#technology
213 quotes
“Technology is not good or bad; it is the use we make of it that matters.”
“The Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
“Innovation happens when people are free to think, to speculate, to experiment.”
“The Internet is for everyone, and it should be accessible to everyone.”
“You don't have to be a computer scientist to use the Internet.”
“The power of the Internet is that it enables anyone to publish anything.”
“Privacy is not something that you can take for granted in the digital age.”
“The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime.”
“Cybersecurity is not just a technical problem. It is a societal problem.”
“The Internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see.”
“The ability to interact with a computer presence like you would a human assistant is becoming increasingly feasible. p. 30”
“I've got news for you, we invented it.”
“And programming computers was so fascinating. You create your own little universe, and then it does what you tell it to do. p. 28”
“The things we should be doing at Apple are things that others can’t. bloomberg.com”
“If there were any doubts, I think that they should be put to bed. Talking about the Apple Watch,”
“I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others, … So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade”
“If there was a lot of emotion in my voice today, it's because we've all been waiting for this day for a long time. It felt so great, … the people at this company are doing the best work of their lives, the best work that Apple has ever done. usatoday.com”
“In response to a conservative interest group's request that Apple disclose the financial costs of its environmental initiatives, and to only take them on if they were profitable”
“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. At an Apple shareholder meeting in March 2014”
“iPad sales had been increasing at the expense of Mac sales.”
“Our base philosophy is to never fear cannibalization. If we do, somebody else will just cannibalize it. We never fear it. At Apple's 2013 Q1 earnings call (2013”
“Cook was asked about converging touch”
“You can converge a toaster and refrigerator, but these things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user. During the Q & A session after an earnings call (2012”
“The creator of the World Wide Web, TIM BERNERS”
“Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy. Interview by Kris Herbst for Internet World”
“Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch. Interview by Kris Herbst for Internet World”
“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners”
“I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him. developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners”
“Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?”
“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and”
“Electronic publishing and visions of hypertext”
“WorldWideWeb wide”
“Information Management: A Proposal”
“It had to be that artistically perfect, because it represents yourself when you do a great design.”
“Sometimes you need a critical mass of loyal users that will instantly buy and go this direction... Apple Must Keep Setting Standards or Lose Its Cool, Wozniak Says”
“If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise. p. 300”
“I never lie, even to this day. Not even a little. Unless you count playing pranks on people, which I don't. That's comedy. Entertainment doesn't count. A joke is different from a lie, even if the difference is kind of subtle. p. 12”
“Every PC is a Macintosh”
“A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.”
“I also like to ride Segways. How much fun that is! Anybody think that's fun? I hope so... There's an awful lot of people in the world that sneer at Segways because other people are having fun . There must be something bad about it. But I always tell people, that hey, these Segways are so environmentally conscious. I carry four of them in the trunk of my Hummer.”
“Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.”
“Woz has fun with leaked iPhone T”
“Steve Jobs doesn't use a Mac, and won't, because it's too crappy in his opinion. Commenting on Steve Jobs's stewardship after his return to Apple, before the release of Mac OS X , MacTech Vol. 14 No. 5”
“It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy. At a retreat in September 1982, as quoted in John Sculley and John A. Byrne, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world? A comment he made in persuading John Sculley to become Apple's CEO, as quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple: A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987) by John Sculley and John A. Byrne”
“I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I'm only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I've got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that. On his expulsion from any position of authority at Apple, after having invited John Sculley to become CEO, as quoted in Playboy”
“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. On the early rivalry between Macintosh and "IBM”
“They're babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen. On Pixar co”
“Real artists ship. Epigram attributed to Steve Jobs during the development of the Macintosh, West of Eden by Frank Rose”
“It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300”
“You're ripping us off! I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us! Steve Jobs reactions on Microsoft Windows 1.0”
“We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream. Interview about the release of the Macintosh”
“commercial , which ends with the announcer saying”
“The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.”
“Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.”
“Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around. Charlie Ayers in Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)”
“If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough. Mayer, Catherine (August 5, 2013). Meet ‘Schmeat’: Say Hello to the Stem”
“Without Sergey Brin, Google has lost its healthy fear of authoritarianism”
“Google's Sergey Brin calls on U.S. politicians to ditch their parties”
“Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power. Guest lecture, UC Berkeley Oct. 5, 2005”
“We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are”
“Google's Schmidt, Page and Brin hold court at Zeitgeist”
“re gmail, great user experience has helped other email systems (others have increased storage etc). there are areas that have been overlooked in industry, much as search was overlooked in the 90's. thinks they have technology, distribution infrastructure to address those things. Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google”
“There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.”
“If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”
“It may be true that one can reach more microcomputer users with advertising. If this is really so, a business which advertises the service of copying and mailing GNU for a fee ought to be successful enough to pay for its advertising and more. This way, only the users who benefit from the advertising pay for it. On the other hand, if many people get GNU from their friends, and such companies don't succeed, this will show that advertising was not really necessary to spread GNU. Why is it that free market advocates don't want to let the free market decide this?”
“Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.”
“GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.”
“To avoid horrible confusion , please pronounce the G in the word GNU when it is the name of this project.”
“GNU , which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix”
“Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done.”
“Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978”
“things the net has been used for is clearly very small. And if they have found any people any jobs, clearly they have done good. If I had a job to offer, I would offer it to my friends first. Is this”
“The Future of the Wireless Art”
“The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires”
“The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”
“Roentgen Rays or Streams”
“On Light And Other High Frequency Phenomena”
“There is something within me that might be illusion as it is often case with young delighted people, but if I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity. If those hopes would become fulfilled, the most exciting thought would be that it is a deed of a Serb. Address at the Belgrade train station”
“Ere long intelligence”
“Russians are lucky”
“Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency”
“Experiments With Alternating Currents of Very High Frequency, and Their Application to Methods of Artificial Illumination”
“I think that some decisions that we made early on to localize the website and keep it separate for each college on the network kept it really useful, because people could only see people from their local college and friends outside. That made it so people were comfortable sharing information that they probably wouldn't otherwise, which made it useful in the long term for people to look up information about other people on the site. Bambi Francisco interviews Mark Zuckerberg in 2005”
“Exclusive Interview With Mark Zuckerberg”
“I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before.”
“Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuckerberg: Just ask Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider”
“'It's better to buy than compete': The FTC is using Mark Zuckerberg's own words against him”
“It is better to buy than compete .”
“My goal is to not have a job. Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life. Interview with Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, June 2004 , Business Insider”
“Zuckersberg's Facemash (a variant of Am I Hot or Not? ), which ranked photos of students according to attractiveness, led to the possibility he might have to leave Harvard for a time or permanently. He was not sanctioned by the Administrative Board.”
“Facemash Creator Survives Ad Board”
“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community.”
“I wrote a program that crashed Windows”
“Dijkstra probably hates me. Comment in Linux kernel 1.1.42's kernel/sched.c file  ( 1994”
“OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name”
“Well, I probably won't get too good grades even without you: I had an argument (completely unrelated – not even pertaining to OS's) with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn :) Torvalds, Linus ( 1992”
“Portability is for people who cannot write new programs. Torvalds, Linus ( 1992”
“Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain”
“Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix”
“Torvalds, Linus Benedict (1991”
“Do you pine for the nice days of minix”
“I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. Torvalds, Linus ( 1991”
“The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”
“Where in the World Is Larry Page?”
“Larry Page is quietly amassing a 'flying car' empire”
“Have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Larry Page's Google Zeitgeist 2012 talk”
“I don't know how long I would've stayed, to be honest. theguardian.com”
“Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address , 2009.”
“And I'm just curious what you do both at Google and also in the way you've managed the YouTube acquisition, which I think you could look at as one of the most successful examples of somebody buying something and not screwing it up. What's consciously done to keep that ethos, both at the Google level and then at YouTube?”
“If you look at things like Google Now also. Maybe you want to just have [a question] answered for you before you ask it. theguardian.com .”
“I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research. Plenary speech, AAAS Annual conference, San Francisco (February 2007).”
“Understand Everything,”
“I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics,”
“You should call it entropy , for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name , so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. Suggesting to Claude Shannon a name for his new uncertainty function, as quoted in Scientific American Vol. 225 No. 3, (1971), p. 180.”
“John von Neumann (1903”
“When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system. As quoted in John von Neumann, 1903”
“It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way… Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe. As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman”
“Method in the Physical Sciences”
“The Role of Mathematics in the Sciences and in Society”
“Unsolved Problems in Mathematics”
“Can we survive Technology?”
“inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical; when it shows signs of becoming baroque, then the danger signal is up. It would be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the baroque and the very high baroque... Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.”
“If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details... People who are right a lot change their mind... They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re”
“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains his famous one”
“Jeff Bezos thinks that to save the planet we'll need to move all heavy industry to space”
“Your margin is my opportunity. Amazon's Impending Invasion Of Banking”
“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon”
“If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting. What Amazon's Jeff Bezos thinks about Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker (BoingBoing) (dubbed "The Bezos Principle" by Walt Mossberg ) June 2016”
“You gotta earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it’s disruptive to the old way. Amazon's Jeff Bezos looks to the future”
“We’re building what’s called a private cloud for them [the C.I.A. ], … because they don’t want to be on the public cloud. Amazon's Jeff Bezos looks to the future”
“That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better. Jeff Bezos explains why Amazon doesn’t really care about its competitors 17 September, 2013.”
“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent . And be patient. If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘ reader ,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.. Jeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper . September 2013”
“Programming is not about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.”
“Don't try to be clever — write code that is easy to understand.”
“Readability counts.”
“Simple is better than complex.”
“Explicit is better than implicit.”
“The best way to learn a programming language is to write code in it.”
“Code is read much more often than it is written.”
“I don't think of Python as a language. I think of it as a community.”
“The joy of coding Python is seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code.”
“Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need.”
“I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy. As appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chips , a Department of the Navy information technology magazine”
“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past . As quoted in The Reader's Digest (October 1994), p. 185”
“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs. As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X”
“There's something you learn in your first boot”
“I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?”
“Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.”
“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?" On being the oldest active”
“At present , we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with the computers will change that. As quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine”
“From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer , we said it had bugs in it. On the removal of a 2”
“We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data”
“I could either watch it happen, or be part of it.”
“One was the Internet, one was clean energy and one was space.”
“Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.”
“If you wanted to be close to the cutting edge, particularly in technology, you came to North America.”
“I think South Africa is a great country.”
“I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time.”
“I didn’t really expect to make any money. If I could make enough to cover the rent and buy some food that would be fine. As it turns out, it turned out to be quite valuable in the end.”
“Life is too short for long”
“If things aren't not failing you are not innovating enough. Fast Company, article "Hondas in Space"”
“Elon Musk Explains Internet in 1998, Old Interview Goes Viral”
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email (let's drop the hyphen) Donald Knuth's Stanford University web page”
“All Questions Answered”
“I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof . Digital Typography , ch. 33, p. 649”
“A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God . Digital Typography , ch. 1, p. 8”
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. Foreword to the book A=B”
“The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues. Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth . Dr. Dobb's Journal , pages 16”
“The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole. Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth . Dr. Dobb's Journal , pages 16”
“The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large. Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth . Dr. Dobb's Journal , pages 16”
“I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level. Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview (1993) On why bioinformatics is very exciting”
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. Donald Knuth's webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion”
“The working examples of important new systems seem to have come either from entrepreneurial efforts (Visicalc is a good example) or from large companies, like Bell Labs and most especially Xerox, that were much involved with computers and could afford research into them, but did not regard them as their primary business.”
“Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode.”
“The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance . Evidence for the worldwide fascination with computers is everywhere, from the articles on the financial, and even the front pages of the newspapers, to the difficulties that even the most prestigious universities experience in finding and keeping faculty in computer science. The best professors, instead of teaching bright students, join start”
“Computer science research is different from these more traditional disciplines. Philosophically it differs from the physical sciences because it seeks not to discover, explain, or exploit the natural world, but instead to study the properties of machines of human creation. In this it as analogous to mathematics, and indeed the "science" part of computer science is, for the most part mathematical in spirit. But an inevitable aspect of computer science is the creation of computer programs: objects that, though intangible, are subject to commercial exchange.”
“Life's a bitch and then your feet wear down. Plan 9 fortunes file .”
“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. The Development of the C Language .”
“UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity. quote.com/quotes/authors/d/dennis_ritchie.html Brainy Quote.com .”
“Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On”
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party. USENET : net.unix”
“The Evolution of the UNIX Time”
“Good design is as little design as possible.”
“Innovation happens when people have the freedom to experiment.”
“The web platform is the most powerful development platform in history.”
“I created JavaScript in ten days, but I've been perfecting it ever since.”
“The browser is the new operating system.”
“Open standards create choice and competition.”
“Programming languages are tools, not religions.”
“Always bet on JavaScript.”
“The web is the most important platform of our time.”
“JavaScript is the first language where you can just sit down and start programming.”
“Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. p. 693”
“Proof by analogy is fraud. p. 692”
“just one little global variable”
“C++ Q&A Community Event with Bjarne Stroustrup”
“I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (2009) by Federico Biancuzzi, p. 14”
“with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful. As quoted in”
“The Problem with Programming”
“The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous. PDF: Notes to the Reader, The C++ Programming Language, Special Edition (2000), p. 9”
“Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup”
“And no, that smaller and cleaner language is not Java or C#.”
“I laid out memory so the bottom 640 K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM , and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640 K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20”
“Challenges and Strategy”
“I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't”
“There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written. Interview with Electronics magazine”
“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. OS/2 Programmers Guide , November 1987”
“Windows 1.0 is borrowed from Macintosh 128K”
“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC. BusinessWeek, 26 November 1984”
“To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination”
“Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company. Comment to reporters during the IBM PC launch (1981), interpreted as a jab at Gary Kildall”
“It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of. Interview with Dennis Bathory”