vertically integrated rivals, such as Hewlett-Packard, designed and manufactured their own components, built computers to inventory, and then sold them through resellers. Dell sold direct, building computers to customer orders using outsourced components and a tightly managed supply chain. These competing approaches had very different cost and investment profiles. Dell’s model required little capital since the company did not design or make components, nor did it carry much inventory. In the late 1990s, Dell had a substantial advantage in days of inventory carried. Because component costs were then dropping so fast, buying components weeks later, as Dell effectively did, translated into lower relative costs per PC. And Dell’s customers actually paid for their PCs before Dell had to pay its suppliers.
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company’s closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes. But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy’s computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy’s little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
You must put in a lot of effort to build habits that help you maximize your time.
S.J. Scott (115 Productivity Apps to Maximize Your Time: Apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire and PC/iOS Desktop Computers (Updated: October 2014))
When producing low-heat Portland cement the percentage of C2S is increased and that of C3S and C3A is decreased. This type of cement is of particular use in construction of dams, massive foundation, etc. to reduce the production of heat.
P.C. Varghese (Building Materials)
2. The total percentage of C2S and C3S in all types of Portland cements is around 70 per cent, so that even though the strength development of two cements at early stages may be different, the final strength obtained after long periods of time may not be different. However, removal of formwork, prestressing of concrete depends to a large extent on the early strength of concrete. 3. When producing low-heat Portland cement the percentage of C2S is increased and that of C3S and C3A is decreased. This type of cement is of particular use in construction of dams, massive foundation, etc. to reduce the production of heat. 4. Reducing C3A increases sulphate resistance but the 7 day and 28 day strengths also get lowered as compared to the ordinary Portland cement. Sulphate-resisting Portland cement has less than 5% C3A. This type of cement is recommended for sewer works. 5. Rapid hardening cements compared to ordinary cements have more or less the same composition except that the latter is more finely ground and may sometimes contain higher percentage of C3S. The increased fineness increases the 7 day strength.
P.C. Varghese (Building Materials)
RAM sticks do get hot, especially if overclocked and need to be cooled. Though not as serous as other components like the CPU or GPU, your DIMMS still need cooling. 
Kieran Leyland (The Geeky Kids Guide! To Building Your Own Gaming PC)
Networking was already a sore subject at Microsoft. A standard feature of minicomputers and workstations, networking had been slow to arrive in the world of PCs. Aside from Apple, whose Macintosh contained a simple and effective means of sharing files and printers between machines, customers had yet to find a standard way of linking together different brands of PCs. A Utah company named Novell had grabbed the lead with a program called Netware, which made it possible for many PCs to both share a single printer and handle a set of files located on one PC. Print and file services, though mundane, were the lifeblood of PC networking. Novell’s lead stemmed largely from its fast delivery of these services: Microsoft was unable to better or even match Novell’s products. At the moment Rubin led a large group that was building a networking attachment to OS/2 called Lan Man, which was Microsoft’s latest hope in the attempt to overtake Novell. Cutler
G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
Having grown rapidly, many PC software companies were stretched to the limit simply building their programs. With customers clamoring for new products, testing inevitably had to take a backseat. In addition, though it was eroding, there remained a pejorative attitude toward testing: “Let the customer test the program.” That saved the builder money and time, but it frustrated buyers, who came to view the first release of a program as a gamble. Microsoft
G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
To paraphrase Peter Drucker, effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. They have genuine Quadrant I crises and emergencies that require their immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small. They keep P and PC in balance by focusing on the important, but not urgent, high leverage capacity-building activities of Quadrant II.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
the girls’ dorm to the main school building, I decided
P.C. Cast (Untamed (House of Night, #4))
junk they thought was a steal at only 700 dollars- a PC that would realistically total up to around 450 dollars had they built it themselves
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
There are at least 8 required PC components for a comfortable and effective PC experience- A CPU, at least one RAM module, at least one drive, a power supply, a motherboard, a CPU cooler, a case, ( Technically, a case isn’t required. But it makes your PC experience a great deal better ) and at least one case fan. A graphics card is also a component that most PCs have. However, it isn’t needed as long as your CPU is equipped with integrated graphics.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
the majority of prebuilts are not as well-performing for the price; and it would be a sin to say that most prebuilt companies use quality components.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
There are quite a few reasons why you shouldn’t buy an already built tower, also known as a prebuilt. The first and possibly largest reason is that prebuilts tend to be terrible value for the consumer. This is due to many reasons, including the sad fact that manufacturers use the worst quality parts they can in order to save money. But it doesn’t stop there; as prebuilt manufacturers will also charge a building fee. This is sometimes justified as it’s for the labor involved, but what some companies will charge is absolutely absurd. Building fees usually range anywhere from 100 dollars up to 500 dollars. I feel that building fees over 100 dollars are completely unfair, as PC building isn’t nearly as hard as people make it out to be.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
And for the final fallacy, unless you are being extremely careless and mess around with your components, you probably won’t break anything.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
some CPUs, or central processing units, can be provided with integrated graphics, which takes the place of a graphics card. Integrated graphics tend to be pretty unimpressive, and are used to output an image onto a screen.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
One peculiar idea concerning CPUs is that only 2 well-known companies worldwide fabricate desktop CPUs- AMD and Intel.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Generally, the higher the clock speed, the better the CPU will perform in single-threaded applications.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Generally, the more cores and threads a processor has, the better.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
There are 2 types of cooling solutions- AIOs, and traditional air coolers. Well, technically there is also the world of custom loops to talk about, but only the most advanced builders attempt to create one.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
If you want the best performance for your AIO, choose high static pressure fans.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Another aspect of a CPU that can boost performance is something called hyperthreading, sometimes referred to as multithreading. This is when more than one thread is assigned to a specific core, which increases the efficiency of a CPU, therefore allowing it to better or more efficiently complete a task.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
An overclock is when you push a component’s clock speeds past the manufacturer's specified values to obtain a little extra performance out of your product. But be warned, an overclocked part will produce more heat than a non-overclocked one, which can and will lower the component’s lifespan.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Random access memory, or RAM, is a component that acts as ultra-fast temporary storage for your computer.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
Besides running XMP profiles, make sure that your RAM is running in dual channel, as long as you have a more modern motherboard.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
When XMP, a feature regarding RAM is enabled, your RAM will run at its advertised speeds.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
There are 2 types of storage; standard hard drive storage, and solid-state drive storage.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
there is one downside to using a hard-drive only machine; and that is because hard drives are known for being far slower than the other two storage types. This is mostly due to the fact that hard drives not only utilize older technology but also contain moving parts; both of which hinder performance.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
two dominant downsides to using solid-state tech- the cost and limited support for large amounts of storage.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
SSDs are noticeably faster than traditional hard drives, as they use more advanced controllers, some use faster data transfer technology, and they don’t house moving parts, hence the name- SOLID state drive.
Bradley Lentz (Computer Parts and Components Guide for Beginners : Comprehensive Quick Guide on How to Build a PC)
In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
30. The first Google server casing was built from LEGO bricks. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the masterminds behind the largest IT project in the world started out with little beyond a pile of budget PC components assembled – or, better to say, scrapped – together. In 1996, they had to assemble multiple components, such as ten hard disks, into working clusters, the expenses for such machinery left them without funds to buy a decent computer casing. Thus, they built the casing from LEGO building blocks. Two years later, it was superseded by a large production server rack. Then, two years after that, their computing power counted around 5,000 (yes, five thousand) computers, and today the number is estimated to between 1,5 and 2 million. Talk about investment and growth!
Tyler Backhause (101 Creepy, Weird, Scary, Interesting, and Outright Cool Facts: A collection of 101 facts that are sure to leave you creeped out and entertained at the same time)
It’s important to distinguish network effects from other familiar market-building tools, such as price effects and brand effects. Misunderstanding of these distinctions is a source of the current confusion over how to value platform business models, and contributed to the dot-com boom and bust of 1997–2000. During the dot-com boom, investors in startups like eToys, Webvan, and FreePC regarded market share as practically the only significant metric of business success. Captivated by slogans like “Get big fast” and “Get large or get lost,” they urged companies to spend lavishly to lure customers in hopes of achieving an insurmountable market share advantage. The companies responded: for example, via discounting and couponing, they created price effects.
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.
Satya Nadella (Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone)
In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Xerox had an attractive financial model focused on leasing and servicing machines and selling toner, rather than big-ticket equipment sales. For Xerox and its salespeople, this meant steadier, more recurring income. With a large baseline of recurring revenues, budgets were more likely to be met, which allowed management to give accurate guidance to stock analysts. For customers, the cost of leasing a copier is accounted for as an operating expense, which doesn’t usually entail upper management approval as a capital purchase might. As a near-monopoly manufacturer of copiers, Xerox could reduce costs by building more of a few standard models. As owner of a fleet of potentially obsolete leased equipment, Xerox might prefer not to improve models too quickly. As Steve Jobs saw it, product people were driven out of Xerox, along with any sense of craftsmanship. Nonetheless, in 1969, Xerox launched one of the most remarkable research efforts ever, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), without which Apple, the PC, and the Internet would not exist. The modern PC was invented at PARC, as was Ethernet networking, the graphical user interface and the mouse to control it, email, user-friendly word processing, desktop publishing, video conferencing, and much more. The invention that most clearly fit into Xerox’s vision of the “office of the future” was the laser printer, which Hewlett-Packard exploited more successfully than Xerox. (I’m watching to see how the modern parallel, Alphabet’s moonshot ventures, works out.) Xerox notoriously failed to turn these world-changing inventions into market dominance, or any market share at all—allowing Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and others to build behemoth enterprises around them. At a meeting where Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of ripping off Apple’s ideas, Gates replied, “Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke in to steal his TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
standard-setting device." - Engadget "Its solid build quality, along with its improved design, integrated store, and cross-platform transportability… all add up to a winner that shoots to the head of the pack." - PC World "Simply put, it's the best dedicated ebook reader you can buy… Amazon has managed to increase the contrast on the Kindle in a way that sets it above the Nook, Sony Readers, or any other dedicated ebook reader we've tested." - PC Magazine All-New Design Lighter & Thinner - Only 8.5 Ounces When reading for long periods of time, we know that weight matters. That’s why
Anonymous
Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.
Blake Masters (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)