Technology Quotes

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.

No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.

Sometimes I think the only universal in the computing field is the fetch-execute cycle.

If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.

My computer must be broken: whenever I ask a wrong question, it gives a wrong answer.

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.

There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network.

The Internet is a great way to get on the net.

Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

The US Nuclear Security Administration runs the Blue Gene supercomputer. It is supposed to be the top super computer in the world ? and it runs on GNU Linux. Of the top 10 super computers in the world, seven run on GNU Linux. From a security point of view, there is a case to be made.

Today's meters are little computers.

What does it say about our culture that personality is now considered a technology, a tool of the trade, not only in politics but in business and the professions? Has everyone been forced to become an actor? In sixteenth century England, actors were.

Ooops. My brain just hit a bad sector.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.

A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?

Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."

If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put into microcode and then they certainly won't be the same.

Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.