Programmers Inspiring Quotes

If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.

People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.

Your mouth is not given to you for feeding alone; it is given to you to programme events and circumstance around you.

You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

I want to tell you a growing conviction with me, and that is that as we obey the leadings of the Spirit of God, we enable God to answer the prayers of other people. I mean that our lives, my life, is the answer to someone’s prayer, prayed perhaps centuries ago. It is more and more impossible to me to have programmes and plans because God alone has the plan, and our plans are only apt to hinder Him, and make it necessary for Him to break them up. I have the unspeakable knowledge that my life is the answer to prayers, and that God is blessing me and making me a blessing entirely of His sovereign grace and nothing to do with my merits, saving as I am bold enough to trust His leading and not the dictates of my own wisdom and common sense.

It is absolutely what I think.' He looks deadly serious now. 'These academic guys have to feel important. They give papers and present TV programmes to show they're useful and valuable. But you do useful, valuable work every day. You don't need to prove anything. How many people have you treated? Hundreds. You've reduced their pain. You've made hundreds of people happier. Has Antony Tavish ever made anyone happier?

I imagine there are orderly, well-organized Scanners in the world, but there can't be very many of them. It's far more common to hear a Scanner mumbling, "Now, where did I put that lizard?

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Only give me the chance to do my very best!

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.

…I claim that the ancient Irish system possessed pre-eminently two characteristics: first, freedom of the individual, and secondly, an adequate inspiration. Without these two things you cannot have education, no matter how well you may elaborate educational machinery, no matter how you may multiply educational programmes.

the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see.

Finally, I want to thank all of the writers, filmmakers, actors, artists, musicians, programmers, game designers, and geeks whose work I’ve paid tribute to in this story. These people have all entertained and enlightened me, and I hope that—like Halliday’s hunt—this book will inspire others to seek out their creations.

Every mess has a message. Your inability is God's ability for yo stability, Every problem has a programme. Every Stress has a strategy and a grace of God will help you to win yo race." Your next in line!

found myself gazing in wonderment at my surroundings. Even now, I couldn’t help but be awed by the scope and detail of Tolkien’s imagination. After almost a century, artists and storytellers and programmers were still drawing inspiration from his creation.

How does Chekhov’s artistic “programme” comment on the message of The Duel, and vice versa? I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms. . . . Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. . . . That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom— freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.*

Idealism, particularly idealism of a cultural or artistic kind, has become such a rare phenomenon in the contemporary world that it may often be hard for us to feel our way into the spiritual background of much of the art, music, and literature that burst upon an unsuspecting European public in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. It has become fashionable to suppose that what we have come to term variously “modern art”, “modern music”, or simply “modernism” took its origins in some collective artistic rejection of the styles and norms of the past, and in an adoption of a sceptical and anti-idealistic world view. While it is true that the “iconoclastic” movements of expressionism, futurism, dada, and early surrealism relied for much of their public impact on shock-tactics and a philosophy of ‘making it new’, a close study of their artistic programmes shows that their primary concern was less the destruction of the past than the reinterpretation of both past and present in terms of a visionary future, a hoped-for world in which the artist, like some divinely inspired child, would endow mankind with a new innocence, exorcising from it the demons of war, revolution, technology, and social organisation. Such a transformed humanity would be a worthy successor to the mankind of previous ages

Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.

Few classical programmers found prototypal inheritance to be acceptable, and classically inspired syntax obscures the language’s true prototypal nature. It is the worst of both worlds.

Braun the AI took his name from a popular character in Welsh mythology. A great warrior and an intrepid mariner, Braun the Blessed was the high king of the Island of the Mighty. Frequenting the famous ancient stories known as the Welsh Triad, Braun was often portrayed as a giant among mortals and a force of great power. The tales of his ocean navigation and the descriptions of his superhuman size inspired the programmers,

À trente ans, ce colosse au crâne rasé en a déjà passé dix en prison et, comme il le dit joliment, « vit entouré de crimes comme les habitants d’une forêt vivent entourés d’arbres ». Cela ne l’empêche pas d’être un homme paisible, d’humeur toujours joyeuse, en qui se mêlent les traits du fol en Christ russe et de l’ascète oriental. Été comme hiver, même quand le thermomètre dans la cellule descend au-dessous de zéro, il est en short et tongs, il ne mange pas de viande, il ne boit pas de thé mais de l’eau chaude et pratique d’impressionnants exercices de yoga. On l’ignore souvent, mais énormément de gens, en Russie, font du yoga : encore plus qu’en Californie, et cela dans tous les milieux. Pacha, très vite, repère en « Édouard Veniaminovitch » un homme sage. « Des gens comme vous, lui assure-t-il, on n’en fait plus, en tout cas je n’en ai pas rencontré. » Et il lui apprend à méditer. On s’en fait une montagne quand on n’a jamais essayé mais c’est extrêmement simple, en fait, et peut s’enseigner en cinq minutes. On s’assied en tailleur, on se tient le plus droit possible, on étire la colonne vertébrale du coccyx jusqu’à l’occiput, on ferme les yeux et on se concentre sur sa respiration. Inspiration, expiration. C’est tout. La difficulté est justement que ce soit tout. La difficulté est de s’en tenir à cela. Quand on débute, on fait du zèle, on essaie de chasser les pensées. On s’aperçoit vite qu’on ne les chasse pas comme ça mais on regarde leur manège tourner et, petit à petit, on est un peu moins emporté par le manège. Le souffle, petit à petit, ralentit. L’idée est de l’observer sans le modifier et c’est, là aussi, extrêmement difficile, presque impossible, mais en pratiquant on progresse un peu, et un peu, c’est énorme. On entrevoit une zone de calme. Si, pour une raison ou pour une autre, on n’est pas calme, si on a l’esprit agité, ce n’est pas grave : on observe son agitation, ou son ennui, ou son envie de bouger, et en les observant on les met à distance, on en est un peu moins prisonnier. Pour ma part, je pratique cet exercice depuis des années. J’évite d’en parler parce que je suis mal à l’aise avec le côté new age, soyez zen, toute cette soupe, mais c’est si efficace, si bienfaisant, que j’ai du mal à comprendre que tout le monde ne le fasse pas. Un ami plaisantait récemment, devant moi, au sujet de David Lynch, le cinéaste, en disant qu’il était devenu complètement zinzin parce qu’il ne parlait plus que de la méditation et voulait persuader les gouvernements de la mettre au programme dès l’école primaire. Je n’ai rien dit mais il me semblait évident que le zinzin, là-dedans, c’était mon ami, et que Lynch avait totalement raison.

Whether the work of the prime minister or one of her now forgotten minions, ‘Garibi Hatao’ was an inspired coinage. It allowed Congress (R) to take the moral high ground, representing itself as the party of progress, against an alliance of reaction. Personalizing the election was to backfire badly against the opposition, whose agenda was portrayed as negative in contrast to the forward-looking programme of the ruling party.

If the style of my programmes was to be inspired by anyone else, I thought it had to be, of course, the great Michael Palin.

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine. But a written program has another face, that which tells its story to the human user. For even the most private of programs, some such communication is necessary; memory will fail the author-user, and he will require refreshing on the details of his handiwork. How much more vital is the documentation for a public program, whose user is remote from the author in both time and space! For the program product, the other face to the user is fully as important as the face to the machine. Most of us have quietly excoriated the remote and anonymous author of some skimpily documented program. And many of us have therefore tried to instill in new programmers an attitude about documentation that would inspire for a lifetime, overcoming sloth and schedule pressure. By and large we have failed. I think we have used wrong methods.

For far too long, we have all been playing out a victim consciousness, convincing ourselves that dependency and powerlessness are absolutely fundamental to the human condition. Nowhere is this belief more deeply ingrained than in the “world” of addiction and in the traditional treatment and recovery programmes available to the masses ... If we do not embrace a new consciousness about addiction, then the old consciousness will simply create more fear, disruption, victimhood and dis-satisfaction on the planet. Ultimately, every one of us begins to teach this new consciousness by living it ourselves, bringing transcendence into daily life, hope to those who have often felt hopeless, and empowerment to those who feel powerless. It is an evolutionary leap forward and I invite YOU to make that leap with me ... NOW.” — John Flaherty

Also, don't forget that some of the most successful people in the world are self-taught programmers. Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple, is a self-taught programmer. So is Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on NASA's Apollo Moon missions; David Karp, founder of Tumblr; Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter; and Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram.

CHAPTER 12 The Engineers In this chapter, I describe the engineering role (also commonly known as developers or, in some circles, programmers). But as with the last chapter, I'm not trying to speak here to the engineers—I'm aiming this discussion at product managers who need to learn how to work effectively with engineers. There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers. If your relationship is strong, with mutual and sincere respect both ways, then the product manager job is great. If your relationship is not strong, your days as product manager will be brutal (and probably numbered). Therefore, this is a relationship worth taking very seriously and doing everything you can to nurture. This strong relationship begins with you.

Asoka World School is a reputed international school in Kochi affiliated with CBSE. We have a student-friendly environment and has a very interesting syllabus. The STEM enriched curriculum helps to provide an in-depth learning experience for the students. We have a wide range of extracurricular activities for nurturing and developing a child’s creativity and imagination. Asoka World School can be an ideal option for your child. Here are some key reasons why Asoka World School is the best for your kid. Individualized attention in classes: Our student-teacher ratio arrangement is standardised in such a way that teachers are able to give individual attention to each child. Our teachers are well educated, experienced and constantly inspires their students. We follow the golden teacher-student ratio of 1:20. This helps students to gain the concepts of each subject easily hence they become more confident. This also enriches their knowledge, and they get more quality time to interact with their teachers. image Child Safe Environment: At Asoka World School, you will find your child is in extremely safe hands. Our classrooms are aesthetically designed and technologically equipped to disseminate learning through very many fun ways. Asoka World School has a world-class building design, infrastructure, fully integrated wireless network, climate-controlled smart classrooms, security features and no compromise hygiene and safeguarding policy that offers everything you have been dreaming for your child. Updated Curriculums: We have 4 levels of programmes prepared for our children. Foundational - KG - IInd Preparatory - IIIrd - Vth Middle School - VIth - VIIIth Senior School - IXth - XIIth These programs are framed by our school to focus on developing various vital skills in the students. Our teachers adopt a customised teaching approach that can help students of every category. Our flexible curriculum enhances the communication between the teachers and students to a great extent. Our school has result-oriented teaching methods, qualified and responsible teaching staff to help facilitate a learning environment that is both safe and nurturing. As the best CBSE school in Kochi, Asoka World School is a leader in its sector and we hope to continue rising and come out as the best school in Kochi.

can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things.

A programação é uma arte. Basicamente, se resume a conseguir que um computador faça o que você quer que ele faça (ou o que seu usuário quer que ele faça). Como programador, você é parte ouvinte, parte conselheiro, parte intérprete e parte definidor. Tenta capturar requisitos vagos e encontrar uma maneira de expressá-los para que uma simples máquina possa concretizá-los. Tenta documentar seu trabalho para que outras pessoas possam entendê-lo e tenta construir seu trabalho de um modo que outros possam se basear nele. Procura fazer tudo isso contra o implacável decorrer do tempo do projeto. Você faz pequenos milagres diariamente.

dating question -What do you want from this world? -To have a wardrobe. In his first meeting with Katrina, she asked him a dating question, and his answer was unconventional, he wished he could buy a wardrobe, in which he put his belongings, a metaphor for the instability in his life, so how does he do this, while he is without a homeland, without a home, moving from place to another, carrying a bag containing a few of his personal belongings. About to cheat on Khadija, the curiosity in the intelligence man’s mind overpowered him, the desire for knowledge, exploration, information, and a thirst for more details, the smallest details. Plan the process with the mentality of a computer programmer, “I will leave them a loophole in the system, they will hack me through it, and to do this they have to open their doors to send their code, and at this very moment, I am sending my code in the opposite direction. The most vulnerable account devices to hack are the hackers themselves. They enter the systems through special ports, which are opened to them by the so-called Trojan horse, a type of virus, with which they target the victim, open loopholes for them, infiltrate through them, and in both cases, they, in turn, have to open ports on their devices to complete the connection, from which they can be hacked backward. Katrina is a Trojan horse, he will not close the ports in front of her, she must succeed in penetrating him, and she will be his bridge connecting them, he will sneak through her, to the most secret and terrifying place in the world, a journey that leads him to the island of Malta, to enter the inevitable den. This is how the minds of investigators and intelligence men work, they must open the outlets of their minds to the fullest, to collect information, receive it, and deal with it, and that is why their minds are the most vulnerable to penetration, manipulation, and passing misleading information to them. It is almost impossible to convince a simple man, that there is life outside the planet, the outlets of his mind are closed, he is not interested in knowledge, nor is he collecting information, and the task of entering him is difficult, they call him the mind of the crocodile, a mind that is solid, closed, does not affect anything and is not affected by anything, He has his own convictions, he never changes them. While scientists, curious, intellectuals, investigators, and intelligence men, the ports of their minds are always open. And just as hackers can penetrate websites by injecting their URL addresses with programming phrases, they can implant their code into the website’s database, and pull information from it. The minds of such people can also be injected, with special codes, some of them have their minds ready for injection, and one or two injections are sufficient to prepare for the next stage, and for some, dozens of injections are not enough, and some of them injected their minds themselves, by meditation, thinking, and focusing on details, as Ruslan did. Khadija did not need more than three injections, but he trusted the love that brought them together, there is no need, she knew a lot about him in advance, and she will trust him and believe him. Her mind would not be able to get her away, or so he wished, the woman’s madness had not been given its due. What he is about to do now, and the revenge videos that she is going to receive will remain in her head forever, and will be her brain’s weapon to escape, when he tries to get her out of the box. From an early age, he did not enjoy safety and stability, he lived in the midst of hurricanes of chaos, and the heart of randomness. He became the son of shadows and their master. He deserved the nickname he called himself “Son of Chaos.

More radically, how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? You might think that because a blow to the head renders one unconscious, the ‘seat of consciousness’ must lie within the skull. But there is no logical reason to conclude that. An enraged blow to my TV set during an unsettling news programme may render the screen blank, but that doesn’t mean the news reader is situated inside the television. A television is just a receiver: the real action is miles away in a studio. Could the brain be merely a receiver of ‘consciousness signals’ created somewhere else? In Antarctica, perhaps? (This isn’t a serious suggestion – I’m just trying to make a point.) In fact, the notion that somebody or something ‘out there’ may ‘put thoughts in our heads’ is a pervasive one; Descartes himself raised this possibility by envisaging a mischievous demon messing with our minds. Today, many people believe in telepathy. So the basic idea that minds are delocalized is actually not so far-fetched. In fact, some distinguished scientists have flirted with the idea that not all that pops up in our minds originates in our heads. A popular, if rather mystical, idea is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once entertained an even bolder hypothesis: that quantum effects in the brain leave open the possibility of external input into our thought processes and thus guide us towards useful scientific concepts. He proposed that this ‘external guide’ might be a superintelligence in the far cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.

More radically, how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? You might think that because a blow to the head renders one unconscious, the ‘seat of consciousness’ must lie within the skull. But there is no logical reason to conclude that. An enraged blow to my TV set during an unsettling news programme may render the screen blank, but that doesn’t mean the news reader is situated inside the television. A television is just a receiver: the real action is miles away in a studio. Could the brain be merely a receiver of ‘consciousness signals’ created somewhere else? In Antarctica, perhaps? (This isn’t a serious suggestion – I’m just trying to make a point.) In fact, the notion that somebody or something ‘out there’ may ‘put thoughts in our heads’ is a pervasive one; Descartes himself raised this possibility by envisaging a mischievous demon messing with our minds. Today, many people believe in telepathy. So the basic idea that minds are delocalized is actually not so far-fetched. In fact, some distinguished scientists have flirted with the idea that not all that pops up in our minds originates in our heads. A popular, if rather mystical, idea is that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician’s mind somehow ‘breaking through’ into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether. The cosmologist Fred Hoyle once entertained an even bolder hypothesis: that quantum effects in the brain leave open the possibility of external input into our thought processes and thus guide us towards useful scientific concepts. He proposed that this ‘external guide’ might be a superintelligence in the far cosmic future using a subtle but well-known backwards-in-time property of quantum mechanics in order to steer scientific progress.

official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC’s BASIC for the PDP-11.

In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.75 Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it.76 What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.

he moved beyond the stately confines of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and travelled the length and breadth of the country, meeting students, politicians, teachers, bureaucrats, professionals from all fields, talking to them, answering their queries patiently and filling every gathering with inspiration and pride. He talked of his humble beginnings, of working with the best minds of the country in his years at ISRO and DRDO, and laid out specific programmes to bring about prosperity and connectivity to every corner of the country.

Books can be sources of inspiration for anyone, anywhere. In 2011, I went to Madurai to inaugurate the Paediatric Oncology unit of the Meenakshi Mission Hospital. After the programme, a person who looked very familiar approached me. When he came closer, I realized that he has been my driver when I was working with DRDL in Hyderabad. His name is V. Kathiresan, and he worked with me day and night for nine years. During that time, I had noticed that he was always reading in his spare time, be it a book, magazine or a newspaper. That dedication attracted me. One day, I asked him what made him read so much during his leisure time. He replied that he had a son and daughter and both asked him lots of questions. In order to give them correct answers, he read and studied whenever he got the time. The spirit of learning in him impressed me and I told him to study formally through a distance education course. I also gave him some free time to attend the course and complete his +2 and then to apply for higher education. He took that as a challenge and kept on studying. He did B.A. (History), then M.A. (History) and then he did M.A. (Political Science). He also completed his B.Ed and then M.Ed. Then he registered for his Ph.D in Manonmaniam Sundaranar University and got his Ph.D in 2001. He joined the education department of Tamil Nadu government and served for a number of years. In 2011, when I met him, he was an assistant professor in the Government Arts College at Mellur near Madurai. What extraordinary commitment and dedication had helped him to acquire the right skills in his leisure time and changed the course of his life.

What can explain this difference? On the surface, much appears to hinge on Richard’s programming feat, his software shim. Otherwise, his effort with Konqueror seems much like my struggles with Mozilla. Perhaps he was just a better programmer than me, and without his coding cleverness, there would be no story. That explanation is too simple. Richard made his shim only after determining he needed one last link in a chain of inspiration, intuition, reasoning, and estimation. His shim was a consequence of his overall plan. To show what I mean, here’s an accounting of what Richard did in his first couple of days at Apple. He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit. By doing so, he demonstrated the self-confidence to skip any ingratiating display of deference to his new manager, a person who had years of experience in the technical field he was newly entering. Next, Richard resolved to produce a result on the shortest possible schedule. He downloaded an open source project that held genuine promise, the Konqueror code from KDE, a browser that might well serve as the basis for our long-term effort. In getting this code running on a Mac, he decided to make the closest possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule. He identified three features—loading web pages, clicking links, and going back to previous pages. He reasoned these alone would be sufficiently compelling proofs of concept. He then made his shortcuts, and these simplifying choices defined a set of nongoals: Perfect font rendering would be cast aside, as would full integration with the Mac’s native graphics system, same for using only the minimum source code from KDE. He reasoned that these shortcuts, while significant, would not substantially detract from the impact of seeing a browser surf web pages. He resolved to draw together these strands into a single demo that would show the potential of Konqueror. Then, finally, he worked through the technical details, which led him to develop his software shim, since that was the only thing standing between him and the realization of his plan. His thought process amplified his technical acumen. In contrast, Don and I were hoping Mozilla would pan out somehow. I was trying to get the open source behemoth to build on the Mac, with little thought beyond that. I had no comparable plan, goals, nongoals, tight schedule, or technical shortcuts.

الأفكار السلبية تعيق تقدمنا، علينا أن نقاومها ببسالة والتخلص من جذور المشكلة هو الشيء الذي يقتلعنا من وضع الألم من الضعف من الإهانة من سوء الحال..علينا أن نصعق معتقداتنا الذاتية الواهمة التي لا تلزم الا كل واحد منا لنجعلها نقطة انطلاقة لرحلة حب كونية ولنرتفع الى سماء الأسوياء المستقرين نفسيا القادرين على الأخذ بزمام الأمور ونستنشق هناك الأوكسيجين النقي الشافي، ونمشي في طرق كنا نعتقد أنها لم تخلق لمثلنا.. لا يجب أن نهدر عمر الأفراد والشعوب ونحن عالقين في أوحال الخوف وأشواك الماضي، هذا هو التشخيص، وانها حياة نستحقها لا كره فيها لا خوف فيها ولا ندم.

Pericles’ speech is not only a programme. It is also a defence, and perhaps even an attack. It reads, as I have already hinted, like a direct attack on Plato. I do not doubt that it was directed, not only against the arrested tribalism of Sparta, but also against the totalitarian ring or ‘link’ at home; against the movement for the paternal state, the Athenian ‘Society of the Friends of Laconia’ (as Th. Gomperz called them in 190232). The speech is the earliest33 and at the same time perhaps the strongest statement ever made in opposition to this kind of movement. Its importance was felt by Plato, who caricatured Pericles’ oration half a century later in the passages of the Republic34 in which he attacks democracy, as well as in that undisguised parody, the dialogue called Menexenus or the Funeral Oration35. But the Friends of Laconia whom Pericles attacked retaliated long before Plato. Only five or six years after Pericles’ oration, a pamphlet on the Constitution of Athens36 was published by an unknown author (possibly Critias), now usually called the ‘Old Oligarch’. This ingenious pamphlet, the oldest extant treatise on political theory, is, at the same time, perhaps the oldest monument of the desertion of mankind by its intellectual leaders. It is a ruthless attack upon Athens, written no doubt by one of her best brains. Its central idea, an idea which became an article of faith with Thucydides and Plato, is the close connection between naval imperialism and democracy. And it tries to show that there can be no compromise in a conflict between two worlds37, the worlds of democracy and of oligarchy; that only the use of ruthless violence, of total measures, including the intervention of allies from outside (the Spartans), can put an end to the unholy rule of freedom. This remarkable pamphlet was to become the first of a practically infinite sequence of works on political philosophy which were to repeat more or less, openly or covertly, the same theme down to our own day. Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom. It became the more necessary for them to assert their superiority by fighting against equality as they were (using Socratic language) misanthropists and misologists—incapable of that simple and ordinary generosity which inspires faith in men, and faith in human reason and freedom. Harsh as this judgement may sound, it is just, I fear, if it is applied to those intellectual leaders of the revolt against freedom who came after the Great Generation, and especially after Socrates. We can now try to see them against the background of our historical interpretation.

I have identified seven elements essential to Apple’s software success: Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs There weren’t any company handbooks describing these elements. Nobody outlined this list in a new-employee orientation. There weren’t any signs affixed to the walls of our Cupertino campus exhorting us to “Collaborate!” On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking. Therefore, our approach flowed from the work. This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs, and it happened from the ground up, through the daily efforts of designers and programmers you’ve never heard of, people like me and my colleagues, some of whom I’ll tell you about.