Technology Quotes

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.

The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon.

Steve Jobs may have the apple, but Bill Gates has the entire orchard !

Two men were examining the output of the new computer in their department. After an hour or so of analyzing the data, one of them remarked: "Do you realize it would take 400 men at least 250 years to make a mistake this big ?

To go forward, you must backup.

Hey ! It compiles ! Ship it !

In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the country adding 'aol.com' to people's Usenet kill files everywhere. The programmer of the virus still remains anonymous, but has been nominated several times for a Nobel peace prize.

When we first started, we would message all the time, ... He would log on, and mostly we would just message back and forth at the beginning of the relationship. Now, we use the computer, phones, letters, airlines - everything.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

We're only at the beginning of what we have to do here.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

Paper returns done by hand have an 80 percent accuracy rate, or 20 percent error rate. E-file has more than a 99 percent accuracy rate, because the computer does all the work for you.

Hacking is like sex. You get in, you get out, and hope that you didn't leave something that can be traced back to you.

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the "bricks" are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important.

Like punning, programming is a play on words.

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone coming out of school with a technical degree will go into one area and stay there. Today's students have to look forward to the excitement of probably having three or four careers.

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by ‘they’, I mean ‘computers’. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)