Quotes About Technology

In 2013, Apple spent $3,370,000 on lobbying; Amazon, $3,456,000; Facebook, $6,430,000; Microsoft, $10,490,000; and Google, $15,800,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States but contracts with over 700,000 workers abroad.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.

Some day man will travel at the speed of light, of small interest to those of us still trying to catch up to the speed of time.

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone's feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence.

Le cinéma sonore a inventé le silence.

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Over the past century and a half, we've gone from harnessing animals—and enduring all the shit they shat—to harnessing the subatomic motion of electrons.

Utilizing wind energy to fuel data centers would be equally problematic. To demonstrate that, consider the Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, which needs 28 megawatts of power.46 The areal power density of wind energy—and it doesn't matter where you put your wind turbines—is 1 watt per square meter.47 (I will address wind energy in a later chapter.) Therefore, just to fuel the Facebook data center with wind will require about 28 million square meters of land.

The Western countries have experienced a development trajectory in which higher wages led to the invention of labour-saving technology, whose use drove up labour productivity and wages with it.

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people.

What if your company has made a commitment to a certain database, or a certain web server, or a certain framework? A good architect pretends that the decision has not been made, and shapes the system such that those decisions can still be deferred or changed for as long as possible. A good architect maximizes the number of decisions not made.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. —Bjarne Stroustrup, 1991

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

abstraction is evil. Code is anti-evil, and clean code is perhaps divine.

The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute.

The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.

We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance.

The folks who think that code will one day disappear are like mathematicians who hope one day to discover a mathematics that does not have to be formal. They are hoping that one day we will discover a way to create machines that can do what we want rather than what we say. These machines will have to be able to understand us so well that they can translate vaguely specified needs into perfectly executing programs that precisely meet those needs. This will never happen.

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. —Grady Booch

Implementation Patterns.

the history of software development technology is the story of how to conveniently create plugins to establish a scalable and maintainable system architecture.