Quotes About Technology

On mobile phones: "It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring

If cell phones came with a cigarette dispenser, they'd be the greatest stupid invention ever.

She looks at something in her hand that's beeping at her. It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring. She types something on the tiny typewriter with her thumbs, and smiles. "What's that you're playing with?" "You've never seen one of these? It's a BlackBerry.

It means the faction found us." He looks around again. "How?" "How the fuck do I know? Spy satellites? Facial recognition pigeons on the freeway signs? Ballerinas with Uzis? What does it matter? Just hit the fucking accelerator.

They aren't stupid. Those are going to be tactical tires. There are metal inserts inside the wheels. When a tire goes flat, they can still drive on the insert.

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

When they buy businesses, all venture capitalists look hard at the technology, the management, the market. They get into all sorts of complex investigation. They hire consultants to assess the technology and the market, accountants to crawl over the books, and lawyers to tie the managers in knots and do whatever lawyers do. I did none of those things. I knew Betfair was a star business. That was enough for me.

In June 2008, Amazon.com filed for a new patent with a Microsoft Kinect–like feature for making purchases with body movements. Anticipating computers and other devices that can track a user's movements, the new Amazon patent is titled "Movement recognition as input mechanism." Forget keypads and mice, you may soon be able to make a purchase simply by nodding your head at your computer, Kindle, or cell phone. Industry wags have dubbed it the "1-Nod patent.

this new frontier is characterized by at least five trends: a severance of the public and private mind from our food's origins; a disappearing line between machines, humans, and other animals; an increasingly intellectual understanding of our relationship with other animals; the invasion of our cities by wild animals (even as urban/suburban designers replace wildness with synthetic nature); and the rise of a new kind of suburban form.

Something else was different when we were young: our parents were outdoors. I'm not saying they were joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors. As far as physical fitness goes, today's kids are the sorriest generation in the history of the United States. Their parents may be out jogging, but the kids just aren't outside.

There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat — draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative.

The more high tech we become the more nature we need.

Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive.

Television remains the most effective thief of time.

For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality.

Szwed, K., & Bouck, E. (2013). Clicking away: Using a student response system to self-monitor behavior in a general education classroom. Journal of Special Education Technology, 28(2), 1–12.

Isn't it better to talk about the relative merits of washing machines than the relative strength of rockets?

With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.

Out of the surfeit of falsity born of technology and commercialism, we rejoice in returning to primary data and to assurance that the world is a world of enduring forms which in themselves are neither brutal nor sentimental.

In a wired world, silence is suspicious.

As has been said elsewhere the architect is the interface between the business and the technology team, the architect must understand every aspect of the technology to be able to represent the team to the business without having to constantly refer others. Similarly the architect must understand the business in order to drive the team toward their goal of serving the business.

We cannot easily add lanes to roads, but we've learned how to easily add features to software. This isn't a defect of our software processes, but a virtue of the medium in which we work.

Equally, there's a good chance that there's someone who you think is "just not doing it right" and is undermining the project. In these cases, the technology you need to solve your problem is very old and well established indeed, in fact it's possibly the most important technical innovation in the history of humanity. What you need is a conversation.

All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. (Grady Booch)