Gillian Tans Quotes

I can barely turn on my computer!

I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google!

Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

It would be nice to have radio support, not that we've ever had that much trouble with it.

Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It's time to stop the madness.

I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.

We changed every lead in our whole system, and to this day we still don't really know why it did it. We think wires were touching and faulting. That was it really, but it didn't make it any easier.

I'm a techno moron. I need help just to plug in my video camera.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'

Finding out exactly what went wrong is key toward preventing future debacles.

W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

You don't have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you've got will be irrelevant.

If your project doesn't work, look for the part that you didn't think was important.

In the astronaut business - the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, 'There is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.'

I couldn't tell you in any detail how my computer works. I use it with a layer of automation.

Processes break in two ways. They break because they don't have the right checks and balances and because they don't have the right execution.

For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.

I've worked on products where they go down in the middle of the night, and no one notices. You get the 'site down' notice, but it doesn't matter.

When computer systems cause errors, you can end up with The Dreaded NIGO - the 'not in good order' transaction.

I don't know how to turn on a computer.

Ask anyone in the industry if Bumbada is accessible. A technical hand can call me at 2 A.M. and I will be there to help him.

Technically, Windows is an "operating system," which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating.