Technology Quotes

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

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.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

I think there is irony in the fact that the computer is both their chief venue of communication and propaganda and also the mother of all their fears.

Software expands to consume all available resources.

People say Microsoft paid $14M for using the Rolling Stones song 'Start me up' in their commercials. This is wrong. Microsoft payed $14M only for a part of the song. For instance, they didn't use the line 'You'll make a grown man cry'.

The new information technology—Internet and e-mail—have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.

Good code is its own best documentation.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all across the country know about it.

There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.

If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0.

Food for thought: A fully-protected-and-updated Windows box cannot, by definition, have an uptime of more than 30 days.

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world.

Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

Americans have the right to have their medical decisions made by them and their doctors, and not by those bureaucrats sitting behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

This is something we're very committed to, it's something that I think people are underestimating right now as they've seen some of the dot-com promises not come through. I think they're missing the fact that the basic technology is moving forward, the new platforms are here and this vision of the digital decade will be a reality.