Tag: quotes

Presidential elections, Russia, 2012

Today Russia is voting for a new president.  There is a lot of discussion and effort to make these elections fair and square.  A lot of people are observing and controlling.  I myself won’t be participating though.  I don’t believe that I have any vote in the matter anyway.  Instead, let me quote a rather appropriate section of Douglas Adams’ book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship…]
“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

On technology revolution

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, on technology revolution:

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.”

I’ve spent a lot of time with non-technical people lately.  People from different industries – shipping, real estates, and even music recording.  Most of these people are just getting into the whole technology thing.  Sure, they use Google to search the web.  But that’s not what I am talking about.  They are just getting started with using technology for their business.  And most of them are so far behind, that paper seems to them like the only working solution.

Talking to these people, there is a whole variety of subjects that have to be explained to them.  Even aside from technology.  Things like data consistency, workload scalability, process automation, backups, security, and more.  Consider for example a website.  Most of these people see a website with 5-10 pages to be an huge amount of work.  It’s almost like they need to hire a separate person to handle that.  For most of them, the fact that I have a personal blog with more than 4,000 articles in it, is mind-blowing.

When they are introduced to online tools for handling emails, documents, accounting, or project management, most of them need to pause for a couple of weeks, to process the information overload.  When they hear that blog posts and social media are more effective ways to communicate than press releases, they feel shaken, lost, and scared.  When they realize that most of the things they’ve learned in college are not too practical anymore, they get really stressed.

And these are people who are already familiar with Google search.  I know that there are layers and layers of people behind them, who have no knowledge of computers at all.  And those people will get online soon.  And they will need to change the way they think and the way they work.  And I have to agree with Eric Schmidt here, that most of those people are not ready yet.

But I think it will happen anyway.