A healthy technology will be as much art as machinery. Currently,
however, the elimination of the qualitative and artistic dimension from
consideration, leaving us with a naked skeleton of logic and algorithm,
is more or less what defines technology. - Steve Talbott, NetFuture
%
The limitation of a technocratic society is always a limitation
of imagination. - Steve Talbott, NetFuture
%
A mathematical regularity, or syntax, is implicit in the world's
phenomena and can be said to *explain* the world no less and no more
than the grammatical syntax of a speech explains the content of the
speech. - Steve Talbott, NetFuture
%
I have a 4x5" slide of the Athabasca glacier in the Canadian Rockies.
 If you look at the image though a 10x loop, you can find a bus
in the parking lot below the access to the glacier.
 If you look through a microscope at about 100x you can make out
by color that the bus has Alberta license plates.
 At about 500x you can read the license plate.
Film really is that good. - Genda Bendte
%
If we were willing to withhold our projections and open ourselves to
the Eternal Surprise of the universe, its biggest surprise might be
the knowledge that we truly do belong - and that our belonging
doesn't depend on simplistic, machine-influenced thinking.
 - Steve Talbott, NetFuture #153, 2004-01-06
%
The truth - as we all so bitterly know - is that the IT world
is filled with certified, credentialed and accredited idiots.
I bet you've hired a few. I know I have.
 - Michael Schrage, CIO Magazine, June 2004
%
I feel like we are losing our creativity and imagination. Give a 3 year
old a box of crayons and you have no idea what he will come up with.
Give a 10 year old a Playstation2 and about the best that might happen
is he'll find a way to cheat.
 - Lee Harr, April 2005
%
In one sense, we're entering an age of high tech. In another sense, it's
*always* been high tech. Poster: picture of a nautilus shell.
Caption: "High Tech: It's not just where we're heading, it's where we're
coming from." - Kirby Urner, April 2005
%
The computer, especially connected to the Internet, is the paradigm power
tool of our age. The sin would be to bring up a generation of passive
consumers who complain and whine because "it won't do what I want."
The mark of a successful civilization is it gives its people power over
its most powerful tools, and not vice versa. - Kirby Urner, April 2005
%
Abstraction is layering ignorance on top of reality.
 - rpg, cited by Richard P. Gabriel, November 2002
%
Welcome to the *real* Web 2.0. Now shut up and buy some stuff.
 - Richard S. Tallent, II, November 2005
%
People just don't want to be pestered - they want shit to happen
without being bugged. If technology is to help, it must be seren-
dipitous rather than strident. - Nathan Torkington, November 2005
%
There are, in fact, only two categories of doctors and scientists who
are not opposed to vivisection: those who don't know enough about it,
and those who make money from it.
 - Werner Hartinger (cited by David Icke, May 2006)
%
Won't someone think of the children?? Oh, wait... someone did!
 - greenguy on Slashdot, May 2006, about www.laptop.org
%
The real job of a leader is to create and preserve a workplace that's
a more civilized and satisfying place to work than it was when he or
she found it. - Carmine Coyote, May 2006
%
I'm creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch,
search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on con-
tent creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal.
Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don't. Apple doesn't.
 - Mark Pilgrim, June 2006
%
Data preservation is an ogre, and ogres have layers.
 - Mark Pilgrim, June 2006
%
All we're asking is that you stop spreading misinformation about
the current state of dynamic languages to the press, analysts, and
your customers. This does not require you to champion or otherwise
support these technologies - just stop lying about them.
 - Ryan Tomayko to James Gosling, March 2006
%
Instead of you taking the time to list the 30 or so legitimate things
you need to do, it's easier to pay $29.95/year to someone else who will
try to maintain an exhaustive list of all the evil in the world.
 - Marcus J. Ranum, September 2005
%
You've obviously never tried to reverse engineer a chip using an electron
microscope. [...] That's like looking at the grains of sand on a beach
and trying to map out the coastline of Hawaii. - Cutie Pi, July 2006
%
Once more, with feeling: Technology changes how we do things. It doesn't
change what we do. Ain't no technology that's gonna do that for us. Wanna
better world? Be better people. - David M. Rogers, August 2006
%
Any guess on how long it will take the FairUse4WM people to update their
software? And then how long before Microsoft to patch once again? Certainly
much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to
realize they're playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital
files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
 - Bruce Schneier, September 2006
%
It turns out everyone has a secret love affair with paper. We keep lots
of important data on computers, but we want it all on dead trees too.
I think we all secretly believe the power will go out one day and
never come back on. - Luke of DabbleDB, September 2006
%
Bill sucks. Microsoft has no clue. This "Digital Decade" (how catchy!) we
are in happens to run on the *internets*. They are a series of *tubes*.
They are *independent* of your specific operating system. Especially if
they are of the future of which Microsoft wishes to bind you to.
 - Patrick Logan, January 2007
%
There was a suggestion that the entire Linux Weekly News archive be closed
to non-subscribers. That is not a step we expect to take. [...] It is our
goal to increase the amount of useful information available to the commu-
nity as a whole, and that runs counter to the idea of a closed archive.
 - Jonathan Corbet, February 2007
%
Se pensavate che Windows Vista vi avrebbe permesso di risparmiarvi
l'acquisto di un antivirus, vi sbagliavate. Se pensavate che fosse
più sicuro dei vecchi Windows, vi sbagliavate. Se pensate che possa
essere più sicuro di Linux o di MacOS X vi sbagliate di grosso.
 - Alessandro Bottoni, Febbraio 2007
%
Just as in the past the railroads disrupted the canals, the telephone dis-
rupted the telegraph, and transistors disrupted vacuum tubes, today digital
cameras are disrupting film, VoIP is disrupting the telephone, and Google
is disrupting everything it seems. - Erick Schonfeld, April 2007
%
Life's too short to be working on technology that can only possibly make
sense when you're dressed in combats and vans, listening to Pearljam and
pretending it's still the nineties. There's a real wish to conduct one-
self at a higher level of abstraction before complete dementia sets in.
 - Bill de hÓra, June 2005
%
I've heard that directly from folks working on the relevant teams
over there. Microsoft cheerfully shows up at the standards meetings
to make damn sure they screw up the APIs for everyone else.
 - Steve Yegge, September 2006
%
OLPC is designed from the start as an open system. The chip specs are
wide open (with one or two exceptions still being resolved); the board
schematics are there for all to see. Because the system is open, OLPC
can avoid using "standards" such as ACPI, which mainly exist to protect
closed interfaces. - Ronald G. Minnich, LinuxBIOS, February 2007
%
Guys, if you're going to work at Microsoft, you'll just have to accept
that you're in a world where you're routinely suspected of the worst.
It's too late to go back and change the history that led here; they
teach distrust-of-Microsoft as an MBA-level business basic these days.
Learn to deal with it or find a new job. - Tim Bray, June 2007
%
Some people find the act of categorizing and abstracting natural
and rewarding, others find it frustrating and unnecessary. The
problem with information technologies is that computer programmers
are likely to fall in the first category, and users of such programs
are likely to fall into the second one. - Stefano Mazzocchi, July 2005
%
Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs's iron-fisted rule - that there's
always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be
expressed in his presence and he'll (inexplicably) latch onto it and
make it happen? Ugh, I don't even want to think about it.
 - John Siracusa, October 2007
%
I never drank the "convergence" cool-aid. I believe in divergence.
We'll have more and more devices in our houses. They will talk to
each other, syncing our data among themselves behind the scenes.
 - Fabrizio Capobianco, November 2007
%
For the [Amazon] Kindle to be the "iPod of reading," it would have
had to have been preceded by a "Napster of reading." And, of course,
it wasn't. Which probably tells you something about the difference
between songs and stories. - Nicholas Carr, November 2007
%
Sometimes you don't want things that work like the real world, sometimes
you want things that work like computers. - Damien Katz, April 2006