Quotes About Technology

Fucking netbooks; you can't even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)

La culpa es mía por ser el informático del departamento: cuando las máquinas se estropean, agito mi pollo muerto y escribo encantamientos vudú en los teclados hasta que vuelven a funcionar.

Es que no saben que el único ordenador inhackeable es el que tiene instalado un sistema operativo seguro y está encerrado en una caja fuerte de acero enterrada bajo una tonelada de hormigón en el fondo de una mina de carbón protegida por los SAS y un par de divisiones armadas, y además está apagado?

A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.

Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)

I'm lurking in the shubbery behind an industrial unit, armed with a clipboard, a pager, and a pair of bulbous night-vision goggles that drench the scenery in ghastly emeralt tones. The bloody thing make me look like a train-spotter with a gas-mask fetish, and wearing them is giving me a headache

Los idiotas emiten bogones que hacen que las máquinas se estropeen en su presencia. Los administradores de sistema absorben los bogones, lo que permite que las máquinas vuelvan a funcionar.

The IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don't get out much, and when you do it's usually at night.

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before

when it isn't spending half its energy scanning for viruses or painting a pretty drop-shadow under the mouse pointer it runs like greased whippet shit.

It felt like going commando in a miniskirt on a Saturday night in town, even after Jim sent an email to ensure that there'd be a shiny new Samsung waiting for me in DC. Not knowing I could check my team's timesheets on my phone at 3 a.m. felt profoundly wrong.

Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a crate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home.

Which meant gait metrics were unavailable, and facial recognition was notoriously bad at handling skin tones darker than a typical whitebread silicon valley bro. (It went all the way back to the color cards used to optimize photographic film stock for white-skinned targets in the 1950s: algorithms embodied the prejudices and biases of their designers.)

Everything is terrorism these days: downloading, uploading, jaywalking with intent to cause fear.

This is a joke. Right?" I'm pointing at the green-screen terminal on the desk, and the huge dial-infested rotary phone beside it. "No sir." Bill clears his throat. "Unfortunately the NDO's office budget was misfiled years ago and nobody knows the correct code to requisition new supplies. At least it's warm in winter: you're right on top of the classified document incinerator room, and it's got the only chimney in the building.

Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.

Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.

And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry. And

Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run.

The world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster. Yet, as the New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge."3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for using information to some meaningful end

The internet. Everything one needs at one's fingertips. There have been no doubt studies demonstrating how this has affected people's memories in the negative. I will have to look those up online.

The Internet is for lonely people. People should live.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve. (Think about that for a moment.)

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey In