Nat Friedman Quotes

Nat Friedman's quotes feel bluntly witty, tackling philosophy, happiness and how we think about life.

16 quotes

  1. People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like 'the radiolucent lungs' and 'ligamentous laxity.'

  2. The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life.

  3. If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop.

  4. I once read somewhere that it's a sign of enlightenment to be able to hold two contradicting ideas in your head at the same time.

  5. There are a lot of people whove been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.

  6. 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.

  7. OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.

  8. We plan to support Exchange 2003 as soon as it is released. We already have the prerelease versions from MSDN.

  9. Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

  10. A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free.

  11. It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software.

  12. This is what people need: an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use tool.

  13. I have a G4 at home. Theyre great machines for individual users, and I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft desktop, youve got to look elsewhere.

  14. As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work thats gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C#.

  15. We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

  16. Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.