An essay on Operating Systems with a word on Emacs

Just two quotesFrom In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson:

But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
(...)
If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

[Added later:]
[T]he richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners.

Tags: emacs stephenson

Quote from Edward Sapir

Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure. Edward Sapir. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Language in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human intuitions.

Words are sometimes enough

Just two quotes. One is and the second is by David Whyte, from The heart Aroused (included in ch. 3 of Cluetrain Manifesto).

We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do. Conversely, in judging other people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but how they behave. ... We are drowning in words, many of which turn out to be the lies we tell ourselves or others.

by Gordon Livingston, Too soon old, too late smart

The voice emerges literally from the body as a
representation of our inner world. It carries our
experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the
future, and the emotional resonance of the moment. If
it carries none of these, it must be a masked voice,
and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows
intuitively we are not all there.

by David Whyte, The Heart Aroused (included in ch. 3 of Cluetrain Manifesto).

Nothing Gold Can Stay (Blask złota zawsze zgaśnie)

A poem by David Robert Frost.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

[via: Maas, David. (2005). Tracking how we change: Joseph Conrad's Insights on "Dating"
Ourselves. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 62(3), 232-244]

Blog is a must-have

A quote from Blogging for Business by Olga Kharif:

[A] blog is a must-have tool for every executive. "It'll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account," says Jonathan Schwartz, the president and CEO of Sun Microsystems. "If they don't, they're going to look foolish."

The same quote appeared in an article by Marie E. Flatley.

The carrer of accounting graduates

Hunton, Stone and Wier wrote an article in Accounting Horizons about the impact of higher education degree in Accounting and M. B. A. on future carrier prospects. Below is the abstract of the article.

We investigate the value of graduate business education in learning tacit knowledge and achieving professional accounting success. Archival (n = 5,932) and survey (n = 2,941) data from managerial accountants employed at 2,525 North American companies in three industries (publishing, paper, and chemical) indicate that job performance evaluations (JPEs) of those who hold either a Master's of Accountancy (M.Acc.) or M.B.A. degree are generally higher than non-master's (NM) degree accountants. We find some evidence that professionals with master's degrees, as compared to NM professionals, have higher levels of two forms of tacit managerial knowledge (TMK): self and others. The results also suggest that M.Acc. and M.B.A. degrees contribute to success differentially throughout the professionals' careers. Specifically, a M.Acc. degree provides greater benefit than a M.B.A. degree in the early and middle career years, while an M.B.A. degree provides greater benefit than a M.Acc. degree in later career years. The results indicate that M.Acc. and M.B.A. degrees contribute to success by increasing specific types of knowledge and enhancing ones' ability to learn.

How to Become an Early Riser

How to Become an Early Riser by Steve Pavlina.