Oasis in the desert

Its where we are currently living. A desert! Full of constraints and thirst. Dont really know why we are here in the first place. There is one truth, the absolute truth which definitely brings hope. The truth is that there is a oasis in this desert. Allide nammane, illiruvudu summane.

The fact that we see mirages and comprehend it, proves the existence of the oasis. If we had not seen water ever, we would not be able to see the illusion of water at all.

If the oasis were to be in the center of the desert, every person is at a different place at a different angle with respect to the oasis. Each person might be travelling towards the oasis in a different direction and a different path. One person's path which might be taking him towards the oasis might take another person at a different place away from it. Every person's path is as distinct as he or she is. There are ofcourse some highways, some proven ways but they might not always be available to everybody, nor is it mandatory for everybody to take the highway.

Finally we need to be told about the direction towards the oasis by someone who can see it or who has seen it and has come down from the oasis to take us home. However, there might also be such people who think that they are seeing the oasis while looking at mirages. Then it would be really dangerous for us to follow such illusionists.

Notes from "The Art of Unix Programming"

Some quotes from the book -

For this historical sketch, it will be sufficient to note the impact of the first one's central formula: “Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

For most hackers and almost all nonhackers, “Free software because it works better” easily trumped “Free software because all software should be free”.

Being smarter than anyone else about important but narrow issues of software design didn't prevent us from being almost completely blind about the consequences of interactions between technology and economics that were happening right under our noses. Even the most perceptive and forward-looking thinkers in the Unix community were at best half-sighted. The lesson for the future is that over-committing to any one technology or business model would be a mistake — and maintaining the adaptive flexibility of our software and the design tradition that goes with it is correspondingly imperative.

The right problem

Reading "The Art of Unix Programming", I came across this -

"It is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way".

Encover definitely is solving the right problem. We started at a time when the market was down and survived the downturn. A lot of companies which solved the wrong problem (may be bcoz whatever they were solving was not a problem yet) the right way couldn't survive.

So how do you really distinguish the right from the wrong?

source: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s04.html