Quotes About Technology

Buff: Hey, I've been making these tapes, you know, video tapes. I ripped off a camcorder up at the mall and I thought, you know, it could be something that I do, be a video artist, you know. Tim: Ladies and gentlemen, Buff, the postmodern idiot savant. He will outdo us all.

Technology undoubtedly has, and will always have, some role in making life easier or better, so one shouldn't exclude it. But the role is supplemental. Technology serves us, not we technology. The principle of minimation can be roughly stated thus: it is better to find a non-technological solution than a technological one, or failing that, a less technological solution than a more technological one.

In being slower, time is more capacious. The event is only in the moment. By speeding through life with technology, you reduce what any given moment can hold. By slowing down, you expand it.

One can begin with the expansion of the source base available to scholars brought about by the digital revolution. When I began work on Reconstruction, the World Wide Web did not exist (nor did email, so that scholars wasted a lot less of their time than nowadays).

We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product?

The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration

With the coming of automation it may eventually be possible for a ruling intelligentsia to operate a country's economy without the aid of the masses, and it is legitimate to speculate on what the intellectual may be tempted to do with the masses once they become superfluous.

In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be to either die or become part of the open infrastructure itself.

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.

One of the many consequences of the exponential power-versus-time curve in computing, and the corresponding pace of software development, is that 50% of what one knows becomes obsolete over every 18 months.

To design the perfect anti-Unix, write an operating system that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do. And then adds injury to insult by getting it wrong.

This is quite unlikely to happen to Linux

The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade.

The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.

General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about "a great big beautiful tomorrow.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn't. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn't unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers---those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been deskilled can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.

Then I remembered the Chip, a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought it's dumb not to use this for jumping. That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster

For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by Boeing for the airplanes it sells, we would consider Boeing a manufacturer-innovator in those cases. But if we were considering innovations in metal-forming machinery developed by Boeing for in-house use in building airplanes, we

national competitive advantage

1996, pp. 774-775) elaborated on the original SCOT model by pointing out that the way a product is interpreted is not restricted to the design stage of a technology